>"Since when is a 19 year old, of age to vote, considered a "boy"?"
>You must be under 25.
You must believe in the bullshit of a required nanny or daddy state to protect us "young'uns" from ourselves. This 19 year-old will not be headed to juvie court. Sorry, I don't buy into the continued infantilization of adults, whether it be their rights OR their responsibilities.
>Perhaps we should arrest, prosecute, and imprison everyone who sells their vote.
Yes. Is this some sort of trick question?
This guy didn't try to make a statement, or engage in civil disobedience. He just wanted to make a quick buck. As much as I want crooks like John Murtha and Jim Jefferson behind bars, this guy belongs there, too.
>And yet, barely anyone gives a second thought to tuning their radio while driving or talking to a passenger while driving - both things that are shown to create just as much of a distraction.
I don't think there's anyone out there who never ever deals with distractions while driving. Having a sandwich, drinking something, changing tracks on a CD, driving while not having enough sleep... everyone does it on one level or another. All of it is dangerous, but the only thing that seems to get people keyed up is cell phone use. Can anyone explain to me why?
Mostly because it's the bigger idiots that try to text message while driving. There seems to be a tiered system of stupidity while driving. On one level there's the eating a sandwich or sucking on a soda pop or leaning over to tune the radio. On a higher level of idiocy, there's the people reading a newspaper, doing makeup, driving without your seatbelt, and texting or calling on a cell phone.
Unlike talking to a passenger, who should have a nominal idea of what's going on in traffic, the person on the other end of a call has no sense of when they should shut up or avoid bringing up issues requiring heavy thought. I have no problem with someone making an essential short call when it's safe to say, "Hey Dave, the meeting is canceled today. See you", and then hanging up. It's just that most people who I actually see talking on their cellphones in traffic aren't that bright, and continue to natter on forever while they're swerving and stomping on their brakes.
The title of the Facebook group says it all about the people who text message while driving. "Haven't died, yet!" Congratulations... you win the dumb luck award? Soon to turn into another Award?
>>And, by that point, it'd be too late anyway. No matter how many guns you've got, the US military has more, not to mention the training and tactics to deploy them effectively. The best you'd be able to hope for is a Iraq style guerrilla insurgency, but even that wouldn't work, since the troops you're fighting against would be from a similar cultural background as you.
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading about a similar situation about 230 or so years ago that was fairly successful.
Are you talking about the American Revolution? Because that was going pretty piss poor for the American separatists before France bailed them out, both in engaging the British in a global war and sending much-needed supplies, soldiers and training to the Americans. The British realized they didn't have the manpower to deal with both the Americans and the French, and so pulled out of America. The home-grown militia had very little to do with the overall victory.
Insurgencies/counterinsurgencies are a fight over the support of a population. The notion, which is implied in the summary, that wars can be fought in an environment devoid of the infrastructure of law and order with an attention to civil niceties that peacetime domestic civilian police forces can't live up to is ridiculous. The population will realize that your side is hamstringing itself while the other side has no such qualms and choose sides accordingly. That is what happened in Iraq for the first year or so of the Iraq insurgency - domestic Sunni and foreign jihadist groups terrorized the population whenever the American flag wasn't around, while the American occupation went around promising new water plants and soccer parks. No wonder the American intelligence gathering efforts were so effective back then - new soccer park vs. we will kill you and every member of your family if you cooperate.
>> But the quoted text assumes that ALL life MUST be carbon-based
What else would it be based on? Carbon as a basis of organic molecules provides superior stability and diversity in its flexibility of arrangement. Silicon-based life has been posited but lacks the stability of carbon (as well as real-life examples). Pretty much everything else is a Star Trek pipedream.
>> with four base DNA
There's good evidence that early life on Earth was RNA-based, and DNA (mostly) won out as a source of genetic information due to stability in replication.
>> proteins that process oxygen and so on.
Plenty of anaerobic life on Earth would beg to differ with that assessment... if they had sentience to beg with.
>> The problem with the "Everything is so perfect for life that a supreme being did it on purpose" argument is that it makes the assumption that life cannot exist in any form but ours.
Except that from a physics standpoint, "life" is most easily obtained and created through the carbon-based system like that of Earth. Believing that there is another system out there completely unlike our own without evidence or observation or even conjecture that stands up to scrutiny sounds suspiciously like....
