Finally, a realistic response! Whose event is it? The IOC's! Who gets to decide which advertising contract to sign? They do!
Did they -have- to offer the current Gestapo-esque logo placement to Coke? No! They could have said "Piss off, its a free country and the athletes can have Pepsi on the field if they want."
That they did not do that should tell you a great deal about the IOC and the people who run it. In fact they probably suggested it to Coke, not the other way around.
Coke is an American company. Does Coke really want to be associated with police state tactics, particularly at the Olympics? I think not.
As far as the IOC is concerned the athletes have no rights. They exist for the sole purpose of enriching the IOC and its contituent gratuity seeking, slime mold apparatchiks. These people don't walk, they glide on an extruded layer of mucous.
What political system is that kind of thing most closely identified with? Give you a hint, it starts with an "S", ends with "ocialism".
I bet the North Korean and Chinese teams feel right at home.
The IOC was conceived, created and peopled by the "internationalists", the same bunch of supposed do-gooders who populate the bureacracy of the UN.
In other words, totalitarian minded scam artists out for some juicy graft. The first whiff of something that might negatively affect their little game, slam bam off come the gloves, baby. Kids in the Olympics have no rights and don't you forget it. Same as the UN, but more obvious and less damaging. At least nobody is getting starved to death or fed into a shredder for some faceless UN middleman's Oil-For-Food payoff cheque.
You want to see somebody scream? If you ever are unfortunate enough to meet an IOC creature, mention to them that you think it would be a good idea that the athletes should get a piece of the media money. They are the point of the whole affair and its pictures of them on the TV, shouldn't they get a piece of the action, after IOC expenses are covered? Hell no, of course not! It isn't about athletics, its about sleazy deals between scummy bureaucrats.
The kids competing are being taken for the biggest sleighride on Earth. Empty stadiums the whole first week shows I'm not the only one who thinks so.
And by the way, you can all thank God for those Eeeevile Corporations (TM) because they are the ONLY people who actually -pay- the kids for services rendered. Nike and Rebock et al have put many an otherwise pennyless jock through school and bought them a nice wee starter house and a second hand car when nobody else would give them a nickel. Sportswear companies look like Mother Teresa next to the frickin' IOC.
You corporation haters think about that one for a minute or two before you turn the flame thrower my way.
Your comment is fairly typical of people who dislike firearms, and typical of Slashdot generally. You assume that there must be something seriously wrong with people who own and/or carry firearms, because its something you don't personally agree with. How very tolerant. Such respect for Diversity.
That's the reason I posted the parent comment in the first place. You feel it's perfectly reasonable to deprive gun owners of their rights, because gun owners are obviously lunatics needing to be reigned in or possibly locked up. You haven't looked into the matter at all (or you'd know that RPG's are illegal everywhere in the USA) but in your ignorance you feel perfectly willing to impose your views on everyone.
Yet, you find it outrageous that the NFL would imply that TiVo owners are theives, and make a bogus technical argument against TiVo that anyone with ten seconds of computer training would know was BS.
Welcome to gun ownership. I've grown used to categorical condemnation of my sanity from people who don't know which end of the gun the bullets come out.
Do you think its barely possible that people who own guns, carry them daily and shoot them safely might A) be sane and normal and B)just maybe know something about guns that you don't? Possibly their views may be valid and worthy of respect and consideration, as you obviously think yours are?
Maybe you've gotten the wrong idea about gun owners because we've been getting smeared for years by the same a-holes smearing TiVo owners, and for the same corrupt reasons. Maybe there's nothing wrong and a lot right with carrying a six shooter.
You'd better hope so anyway. If YOU are right there's 100 million insane Americans and 7 million even more insane Canadians out there, armed to the teeth and just percolating on the ragged edge of going postal.
You were expecting some slavering nitwit? Sorry to disapoint. ~:D Allow me to elicidate.
In the USA, those with felony convictions of any description and those with court orders against them cannot purchase any firearm legally. This is reasonable. There is a Federal mandated Instant Check to ascertain that the buyer is not a listed felon or other banned person. Reasonable.
In certain jurisdictions such as Arizona, all firearms are legal to buy and own without an ownership license. Reasonable. Open carry of a pistol does not require a permit. Reasonable. Concealed carry requires a permit and a safety course, which I think is reasonable. There are arguments for and against.
Change of venue to Washington DC, where they require a permit to own -any- firearm, and you cannot get a permit. Ever. This is clearly unreasonable, and counter to the US Constitution. Lucky for Americans they can move to Arizona or Vermont if they don't like it in DC.
Change of venue to Canada where all owners must have a permit and each individual gun must have its own permit as well, to be renewed every four years, prices subject to change. Ten years in the slammer if you forget. This is oppression for political purposes which goes well beyond unreasonable.
The American and Canadian assault rifle bans really typify the perfidity of the gun control movement. It is a lie to suggest that semi-automatic "assault" rifles are in any way different than any other semi-auto rifle. They are the same. They just look different. Functionally identical, from rate of fire to lethality to operating system.
