I have never ever trusted my government. Neither did Thomas Jefferson, my fav Founding Father. The US is turning into just the sort place he hated.
There is the "other" Jefferson thst posters here choose to forget.
Jefferson's political ideal was an agrarian republic of "small" independent farmers. The world of the slave-holding elite - and about as far removed from the modern commercial and industrial society being shaped by men like Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, and Eli WHitney as you could get.
And here are some numbers that I find also help to put the whole terrorism thing in perspective
The fallacy in your argument is that deaths from heart disease are not concentrated in a single time and place. No one community has bear the burden of 700,000 deaths in 102 minutes.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc., can be more or less defined as diseases associated with aging and old age.
These deaths consequently rarely comes as a complete surprise - and the shock can be absorbed through mechanisms that have evolved over thousands of years.
But, as a society, we have often failed miserably in managing the single incident - the defining moment - that erodes confidence in the government and other social institutions, is marked by massive loss of life, property damage, economic losses that ripple through the entire economy - the WTC and Katrina continue to cast a very long shadow.
All this gory, blood-soaked shit gets called "adult" but it's not. It's adolescents wallowing in mindless excess.
Tale Two has a hit in Bioshock. Intense, challenging, visually splendid. Why is it sacrificing so much hard won good will on a project that can best be described as torture porn?
One could just as easily have driven a Ryder truck filled with explosives and put it under the World Trade Center. In fact, terrorists tried that once, and it almost worked
The 1993 sttack did significant damage and exposed the many - many - problems in combating a high-rise fire, but it did not threaten the structural integrity of the building. The Day The World Shook
Say goodbye to last minute business travel = say goodbye to important meetings = say goodbye to business dealings = say goodbye to the economy.
The first American telephone exchange opened in 1878.
Tell me why in 2007 these "last minute" conferences can't be conducted online?
If you tell me the face-to-face neet is essential, why are you going into it with less than three days preparation?
Actually it is the PERFECT retort, because it shows just how out-of-touch Microsoft is. Teenagers don't care about value, because they have no concept of what value is.
It was the teenager who saw value in IM and made it ubiquitous on the PC and cell phone - not the geek - who did little or nothing to make IRC chat more accessible. If I were Microsoft I'd want nothing more than to know what teens like about Vista, how they use Vista, what they want from Vista.
The Vista Premium HP Pavilion desktop with 3 GB RAM, 2.6 GHz Athlon Dual-Core CPU, 500 GB HDD, and nForce motherboard graphics is $670.
The Vista Ultimate HP Elite Media Center PC with an Intel Quad Core CPU, 3 GB RAM. 1 TB of storage and ATSC tuner is $1900.
The whole point of buying the OEM system bundle is to get a fully configured system, all the new tech and the latest Microsoft OS at a very attractive ptice.
I look at these specs and prices. I look at the price I paid for a mid-line refurbished PC four years ago and I wonder why the geek wastes his breath screaming about the "Microsoft Tax."
I am certainly opposed to a surveillance society, but why would the police install things like red light cameras if they could get flying robot dragonflies???
The camera will work in all kinds of weather. It will be simpler and cheaper to maintain. It has a deterrant value even when out of service. The decoy, the fake, costs next to nothing.
Though, somehow, the bodies and nervous systems of dragonflies manage to cope
They manage to survive.
That doesn't mean they can fly a set course or hold their position against the elements.
If the robot looks like a dragonfly to the human eye, why shouldn't it look like a dragonfly to a bird's eye? How does a predator reads its infrared signature, its acoustic signature?
The squirrel robot strikes me as as equally ridiculous.
Why shouldn't the squirrel's many predators simply see the robot as a mid-afternoon snack?
Maybe it's not entirely legal, but since when does the end user care? How is Linspire going to make legit codecs a selling point when the average user doesn't even know what a codec is, and why they need to be licensed?
The enthusiasts who build and customize their own systems are a tiny minority of users.
Everyone else shops for a PC in much the same way they shop for any other home appliance - they buy it retail boxed and ready to run. They buy from dealers who won't touch the illegal codec for love or money.
They got to choose what her financial penalty was.
They got to apply the rule for damages provided by the judge. They performed the calculation using the values they believed were supported by the evidence.
Yes. every juror has an obligation to understand the concept of "jury nullification". End of story.
The jury is - almost by definition - middle aged, middle class, small-C conservative.
They haven't evaded service. They are there by choice, respect for the law, respect for the property of others, is the norm among them.