This is just another resource you grind for in the game, from Gold to Honor to Arena Points and Arena Rating to Tokens in instance drops. I think any innovation would have to be in the rewards, like introducing a Traits or Perks system like in Fallout. More raid gear equivalents as a reward would be redundant... you can get that simply by endless losing in Battlegrounds.
From the attention list though, it looks like they're focusing on casual players... "Super Quest Dude", various quest chains, etc. That's a welcome addition for those of us that don't have endless hours to play every day.
Wow. Your login handle pretty much says it all, "sumdumass". Using a 1996 study to try to support your conclusions that you'll live a great life smoking? According to the CDC, tobacco was the leading actual cause of death in the United States at 435,000 deaths in 2000. But if you don't believe me, take a trip to your local hospital. The majority of patients who are there for weeks or months on a chronic basis (because their health is too shitty to live outside the hospital) are there due to tobacco abuse, alcohol abuse, or being too fat and unfit for too long.
Smoking is not a cause of death where you live a great, happy life for 60 years and then keel over the next day. No, many smokers don't die in their sleep of heart attacks from their chronic hypertension and consequent cardiac hypertrophy. They don't even die within a relatively short time period of 6 months to several years where cancerous growths grow unnoticed in their lungs and then spread to take over their bones (causing pathological fractures, and deep bone pain), brain (causing massive headaches, delirium and loss of senses and ability) or liver (picture bloating up with painful swellings all over the body, and going crazy from encephalopathy) before dying. No, they slowly destroy the airspaces of their own lungs, causing the body to overcompensate by sending more blood to the lungs. The increased blood flow causes liquid to leak out of the vessels, and over the space of ten to fifteen years or so, smokers will drown in their own bodily fluids, trailing oxygen canisters and fighting to get the energy required to get out of bed. The lucky ones die before lying in their own shit deteriorates their skin in their lower back and bottom, causing nonhealing sacral decubitus ulcers that will lead to wasting and chronic infections.
But hey, keep deluding yourself into thinking that smoking will take the worst 10 years off your life. Because the reality is, not only will it shorten your lifespan, it will decrease your quality of life at the end substantially (unless any of the above actually sounds like fun to you). Take it from someone who deals with these people every day - throw out your cigarettes and don't join them.
>>A restaurant or bar, tho...is a private establishment.
>So you have no problem with "whites only" establishments?
What's sad is that second-hand smoke is a public health issue, a "whites-only" sign is a civil rights issue, and you cannot see the difference between the two.
A person is born with his skin color. A person is not born a smoker. If you choose to smoke, please take it where you're not giving someone else lung cancer / COPD / heart disease.
>Sure they look fine, but they don't support the 96 kHz audio sampling rate. By sticking with DVDs, you're missing out on a vast spectrum of inaudible sound.
His dog, at least, thanks him for sticking with DVDs!
Uh... isn't that a violation of the Hippocratic oath? And thank god booby trapping is still considered shameful and unamerican. Sheesh.
Not at all. Why do you think Vicodin, Lortab, Percocet etc. contain acetaminophen? It's not for the pain relief - the opiates do a hell of a job for that. It's to give the drugs a maximum a person can take per time period before they deplete their glutathione and fry their liver.
Some opiate seekers understand this but OD on them anyways.
but until he actually harms someone, he should be free to do whatever the hell he likes
It is a crazy opinion, and it has nothing to do with the case.
So I should be able to breed anthrax in my home, just because I love growing anthrax bacteria?
How about if I'm just curious to know if I'm able to weaponize anthrax spores into a dry powder, so I just do it?
On a more everyday note, I guess it's OK for husbands to hold up a gun and threaten to kill their wife and kids if she leaves him, as long as in his mind he knows it's just a big joke.
Or what about if he just shoots and misses her? No harm, no foul, right?
The Wheel of Time is the World of Warcraft on paper. No, really. Everything good about WoW is pretty much true of tWoT. Conversely, anything frustrating or just plain bad about WoW is also true of tWoT.
The article (yes, I RTFA) seems to point the blame at Microsoft and say, "See! See! They're shipping with an extra heat-sink! It MUST be all their fault!"
I have 20+ friends with 360s, and none of them have experienced problems with their 360s. I have a hard time believing disc read errors, separate audio and visual problems, DOA and exploding consoles are ALL caused by the lack of a heatsink. Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.