It is a lie in the same way as the suggestion that TiVos can supply real time unmodified video over the Internet. It is provably, obviously false, stupidly false in fact, yet the lie is repeated by the media and treated by some in authority as if it were the truth.
Hence my drawing of this issue into the TiVo example. There is in fact less excuse for the DC government's excursion into gun prohibition than there is for the FCC's into TiVo re-design. No constitutional ammendment protects consumer electronics, after all.
So, the quite legitimate outrage all you pissed off Slashdotters have at this entirely corrupt FCC intrusion into your toybox is PRECISELY what gun owners have been faced with.
I just thought it should be brought to y'all's attention that geekdom is not the first bunch to have sand kicked in their face by these Big Government clowns.
"Both sides of the gun control debate are made up of people who are trying to do the right thing. We may question their methods or reasoning, but it's hard to question their motivation."
You wish that were true. That's my point. TiVo owners and people who use computers generally are just now brushing up against the same slime pit gun owners have been wrestling with since the 1960's.
There's two kind of people in the world, the kind that are willing to leave you alone and the kind that want to decide on the configuration of your TiVo. For your own good of course.
You just got a look at their true motivation. Ugly, ain't it?
Tivo don't protect people from random criminality, guns do.
It isn't that there should be no laws regarding the use of firearms, it is that the laws should be effective and reasonable, and should take into account both people's right to self defence and their responsibilities to society.
You look into it even a tiny bit, you'll discover that the gun "control" crowd is just as full of it as the TiVo control types.
I repeat, welcome to gun ownership. Get used to bending over for the government.
When was the last time you heard of somebody fending off a rapist with a TiVo?
Look into the issue a bit, you'll find its every bit as currupt as this Tivo scam.
Rights are rights kids. You want yours, you better be prepared for me to get mine.
Can this be the same Slashdot where I get flamed all the time for mentioning the Second Amendment?
You boys and girls seem all upset when the Federal Government starts depriving you of your toys and amusements, like analog plugs for your TiVo. Lots of complaints about how dumb and crooked all these arguments are I see. Well, you know, you're right. It is dumb and crooked.
Welcome to Gun Owner Land kids. How do you like it so far?
Compare the discussion of gun control on Wiki with the one on E2 as I just did. Wiki discussion contains far fewer assinine comments from either side of the argument.
That's what a debate is supposed to be, a reasoned argument using provable assertions and logic, not a flame war.
Wiki wins on that one baby! Nothing starts a flame war quicker than the gun control subject, so if they managed to keep the heat down on that one they are doing something right!
Let them spend billions of Euros trying. All they will get out of it is tired and poorer.
When are you/. old maids going to get it? This TCP-IP shit is inherently open. You can't close it, its impossible.
If nothing else, people will set up black market radio packet switching, laser links, all manner of ways to cheat. Even the Chicoms can't secure their internet, and they kill people for kicks.
Get over it. The day there's no kiddie porn and snuff movies anywhere on the Web is the day I'll start worrying about the pE eUw and their idiot censors.
If you think school is a joke, just wait until you get into the business world. Your brain will shrivel from the stunning stupidity on parade in any business that employs more than 50 people, whether it makes money or not.
This is also true in medicine, in case you were thinking of that escape route. It is actually worse in medicine, because the stupidity gets patients killed. Ask anybody who has ever worked in a hospital, even if only as a garbage man. They will have a story, guaranteed.
The single escape is SELF EMPLOYMENT. Start something up and make it go. Not only will it test your resolve, self discipline and intelligence, it will humble you.
The thing to remember is that your business will eventually be as full of stunning stupidity as every other one out there, and will suck to work in just like they do. Except for you, because you will the one organizing everything to conform to how you want it, and all the other poor schlubs will have to put up with it.
Smart counts for almost nothing out there kid. What counts is the guts you bring to the job, not how beautiful your thoughts are. Where being smart comes in is finding a faster/cheaper/better way of doing whatever it is you decided to do, whether it be making cookies or chasing electrons.
Here's something else. What you do does not make you better than anyone else. There's a guy in Florida who makes as much money every year as a brain surgeon. He collects golf balls out of ponds and sells them. That's it. He's just as worthy, useful and successful a guy as any brain surgeon I know (and I know a few!), and he doesn't give himself airs like they do.
Go to school, get that 4.0 you think you deserve but can't be bothered to work for, and that will be a good start to getting on in life. Any fool can get a 4.0 average just the same as any fool can collect golf balls. The part of the equation you are missing right now is GUTS. Guts is what makes a 7 figure income out of golf ball collecting, and guts is what takes an average intellect to a 4.0 gpa.
They don't come with the package, you have to grow your own.
With a view like that, you MUST be an NDP'er, right?
How without a clue can you get? If there is lots of money flying around, unscrupulous people find ways for it to stick to their fingers. Crooked contracts, buddy buddy deals, my uncle Horace has a bookstore maybe he can sell all the Little Red Schoolhouse books to the province for cost plus 200%, etc.
If there is very little money, it pretty well has to go into keeping the lights on in the school, doesn't it? I mean if Uncle Horace gets it the school shuts. The schools are not shut yet, despite the very best efforts of the Ontario Teacher's Federation, I'd say its working.