Jury Nullification in its historical - American - context has been profoundly corrupting. It sets the Klansman free on the proven charge of murder and sends the black man to the gallows on a fraudulent charge of rape.
The jury decided the penalty, and it's plain ridiculous.
The jury made a finding of fact for the plaintiff. It awarded damages according to the rules laid down by the judge.
Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts.
Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
It was the responsibility of her attorney to expose the risks:
The jury will never know how poor your are. The jury will never know how rich you are.
But they can damn good at spotting a liar. The case that is built on a house of cards.
The "K-" line of apps has all the cachet of Sam's Club or President's Choice. Why plant the presumption of value product mediocrity in people's minds before they even try it?
At least you have been spared the pain of trying to bring credibility in marketing to The Gimp.
Or so the generation 50+ thinks. And they are the ones who wield the power today.
They didn't play as adults. Well, ok, they played a game of cards, or bowling, but they would never think about sitting down with their friends (and without kids) to play a board game.
The Atari was in Sears "Big Book" Christmas Catalog in 1977. That $200 console wasn't left sitting idle after the kids went to bed. Monopoly carried your great grandparents through the Depression and was played by adults "for blood." from the beginning.
No, it's not. It's still a character that you are watching. Pushing the buttons on a gamepad to perform a kill isn't all that different from turning the page of a book to read about the grizzly murder, or pressing play on the DVD remote.
I respectfully disagree.
You are not watching the action from some physical and psychological distance. You are role-playing the character.
You are being explicitly rewarded for the growing sadism of your kills.
You sre beinh drawn into this environment for hours, days or even weeks, at a stretch. Not the ninety minutes of a theatrical feature. This takes you into territory where even the clinical psychiatrist treads cautiously.
The Nintendo generation is now in its late twenties or early thirties.
The parents of a teenager does not think like a teenager.
The generation raised on Mario Brothers may be even less tolerant of games like Manhunt 2 - perhaps because some threshold has been crossed which the gamer-geek was too blind to see.
You miss the point. Buy a thousand motherboards, chips and cases, put Linux onto them, then walk into computer stores and sell them. There's nothing that precludes you from selling Linux PCs of your own brand.
Surely, someone could sell Linux PCs, preloaded off the Internet, or even through a catalog.
Someone did: WalMart.com
You remember, the retail chain whose commitment to OEM Linux was - not so very long ago - being touted on Slashdot as a crushing blow to Microsoft?
Here was the great opportunity for Linux to gain a foothold among the unsophisticated - budget-conscious users - who needed nothing more than e-mail, the web, and OpenOffice.org.
Slashdot Mirror
There is the "other" Jefferson thst posters here choose to forget.
Jefferson's political ideal was an agrarian republic of "small" independent farmers. The world of the slave-holding elite - and about as far removed from the modern commercial and industrial society being shaped by men like Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, and Eli WHitney as you could get.
The fallacy in your argument is that deaths from heart disease are not concentrated in a single time and place. No one community has bear the burden of 700,000 deaths in 102 minutes.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc., can be more or less defined as diseases associated with aging and old age.
These deaths consequently rarely comes as a complete surprise - and the shock can be absorbed through mechanisms that have evolved over thousands of years.
But, as a society, we have often failed miserably in managing the single incident - the defining moment - that erodes confidence in the government and other social institutions, is marked by massive loss of life, property damage, economic losses that ripple through the entire economy - the WTC and Katrina continue to cast a very long shadow.
Tale Two has a hit in Bioshock. Intense, challenging, visually splendid. Why is it sacrificing so much hard won good will on a project that can best be described as torture porn?
The 1993 sttack did significant damage and exposed the many - many - problems in combating a high-rise fire, but it did not threaten the structural integrity of the building. The Day The World Shook
The first American telephone exchange opened in 1878.
Tell me why in 2007 these "last minute" conferences can't be conducted online? If you tell me the face-to-face neet is essential, why are you going into it with less than three days preparation?
Well, of course, they are.
WalMart doesn't sell a PC as a Heathkit-era craft project. It sells the PC as a home appliance and office machine.
It was the teenager who saw value in IM and made it ubiquitous on the PC and cell phone - not the geek - who did little or nothing to make IRC chat more accessible. If I were Microsoft I'd want nothing more than to know what teens like about Vista, how they use Vista, what they want from Vista.
The Geek always quotes the list price for the retail box when he wants to slag Microsoft.