I feel you on that one. I had a 1991 Honda Civic hatchback that got 42/36 (highway/city). The newest Civics only get 40/30, and while they look a lot cooler than my old '91, they are also about $5,000 more than the sticker price of the 1991. Granted, inflation is a bitch, but then you have the Civic Hybrid. For $8,000 more you only get 51/49, or an average of about 14mpg gain, and a car that will need specialty maintenance only available at a Honda dealership. My point being, why are cars becoming less and less efficient as the years go by, even though oil prices are rising at two to three times the inflation rate?
Physics 101. Sad that it has to be explained on/..
1991 Civic CRX hatchback, 2100 lbs. 07 Civic Hybrid with more weight (2875 lbs.), and, let's not forget, more safety features. If a drunk driver comes swerving across the median and plows into you, do you want to be riding in the 2007 Civic or the 1991 Civic? If it comes down to adding some more pounds for more crumple zone room and more precious crash-test stars, do you think that will sell better to John Q. Public than keeping the weight off for fuel economy?
"What makes gaming (or gambling, for that matter) an addiction?"
The same thing that separates feeling depressed from a depressive disorder. Interference and inability to carry out daily activities. Like someone who plays WoW 4 hours a night but otherwise has a normal life is fine, but someone who quits his job by not showing up, ignores his family and loses friendships over WoW would be someone who could probably use a psychiatric consult.
This should be trivially easy to prove/disprove by an epidemiologic study. There are plenty of people who drink soda with the benzoates in them; there are plenty of people (myself included) who drink a rather large amount of soda with potassium/sodium benzoate added.
Obviously, if the benzoates are really bad for you, there should be more things wrong with us, and the effect should be dose-dependent on how much benzoate you take in.
Honestly, the smell test (do I detect a whiff of paranoid, protect-the-children bullshit?) makes me think this is the Alar Scare of 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
The geeks are buying the XP version to install their own flavor of Linux as a dual-boot?
>"Since when is a 19 year old, of age to vote, considered a "boy"?"
>You must be under 25.
You must believe in the bullshit of a required nanny or daddy state to protect us "young'uns" from ourselves. This 19 year-old will not be headed to juvie court. Sorry, I don't buy into the continued infantilization of adults, whether it be their rights OR their responsibilities.
>Perhaps we should arrest, prosecute, and imprison everyone who sells their vote.
Yes. Is this some sort of trick question?
This guy didn't try to make a statement, or engage in civil disobedience. He just wanted to make a quick buck. As much as I want crooks like John Murtha and Jim Jefferson behind bars, this guy belongs there, too.
>Yes, god damn it! Give me the choice, at least!
Wait, you asked Steve Jobs to give you choices? And you want to buy a product from what company?
*chuckle*
Welcome to /., you must be new around here.
>And yet, barely anyone gives a second thought to tuning their radio while driving or talking to a passenger while driving - both things that are shown to create just as much of a distraction.
I don't think there's anyone out there who never ever deals with distractions while driving. Having a sandwich, drinking something, changing tracks on a CD, driving while not having enough sleep... everyone does it on one level or another. All of it is dangerous, but the only thing that seems to get people keyed up is cell phone use. Can anyone explain to me why?
Mostly because it's the bigger idiots that try to text message while driving. There seems to be a tiered system of stupidity while driving. On one level there's the eating a sandwich or sucking on a soda pop or leaning over to tune the radio. On a higher level of idiocy, there's the people reading a newspaper, doing makeup, driving without your seatbelt, and texting or calling on a cell phone.
Unlike talking to a passenger, who should have a nominal idea of what's going on in traffic, the person on the other end of a call has no sense of when they should shut up or avoid bringing up issues requiring heavy thought. I have no problem with someone making an essential short call when it's safe to say, "Hey Dave, the meeting is canceled today. See you", and then hanging up. It's just that most people who I actually see talking on their cellphones in traffic aren't that bright, and continue to natter on forever while they're swerving and stomping on their brakes.
The title of the Facebook group says it all about the people who text message while driving. "Haven't died, yet!" Congratulations... you win the dumb luck award? Soon to turn into another Award?
>>And, by that point, it'd be too late anyway. No matter how many guns you've got, the US military has more, not to mention the training and tactics to deploy them effectively. The best you'd be able to hope for is a Iraq style guerrilla insurgency, but even that wouldn't work, since the troops you're fighting against would be from a similar cultural background as you.
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading about a similar situation about 230 or so years ago that was fairly successful.