Jeeze, with thinking like yours is it any wonder that the rest of us fear the NDP? How quickly they forget Bob Rae and the 14 billion dollar provincial deficit! (This was a province with like 10 million people in it at the time.) It took the Harris Conservatives five years to dig their way out from under that pile.
The McGuinty Liberal weiners haven't been in office long enough to swing this Sun deal, that has to have all been set up by the Conservative regime as a cost cutting measure. There's no reason on earth why classrooms in public schools need high horsepower machines running on expensive Mickeysoft crapware. There's nothing mission critical in a classroom that can't be done with a pencil, computers are largely wasted anyway. Better they should be as cheap as possible, eh?
Dalton's boys will probably be back to Microsoft by 2005, it gives them better opportunities to steal.
Smooth over human rights abuses? Y'mean like jailing without trail, killing on general principle and stuff like that? One does not smooth over such things, one stops them dead and punishes the perpetrators thereof.
China is currently doing well in the Western markets because they essentially use slave labour to undercut prices in the civilized world. It is difficult to compete with a country who can pay assembly line workers a dollar a day and get away with it. That will cease as soon as those human rights abuses you mentioned are taken care of.
The USA is the world's only superpower because they are the only country in the world that still thinks the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Average Americans freely join the armed forces and go off to defend their own and other people's freedom. It doesn't hurt that their freedom gives them the world's largest economy either.
I should know, I'm a Canadian. Our country believes in letting the Americans protect us. We used to have the third largest Navy in the world (yeah we did, go look it up!) and now we have a handful of leaky sub hunting frigates with no helicopters to make them useful. And no sailors.
There is nothing "liberal" or moderate about the Chicom government. Anyone who thinks there is should check out the situation in Taiwan.
I'd sooner live in the worst dump on the worst crack infested street in Chicago than a fine hotel in Peking. It would be safer.
Well, having RTFA'd Mr. Sterling's disturbingly stupid blog, I can see now why I haven't liked his fiction. He's a total, screaming asshole.
"How about the relatively simple solution of seven or eight billion of us starving to death? Or how about a few massive heat-wave-boosted lethal epidemics? That ought to put a swift kibosh on energy demand."
One of the biggest problems the Chicom government has at the moment is the Internet. People can easilly check the news from foreign countries and debunk the government propaganda they see all day on TV.
Kind of like what Canadians do with the CBC, only more.
If the Chicoms develop their own standards to replace the current web protocols like TCP-IP and HTML, they can isolate their population behind a brand spanking new Bamboo Curtain.
They wish.
One problem, they have to replace all their current telecom and computing infrastructure with new noncompliant home grown shit, which will be both expensive and damaging to their economy. They will be replacing good equipment with less capable stuff and reinventing the wheel endlessly.
This is precisely what the USA did to the Soviets with the arms race, but in a less belicose form. Probably changing the telco infrastructure will be more expensive than building a new bomber force every ten years like the Russians had to do from the 1950's right up to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Regan drove the last stake into their heart with his Star Wars plan. Trying to counter that pie in the sky drove 'em out of business.
Another problem is that it won't work. The country is wired to the hilt already, people are not going to voluntarily give up their window on the world for some Commiebox that reports direct to the Chairman's office every time they log on. China is BIG, even the Chicom government can't collect every PC in the country without active public cooperation. Plus some clever kid is going to hack the Commiebox to bridge the incompatible protocols anyway, probably the same week the new crap gets released. Linux port for the Commiebox anyone?
Final straw, half or more of the computer stuff for Western consumption gets made in Chinese factories right now. Anybody think some of that stuff won't quietly find its way into civillian hands? Shoplifting by employees alone guarantees it will.
I predict the Chicom economy won't carry the strain and if the government pushes this hard they will be bankrupt in ten years or less. Looks good on the bastards, I have to say.
Hopefully the Chinese people will be able to come up with a better government once the jackboot is off their necks.
Flame on, Commie appologists. I've got my asbestos undies ready. ~:D
That's really great and all, but try scaling up your compressed air storage or molten salt idea to 20 million barels of oil per day. That's the US DAILY oil consumption. Let me repeat that, daily.
How much compressed air are you going to pump so that the city of New York NY is going to have uninterupted power for a cloudy day? How about a cloudy week? How many hundreds thousands of acres of solar cells are going to pump that air in addition to the hundreds of thousands of acres that power the place on a sunny day? Is there enough gallium in the entire world to make that many cells in the first place?
Pipe dream!
As a proud SUV driver (Dodge Ram 1500, extended cab baby!) I must say I am totally unconvinced by the doom shouting of the Global Warming bunch. Mr. Lovelock is the classic case, he contends that humanity is a disease, a blight on the face of Gaia if you will.
How big an idiot would I have to be to place any credence in the words of a man who thinks I'm a disease? I'd be better off just swiming over to Iraq and offering myself up for an Islamofascist haircut. They just think I'm a tool of Satan, not a disease.
In the 1970's the big fear was another Ice Age, these days its global warming. Next year it will be some other crap. There is no "proof" of global warming at this time,there aren't even any measurements consistent with warming. There are only computer projections based on incomplete data. Garbage in, garbage out.