This isn't "insightful," it is ignorant and foolish:
The Vista Basic laptop at Walmart starts at $400 Everex StepNote w/VIA CPU
The Dual-Core Vista Basic desktop with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and a DVD burner at $350. Compaq Presario w/ Dual-Core Athlon CPU
The Vista Premium HP Pavilion desktop with 3 GB RAM, 2.6 GHz Athlon Dual-Core CPU, 500 GB HDD, and nForce motherboard graphics is $670.
The Vista Ultimate HP Elite Media Center PC with an Intel Quad Core CPU, 3 GB RAM. 1 TB of storage and ATSC tuner is $1900.
The whole point of buying the OEM system bundle is to get a fully configured system, all the new tech and the latest Microsoft OS at a very attractive ptice.
I look at these specs and prices. I look at the price I paid for a mid-line refurbished PC four years ago and I wonder why the geek wastes his breath screaming about the "Microsoft Tax."
No one is listening. No one gives a damn.
The camera will work in all kinds of weather. It will be simpler and cheaper to maintain. It has a deterrant value even when out of service. The decoy, the fake, costs next to nothing.
They manage to survive.
That doesn't mean they can fly a set course or hold their position against the elements.
If the robot looks like a dragonfly to the human eye, why shouldn't it look like a dragonfly to a bird's eye? How does a predator reads its infrared signature, its acoustic signature?
The squirrel robot strikes me as as equally ridiculous.
Why shouldn't the squirrel's many predators simply see the robot as a mid-afternoon snack?
The geek can't seem to grasp the possibility that the "conscience of the community" might not be on his side.
You'll find Microsoft's list of available codecs for Windows Media Player at Codecs
Let us know when the WalMart shopper is buying your Gentoo box off the shelf. Because that is Linspire's target audience.
The enthusiasts who build and customize their own systems are a tiny minority of users.
Everyone else shops for a PC in much the same way they shop for any other home appliance - they buy it retail boxed and ready to run. They buy from dealers who won't touch the illegal codec for love or money.
Jury Nullification happens whenever a jury votes its desires and not it oath to be true to the facts and the law.
They got to apply the rule for damages provided by the judge. They performed the calculation using the values they believed were supported by the evidence.
The jury is - almost by definition - middle aged, middle class, small-C conservative.
They haven't evaded service. They are there by choice, respect for the law, respect for the property of others, is the norm among them.
Jury Nullification in its historical - American - context has been profoundly corrupting. It sets the Klansman free on the proven charge of murder and sends the black man to the gallows on a fraudulent charge of rape.
The jury made a finding of fact for the plaintiff. It awarded damages according to the rules laid down by the judge.
Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts.
Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
It was the responsibility of her attorney to expose the risks:
The jury will never know how poor your are. The jury will never know how rich you are. But they can damn good at spotting a liar. The case that is built on a house of cards.
It is difficult to suppress the thought here that the sterotypical Slashdot poster hasn't poked his head of Ma's basement since the summer of '89.
At least you have been spared the pain of trying to bring credibility in marketing to The Gimp.
They didn't play as adults. Well, ok, they played a game of cards, or bowling, but they would never think about sitting down with their friends (and without kids) to play a board game.
The Atari was in Sears "Big Book" Christmas Catalog in 1977. That $200 console wasn't left sitting idle after the kids went to bed. Monopoly carried your great grandparents through the Depression and was played by adults "for blood." from the beginning.
I respectfully disagree.
You are not watching the action from some physical and psychological distance. You are role-playing the character.
You are being explicitly rewarded for the growing sadism of your kills.
You sre beinh drawn into this environment for hours, days or even weeks, at a stretch. Not the ninety minutes of a theatrical feature. This takes you into territory where even the clinical psychiatrist treads cautiously.
The parents of a teenager does not think like a teenager.
The generation raised on Mario Brothers may be even less tolerant of games like Manhunt 2 - perhaps because some threshold has been crossed which the gamer-geek was too blind to see.
Then, O.J., the real fun begins.
Surely, someone could sell Linux PCs, preloaded off the Internet, or even through a catalog.
Someone did: WalMart.com
You remember, the retail chain whose commitment to OEM Linux was - not so very long ago - being touted on Slashdot as a crushing blow to Microsoft?
Here was the great opportunity for Linux to gain a foothold among the unsophisticated - budget-conscious users - who needed nothing more than e-mail, the web, and OpenOffice.org.
What could possibly go wrong?