Are you talking about the American Revolution? Because that was going pretty piss poor for the American separatists before France bailed them out, both in engaging the British in a global war and sending much-needed supplies, soldiers and training to the Americans. The British realized they didn't have the manpower to deal with both the Americans and the French, and so pulled out of America. The home-grown militia had very little to do with the overall victory.
The devs just wanted half-naked women calendars on as many mobile devices as possible.
War is hell, film at 11.
Insurgencies/counterinsurgencies are a fight over the support of a population. The notion, which is implied in the summary, that wars can be fought in an environment devoid of the infrastructure of law and order with an attention to civil niceties that peacetime domestic civilian police forces can't live up to is ridiculous. The population will realize that your side is hamstringing itself while the other side has no such qualms and choose sides accordingly. That is what happened in Iraq for the first year or so of the Iraq insurgency - domestic Sunni and foreign jihadist groups terrorized the population whenever the American flag wasn't around, while the American occupation went around promising new water plants and soccer parks. No wonder the American intelligence gathering efforts were so effective back then - new soccer park vs. we will kill you and every member of your family if you cooperate.
>> But the quoted text assumes that ALL life MUST be carbon-based
What else would it be based on? Carbon as a basis of organic molecules provides superior stability and diversity in its flexibility of arrangement. Silicon-based life has been posited but lacks the stability of carbon (as well as real-life examples). Pretty much everything else is a Star Trek pipedream.
>> with four base DNA
There's good evidence that early life on Earth was RNA-based, and DNA (mostly) won out as a source of genetic information due to stability in replication.
>> proteins that process oxygen and so on.
Plenty of anaerobic life on Earth would beg to differ with that assessment... if they had sentience to beg with.
>> The problem with the "Everything is so perfect for life that a supreme being did it on purpose" argument is that it makes the assumption that life cannot exist in any form but ours.
Except that from a physics standpoint, "life" is most easily obtained and created through the carbon-based system like that of Earth. Believing that there is another system out there completely unlike our own without evidence or observation or even conjecture that stands up to scrutiny sounds suspiciously like....
faith!
This is just another resource you grind for in the game, from Gold to Honor to Arena Points and Arena Rating to Tokens in instance drops. I think any innovation would have to be in the rewards, like introducing a Traits or Perks system like in Fallout. More raid gear equivalents as a reward would be redundant... you can get that simply by endless losing in Battlegrounds.
From the attention list though, it looks like they're focusing on casual players... "Super Quest Dude", various quest chains, etc. That's a welcome addition for those of us that don't have endless hours to play every day.
Wow. Your login handle pretty much says it all, "sumdumass". Using a 1996 study to try to support your conclusions that you'll live a great life smoking? According to the CDC, tobacco was the leading actual cause of death in the United States at 435,000 deaths in 2000. But if you don't believe me, take a trip to your local hospital. The majority of patients who are there for weeks or months on a chronic basis (because their health is too shitty to live outside the hospital) are there due to tobacco abuse, alcohol abuse, or being too fat and unfit for too long.
Smoking is not a cause of death where you live a great, happy life for 60 years and then keel over the next day. No, many smokers don't die in their sleep of heart attacks from their chronic hypertension and consequent cardiac hypertrophy. They don't even die within a relatively short time period of 6 months to several years where cancerous growths grow unnoticed in their lungs and then spread to take over their bones (causing pathological fractures, and deep bone pain), brain (causing massive headaches, delirium and loss of senses and ability) or liver (picture bloating up with painful swellings all over the body, and going crazy from encephalopathy) before dying. No, they slowly destroy the airspaces of their own lungs, causing the body to overcompensate by sending more blood to the lungs. The increased blood flow causes liquid to leak out of the vessels, and over the space of ten to fifteen years or so, smokers will drown in their own bodily fluids, trailing oxygen canisters and fighting to get the energy required to get out of bed. The lucky ones die before lying in their own shit deteriorates their skin in their lower back and bottom, causing nonhealing sacral decubitus ulcers that will lead to wasting and chronic infections.
But hey, keep deluding yourself into thinking that smoking will take the worst 10 years off your life. Because the reality is, not only will it shorten your lifespan, it will decrease your quality of life at the end substantially (unless any of the above actually sounds like fun to you). Take it from someone who deals with these people every day - throw out your cigarettes and don't join them.
>>A restaurant or bar, tho...is a private establishment.