The USA alone uses roughly 21 million barrels a day of crude oil alone, without figuring in all the coal, nuclear and natural gas. Figure out the energy content of a barrel of oil, then figure out how many square feet of photovoltaic cells you need to generate that much electricity. Also, remember that solar does not work at night or in the rain or when its cloudy so you have to have someplace to store a couple of days worth of electricity in case of a big cloud front.
Do that up and you will discover that you need more square feet of solar collectors than there is land surface in the USA. Ain't gonna work.
As to giving up my SUV, no fucking way. Its a free country, I get to choose my own vehicle and I chose it. I'll not give it up just because some tree huggers don't like it.
This here is where you see what a political movement is made of, in how they deal with the people who don't agree. Lets count the number of people who call me a pig for driving a politically incorrect vehicle, shall we?
Where do you think the people who keep the US urban murder rate high come from?
This kid is a classic example. He's already whacked his first opponent before he's even out of grade school. He will probably kill multiple more times before somebody bigger and/or faster finally whacks him. That's his future in a nutshell without some truly radical intervention by a third party. Like maybe he will lose a limb in a fire fight and the rehab will hammer some sense into him. Counselling ain't going to do it.
What is "disturbing" to me is that you don't seem bothered that there's a little girl dead, who'd be alive except for the horrific ineptitude of the Michigan child health authorities. Notice the Moore silence on the subject. Murder Boy was an obvious and known freak who should NOT have been left in a standard public school. Where he still is, apparently. Probably picking his next target.
Moore's argument in the movie, to which he bends the truth more than slightly, is that Kayla would be alive if there were no guns available. Which is obviously stupid. Murder Boy could have got lucky with a pencil or a rock anytime. He's a walking murder looking for a place to happen.
The larger argument Moore makes in all his films is that the USA is a cesspool of evil and that "conservatives" made it that way deliberately. You'll note he makes no mention of the corrosive effects of crack, its sale and the gang wars fought over it. Somehow its all Bush's fault, and before Bush it was Regan's fault. Kayla was the NRA's fault, for Christ's sake!
The truth about Michael Moore is that he doesn't believe those arguments himself. He uses them to make movies, which then makes him incredibly stinking rich. Because he doesn't have the talent of other film makers, he's developed this con instead. He's a cynical liar and a sloppy director. But rich!
This kid for whom you feel all this sympathy is nothing more than a prop for Mr. Moore. He's got an agenda to push and he's going to use this kid's circumstances to push it. He cares not a single damn what happens to that kid.
So yeah, I'm disturbed that you were so easily taken in by Mr. Moore. His crockumentary is fairly transparent, what were you thinking?
When are you people at Slashdot going to realize that electric vehicles do not stop air pollution, they only move the place it gets made?
You have to charge up the battery. That takes electricity from the wall. Which comes from a power plant. Which BURNS something, usually coal in China. Really gawdawful brown coal too, not the nice hard stuff we get in the USA and Canada.
Smokestack or exhaust pipe, take your pick. You want to be green, you better pedal it yourself. True, you will be burning sugar and making CO2 while you pedal, but unless you plan on going "back to the land" by stopping breathing on a permanent basis, you'll be doing that anyway.
Theoretically the hybrid is able to A) make use of energy regained by regenerative braking and coasting, and B) run its gas engine at the most efficient rpm rather than having to continuously vary engine speed as we normally do.
Those are the up-side. The down side is that electric generators do not convert 100% of the torque energy you put into them, electric motors do not give you 100% of the electric energy you put in back as torque, and batteries do not give back 100% of the energy you put it storage.
So you have all the losses normally associated with a gas engine PLUS all these electric drive train losses as well.
Consequently it is no surprise that highway mileage is worse with the hybrid than a standard engine, because the standard is tuned for highway driving. There's no energy lost to braking, so the hybrid's advantages are all neutralised.
In the city there is plenty of stop and go driving, with speeding up and slowing down, and this is where the hybrid has the advantage with regenerative braking and constant engine speed.
In concept all you are doing is using a smaller engine to wind up a big spring. Sometimes this is an advantage, sometimes it isn't.
If you are driving all in the city, chose a hybrid. If you are driving mostly on the highway, stick with the standard style.
By the way, the small difference in even city mileage is more of a testament to the superb design of modern engines and cars than a strike against the hybrid car. Cars these days are absolutely amazing.
Here we have some twinkletoes in NYC cycling around stealing services from the people who own the WiFi equipment he's sniffing for. The fact that he helps other people steal it too doesn't raise my opinion of him.
To compare this knob to a guy who contributes an actual -service- to his community in Cambodia is quite incorrect. One's a thief, one's not.
It is nice to see some good come of an idea created to steal something. Kind of like EMS using a slim jim to rescue a baby out of a car. Proving that nothing is so debased it can't be turned to good with a bit of ingenuity and a bunch of work.
And before you bleeding hearts start in telling me its not like that and anyway people should secure their WiFi, answer me this:
If the candy machine is accidentally left unlocked and you take a candy without paying, is it still stealing?
If people want you to access their network, they will put up a sign.
Gotta love a guy who resigns from an open software org because he's anti-war and doesn't want the military using his toys.
"Linux is free to everyone, except the people we don't like this week." Nice principled stand there dickweed.
Open software means the US military gets to use it, Saddam Hussein's Master Torturer gets to use it, the Chicom Ministry of Nuclear Fucking Missiles gets to use it (Red Flag Linux, baby!), Arab slave traders get to use it, and your Aunt Maisy gets to use it. Open is OPEN, free for all.
Which to my mind brings the whole concept of Open Software into question. Maybe there are some people we don't want to have access to high powered computing resources, eh? Kim Jong Ill springs rather forcefully to mind.
On a more personal note, and as a non-US citizen I might add, I'd just like to emphasize my personal disdain for a man so STUPID that he wouldn't resign over the North Korean Army using Linux (you can bet your ass they do!) but he will over the US Army using it. That's got to be the pinacle of jackass behaviour.
Mr. Claiborne sir, you are a true blue Useful Idiot. Your disrespect for the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect your worthless ass is contemptible.
Nobody gets a pass. If they report doo doo, I don't read 'em. If their political slant is so extreme that it affect the truth of what they say, they line the parrot cage. Drudge has his slant of course, but it doesn't prevent him from printing the truth. If GW Bush pulls a Clinton with an intern, Drudge will print it first, with a red light on it.
Drudge puts his corrections up front and in bold, and I don't see too many of them. The NY Slimes puts theirs in a back corner of page six, and there's a bunch every day. I don't read the Slimes.
Bottom line, if I want to find out what's going on in the world I read a bunch of sites, Drudge first among them. If I want to know what the Democratic Party of the USA is pushing today, I'll read the New York Times.
Blogs are good for pointing things out that you may have missed, not so good for origional reporting. Read many, apply bullshit meter to all.
If you make the tax easy enough and small enough, it isn't worth it to dodge through loopholes. The accounting and capital cost are more than what you save by fiddling about if the top rate is under 20%.
On the other hand, the top marginal rate is 35%+, then hell yeah go for the loopholes.
Besides, if some rich guy chissels the taxman for a few hundred grand, do we care? He's paying a buttload anyway, you want the pennies off his eyes too?
At a certain point the "make the rich pay!!!" concept starts costing more than its worth. I belive we passed that point in about 1930 and it has been downhill ever since. Time for a re-look before the whole thing crashes and burns, eh?
Besides, I didn't say you shouldn't go after cheaters. I just think 45 cents is a ludicrous ammount to pay for collecting a measly buck. Flat tax would go a long way to fixing that. You have a better idea, go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, a realistic response! Whose event is it? The IOC's! Who gets to decide which advertising contract to sign? They do!
Did they -have- to offer the current Gestapo-esque logo placement to Coke? No! They could have said "Piss off, its a free country and the athletes can have Pepsi on the field if they want."
That they did not do that should tell you a great deal about the IOC and the people who run it. In fact they probably suggested it to Coke, not the other way around.
Coke is an American company. Does Coke really want to be associated with police state tactics, particularly at the Olympics? I think not.
As far as the IOC is concerned the athletes have no rights. They exist for the sole purpose of enriching the IOC and its contituent gratuity seeking, slime mold apparatchiks. These people don't walk, they glide on an extruded layer of mucous.
What political system is that kind of thing most closely identified with? Give you a hint, it starts with an "S", ends with "ocialism".
I bet the North Korean and Chinese teams feel right at home.
The IOC was conceived, created and peopled by the "internationalists", the same bunch of supposed do-gooders who populate the bureacracy of the UN.
In other words, totalitarian minded scam artists out for some juicy graft. The first whiff of something that might negatively affect their little game, slam bam off come the gloves, baby. Kids in the Olympics have no rights and don't you forget it. Same as the UN, but more obvious and less damaging. At least nobody is getting starved to death or fed into a shredder for some faceless UN middleman's Oil-For-Food payoff cheque.
You want to see somebody scream? If you ever are unfortunate enough to meet an IOC creature, mention to them that you think it would be a good idea that the athletes should get a piece of the media money. They are the point of the whole affair and its pictures of them on the TV, shouldn't they get a piece of the action, after IOC expenses are covered? Hell no, of course not! It isn't about athletics, its about sleazy deals between scummy bureaucrats.
The kids competing are being taken for the biggest sleighride on Earth. Empty stadiums the whole first week shows I'm not the only one who thinks so.
And by the way, you can all thank God for those Eeeevile Corporations (TM) because they are the ONLY people who actually -pay- the kids for services rendered. Nike and Rebock et al have put many an otherwise pennyless jock through school and bought them a nice wee starter house and a second hand car when nobody else would give them a nickel. Sportswear companies look like Mother Teresa next to the frickin' IOC.
You corporation haters think about that one for a minute or two before you turn the flame thrower my way.
Your comment is fairly typical of people who dislike firearms, and typical of Slashdot generally. You assume that there must be something seriously wrong with people who own and/or carry firearms, because its something you don't personally agree with. How very tolerant. Such respect for Diversity.