>So you have no problem with "whites only" establishments?
What's sad is that second-hand smoke is a public health issue, a "whites-only" sign is a civil rights issue, and you cannot see the difference between the two.
A person is born with his skin color. A person is not born a smoker. If you choose to smoke, please take it where you're not giving someone else lung cancer / COPD / heart disease.
...ride a motorcycle. I've always liked that bumper sticker.
>Sure they look fine, but they don't support the 96 kHz audio sampling rate. By sticking with DVDs, you're missing out on a vast spectrum of inaudible sound.
His dog, at least, thanks him for sticking with DVDs!
...the Homer gene?
Mmmmm..... donuts.
Uh... isn't that a violation of the Hippocratic oath? And thank god booby trapping is still considered shameful and unamerican. Sheesh.
Not at all. Why do you think Vicodin, Lortab, Percocet etc. contain acetaminophen? It's not for the pain relief - the opiates do a hell of a job for that. It's to give the drugs a maximum a person can take per time period before they deplete their glutathione and fry their liver.
Some opiate seekers understand this but OD on them anyways.
but until he actually harms someone, he should be free to do whatever the hell he likes
It is a crazy opinion, and it has nothing to do with the case.
So I should be able to breed anthrax in my home, just because I love growing anthrax bacteria?
How about if I'm just curious to know if I'm able to weaponize anthrax spores into a dry powder, so I just do it?
On a more everyday note, I guess it's OK for husbands to hold up a gun and threaten to kill their wife and kids if she leaves him, as long as in his mind he knows it's just a big joke.
Or what about if he just shoots and misses her? No harm, no foul, right?
The Wheel of Time is the World of Warcraft on paper. No, really. Everything good about WoW is pretty much true of tWoT. Conversely, anything frustrating or just plain bad about WoW is also true of tWoT.
The article (yes, I RTFA) seems to point the blame at Microsoft and say, "See! See! They're shipping with an extra heat-sink! It MUST be all their fault!"
I have 20+ friends with 360s, and none of them have experienced problems with their 360s. I have a hard time believing disc read errors, separate audio and visual problems, DOA and exploding consoles are ALL caused by the lack of a heatsink. Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.
I feel you on that one. I had a 1991 Honda Civic hatchback that got 42/36 (highway/city). The newest Civics only get 40/30, and while they look a lot cooler than my old '91, they are also about $5,000 more than the sticker price of the 1991. Granted, inflation is a bitch, but then you have the Civic Hybrid. For $8,000 more you only get 51/49, or an average of about 14mpg gain, and a car that will need specialty maintenance only available at a Honda dealership. My point being, why are cars becoming less and less efficient as the years go by, even though oil prices are rising at two to three times the inflation rate?
/..
Physics 101. Sad that it has to be explained on
1991 Civic CRX hatchback, 2100 lbs. 07 Civic Hybrid with more weight (2875 lbs.), and, let's not forget, more safety features. If a drunk driver comes swerving across the median and plows into you, do you want to be riding in the 2007 Civic or the 1991 Civic? If it comes down to adding some more pounds for more crumple zone room and more precious crash-test stars, do you think that will sell better to John Q. Public than keeping the weight off for fuel economy?
"What makes gaming (or gambling, for that matter) an addiction?"
The same thing that separates feeling depressed from a depressive disorder. Interference and inability to carry out daily activities. Like someone who plays WoW 4 hours a night but otherwise has a normal life is fine, but someone who quits his job by not showing up, ignores his family and loses friendships over WoW would be someone who could probably use a psychiatric consult.
Er, I guess it's too early for that post right now... come back in a few years.
Only the AMD dual core can run Clippy while you go about your work, that's the only thing that matters in my book...
>>makes me think this is the Alar Scare [wikipedia.org] of 2007.
>Did you mean to say that?
Err, yes? If George Bush broke into the Democrat's political offices, it would be the Watergate for 2007. Check your calendar.
News at 11.
This should be trivially easy to prove/disprove by an epidemiologic study. There are plenty of people who drink soda with the benzoates in them; there are plenty of people (myself included) who drink a rather large amount of soda with potassium/sodium benzoate added.
Obviously, if the benzoates are really bad for you, there should be more things wrong with us, and the effect should be dose-dependent on how much benzoate you take in.
Honestly, the smell test (do I detect a whiff of paranoid, protect-the-children bullshit?) makes me think this is the Alar Scare of 2007.