That's the reason I posted the parent comment in the first place. You feel it's perfectly reasonable to deprive gun owners of their rights, because gun owners are obviously lunatics needing to be reigned in or possibly locked up. You haven't looked into the matter at all (or you'd know that RPG's are illegal everywhere in the USA) but in your ignorance you feel perfectly willing to impose your views on everyone.
Yet, you find it outrageous that the NFL would imply that TiVo owners are theives, and make a bogus technical argument against TiVo that anyone with ten seconds of computer training would know was BS.
Welcome to gun ownership. I've grown used to categorical condemnation of my sanity from people who don't know which end of the gun the bullets come out.
Do you think its barely possible that people who own guns, carry them daily and shoot them safely might A) be sane and normal and B)just maybe know something about guns that you don't? Possibly their views may be valid and worthy of respect and consideration, as you obviously think yours are?
Maybe you've gotten the wrong idea about gun owners because we've been getting smeared for years by the same a-holes smearing TiVo owners, and for the same corrupt reasons. Maybe there's nothing wrong and a lot right with carrying a six shooter.
You'd better hope so anyway. If YOU are right there's 100 million insane Americans and 7 million even more insane Canadians out there, armed to the teeth and just percolating on the ragged edge of going postal.
Some are reasonable, some aren't.
You were expecting some slavering nitwit? Sorry to disapoint. ~:D Allow me to elicidate.
In the USA, those with felony convictions of any description and those with court orders against them cannot purchase any firearm legally. This is reasonable. There is a Federal mandated Instant Check to ascertain that the buyer is not a listed felon or other banned person. Reasonable.
In certain jurisdictions such as Arizona, all firearms are legal to buy and own without an ownership license. Reasonable. Open carry of a pistol does not require a permit. Reasonable. Concealed carry requires a permit and a safety course, which I think is reasonable. There are arguments for and against.
Change of venue to Washington DC, where they require a permit to own -any- firearm, and you cannot get a permit. Ever. This is clearly unreasonable, and counter to the US Constitution. Lucky for Americans they can move to Arizona or Vermont if they don't like it in DC.
Change of venue to Canada where all owners must have a permit and each individual gun must have its own permit as well, to be renewed every four years, prices subject to change. Ten years in the slammer if you forget. This is oppression for political purposes which goes well beyond unreasonable.
The American and Canadian assault rifle bans really typify the perfidity of the gun control movement. It is a lie to suggest that semi-automatic "assault" rifles are in any way different than any other semi-auto rifle. They are the same. They just look different. Functionally identical, from rate of fire to lethality to operating system.
It is a lie in the same way as the suggestion that TiVos can supply real time unmodified video over the Internet. It is provably, obviously false, stupidly false in fact, yet the lie is repeated by the media and treated by some in authority as if it were the truth.
Hence my drawing of this issue into the TiVo example. There is in fact less excuse for the DC government's excursion into gun prohibition than there is for the FCC's into TiVo re-design. No constitutional ammendment protects consumer electronics, after all.
So, the quite legitimate outrage all you pissed off Slashdotters have at this entirely corrupt FCC intrusion into your toybox is PRECISELY what gun owners have been faced with.
I just thought it should be brought to y'all's attention that geekdom is not the first bunch to have sand kicked in their face by these Big Government clowns.
"Both sides of the gun control debate are made up of people who are trying to do the right thing. We may question their methods or reasoning, but it's hard to question their motivation."
You wish that were true. That's my point. TiVo owners and people who use computers generally are just now brushing up against the same slime pit gun owners have been wrestling with since the 1960's.
There's two kind of people in the world, the kind that are willing to leave you alone and the kind that want to decide on the configuration of your TiVo. For your own good of course.
You just got a look at their true motivation. Ugly, ain't it?
Tivo don't protect people from random criminality, guns do.
It isn't that there should be no laws regarding the use of firearms, it is that the laws should be effective and reasonable, and should take into account both people's right to self defence and their responsibilities to society.
You look into it even a tiny bit, you'll discover that the gun "control" crowd is just as full of it as the TiVo control types.
I repeat, welcome to gun ownership. Get used to bending over for the government.
When was the last time you heard of somebody fending off a rapist with a TiVo? Look into the issue a bit, you'll find its every bit as currupt as this Tivo scam. Rights are rights kids. You want yours, you better be prepared for me to get mine.
Can this be the same Slashdot where I get flamed all the time for mentioning the Second Amendment?
You boys and girls seem all upset when the Federal Government starts depriving you of your toys and amusements, like analog plugs for your TiVo. Lots of complaints about how dumb and crooked all these arguments are I see. Well, you know, you're right. It is dumb and crooked.
Welcome to Gun Owner Land kids. How do you like it so far?
Compare the discussion of gun control on Wiki with the one on E2 as I just did. Wiki discussion contains far fewer assinine comments from either side of the argument.
That's what a debate is supposed to be, a reasoned argument using provable assertions and logic, not a flame war.
Wiki wins on that one baby! Nothing starts a flame war quicker than the gun control subject, so if they managed to keep the heat down on that one they are doing something right!
...let them try!
/. old maids going to get it? This TCP-IP shit is inherently open. You can't close it, its impossible.
Let them spend billions of Euros trying. All they will get out of it is tired and poorer.
When are you
If nothing else, people will set up black market radio packet switching, laser links, all manner of ways to cheat. Even the Chicoms can't secure their internet, and they kill people for kicks.
Get over it. The day there's no kiddie porn and snuff movies anywhere on the Web is the day I'll start worrying about the pE eUw and their idiot censors.
If you think school is a joke, just wait until you get into the business world. Your brain will shrivel from the stunning stupidity on parade in any business that employs more than 50 people, whether it makes money or not.
This is also true in medicine, in case you were thinking of that escape route. It is actually worse in medicine, because the stupidity gets patients killed. Ask anybody who has ever worked in a hospital, even if only as a garbage man. They will have a story, guaranteed.
The single escape is SELF EMPLOYMENT. Start something up and make it go. Not only will it test your resolve, self discipline and intelligence, it will humble you.
The thing to remember is that your business will eventually be as full of stunning stupidity as every other one out there, and will suck to work in just like they do. Except for you, because you will the one organizing everything to conform to how you want it, and all the other poor schlubs will have to put up with it.
Smart counts for almost nothing out there kid. What counts is the guts you bring to the job, not how beautiful your thoughts are. Where being smart comes in is finding a faster/cheaper/better way of doing whatever it is you decided to do, whether it be making cookies or chasing electrons.
Here's something else. What you do does not make you better than anyone else. There's a guy in Florida who makes as much money every year as a brain surgeon. He collects golf balls out of ponds and sells them. That's it. He's just as worthy, useful and successful a guy as any brain surgeon I know (and I know a few!), and he doesn't give himself airs like they do.
Go to school, get that 4.0 you think you deserve but can't be bothered to work for, and that will be a good start to getting on in life. Any fool can get a 4.0 average just the same as any fool can collect golf balls. The part of the equation you are missing right now is GUTS. Guts is what makes a 7 figure income out of golf ball collecting, and guts is what takes an average intellect to a 4.0 gpa.
They don't come with the package, you have to grow your own.
With a view like that, you MUST be an NDP'er, right?
How without a clue can you get? If there is lots of money flying around, unscrupulous people find ways for it to stick to their fingers. Crooked contracts, buddy buddy deals, my uncle Horace has a bookstore maybe he can sell all the Little Red Schoolhouse books to the province for cost plus 200%, etc.
If there is very little money, it pretty well has to go into keeping the lights on in the school, doesn't it? I mean if Uncle Horace gets it the school shuts. The schools are not shut yet, despite the very best efforts of the Ontario Teacher's Federation, I'd say its working.
Jeeze, with thinking like yours is it any wonder that the rest of us fear the NDP? How quickly they forget Bob Rae and the 14 billion dollar provincial deficit! (This was a province with like 10 million people in it at the time.) It took the Harris Conservatives five years to dig their way out from under that pile.
The McGuinty Liberal weiners haven't been in office long enough to swing this Sun deal, that has to have all been set up by the Conservative regime as a cost cutting measure. There's no reason on earth why classrooms in public schools need high horsepower machines running on expensive Mickeysoft crapware. There's nothing mission critical in a classroom that can't be done with a pencil, computers are largely wasted anyway. Better they should be as cheap as possible, eh?
Dalton's boys will probably be back to Microsoft by 2005, it gives them better opportunities to steal.
Smooth over human rights abuses? Y'mean like jailing without trail, killing on general principle and stuff like that? One does not smooth over such things, one stops them dead and punishes the perpetrators thereof.
China is currently doing well in the Western markets because they essentially use slave labour to undercut prices in the civilized world. It is difficult to compete with a country who can pay assembly line workers a dollar a day and get away with it. That will cease as soon as those human rights abuses you mentioned are taken care of.
The USA is the world's only superpower because they are the only country in the world that still thinks the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Average Americans freely join the armed forces and go off to defend their own and other people's freedom. It doesn't hurt that their freedom gives them the world's largest economy either.
I should know, I'm a Canadian. Our country believes in letting the Americans protect us. We used to have the third largest Navy in the world (yeah we did, go look it up!) and now we have a handful of leaky sub hunting frigates with no helicopters to make them useful. And no sailors.
There is nothing "liberal" or moderate about the Chicom government. Anyone who thinks there is should check out the situation in Taiwan.
I'd sooner live in the worst dump on the worst crack infested street in Chicago than a fine hotel in Peking. It would be safer.
'Nuff said.
Well, having RTFA'd Mr. Sterling's disturbingly stupid blog, I can see now why I haven't liked his fiction. He's a total, screaming asshole.
"How about the relatively simple solution of seven or eight billion of us starving to death? Or how about a few massive heat-wave-boosted lethal epidemics? That ought to put a swift kibosh on energy demand."
Now that's fucking constructive.
One of the biggest problems the Chicom government has at the moment is the Internet. People can easilly check the news from foreign countries and debunk the government propaganda they see all day on TV.
Kind of like what Canadians do with the CBC, only more.
If the Chicoms develop their own standards to replace the current web protocols like TCP-IP and HTML, they can isolate their population behind a brand spanking new Bamboo Curtain.
They wish.
One problem, they have to replace all their current telecom and computing infrastructure with new noncompliant home grown shit, which will be both expensive and damaging to their economy. They will be replacing good equipment with less capable stuff and reinventing the wheel endlessly.
This is precisely what the USA did to the Soviets with the arms race, but in a less belicose form. Probably changing the telco infrastructure will be more expensive than building a new bomber force every ten years like the Russians had to do from the 1950's right up to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Regan drove the last stake into their heart with his Star Wars plan. Trying to counter that pie in the sky drove 'em out of business.
Another problem is that it won't work. The country is wired to the hilt already, people are not going to voluntarily give up their window on the world for some Commiebox that reports direct to the Chairman's office every time they log on. China is BIG, even the Chicom government can't collect every PC in the country without active public cooperation. Plus some clever kid is going to hack the Commiebox to bridge the incompatible protocols anyway, probably the same week the new crap gets released. Linux port for the Commiebox anyone?
Final straw, half or more of the computer stuff for Western consumption gets made in Chinese factories right now. Anybody think some of that stuff won't quietly find its way into civillian hands? Shoplifting by employees alone guarantees it will.
I predict the Chicom economy won't carry the strain and if the government pushes this hard they will be bankrupt in ten years or less. Looks good on the bastards, I have to say.
Hopefully the Chinese people will be able to come up with a better government once the jackboot is off their necks.
Flame on, Commie appologists. I've got my asbestos undies ready. ~:D
That's really great and all, but try scaling up your compressed air storage or molten salt idea to 20 million barels of oil per day. That's the US DAILY oil consumption. Let me repeat that, daily. How much compressed air are you going to pump so that the city of New York NY is going to have uninterupted power for a cloudy day? How about a cloudy week? How many hundreds thousands of acres of solar cells are going to pump that air in addition to the hundreds of thousands of acres that power the place on a sunny day? Is there enough gallium in the entire world to make that many cells in the first place? Pipe dream!
As a proud SUV driver (Dodge Ram 1500, extended cab baby!) I must say I am totally unconvinced by the doom shouting of the Global Warming bunch. Mr. Lovelock is the classic case, he contends that humanity is a disease, a blight on the face of Gaia if you will.
How big an idiot would I have to be to place any credence in the words of a man who thinks I'm a disease? I'd be better off just swiming over to Iraq and offering myself up for an Islamofascist haircut. They just think I'm a tool of Satan, not a disease.
In the 1970's the big fear was another Ice Age, these days its global warming. Next year it will be some other crap. There is no "proof" of global warming at this time,there aren't even any measurements consistent with warming. There are only computer projections based on incomplete data. Garbage in, garbage out.
The USA alone uses roughly 21 million barrels a day of crude oil alone, without figuring in all the coal, nuclear and natural gas. Figure out the energy content of a barrel of oil, then figure out how many square feet of photovoltaic cells you need to generate that much electricity. Also, remember that solar does not work at night or in the rain or when its cloudy so you have to have someplace to store a couple of days worth of electricity in case of a big cloud front.
Do that up and you will discover that you need more square feet of solar collectors than there is land surface in the USA. Ain't gonna work.
As to giving up my SUV, no fucking way. Its a free country, I get to choose my own vehicle and I chose it. I'll not give it up just because some tree huggers don't like it.
This here is where you see what a political movement is made of, in how they deal with the people who don't agree. Lets count the number of people who call me a pig for driving a politically incorrect vehicle, shall we?
Where do you think the people who keep the US urban murder rate high come from?
This kid is a classic example. He's already whacked his first opponent before he's even out of grade school. He will probably kill multiple more times before somebody bigger and/or faster finally whacks him. That's his future in a nutshell without some truly radical intervention by a third party. Like maybe he will lose a limb in a fire fight and the rehab will hammer some sense into him. Counselling ain't going to do it.
What is "disturbing" to me is that you don't seem bothered that there's a little girl dead, who'd be alive except for the horrific ineptitude of the Michigan child health authorities. Notice the Moore silence on the subject. Murder Boy was an obvious and known freak who should NOT have been left in a standard public school. Where he still is, apparently. Probably picking his next target.
Moore's argument in the movie, to which he bends the truth more than slightly, is that Kayla would be alive if there were no guns available. Which is obviously stupid. Murder Boy could have got lucky with a pencil or a rock anytime. He's a walking murder looking for a place to happen.
The larger argument Moore makes in all his films is that the USA is a cesspool of evil and that "conservatives" made it that way deliberately. You'll note he makes no mention of the corrosive effects of crack, its sale and the gang wars fought over it. Somehow its all Bush's fault, and before Bush it was Regan's fault. Kayla was the NRA's fault, for Christ's sake!
The truth about Michael Moore is that he doesn't believe those arguments himself. He uses them to make movies, which then makes him incredibly stinking rich. Because he doesn't have the talent of other film makers, he's developed this con instead. He's a cynical liar and a sloppy director. But rich!
This kid for whom you feel all this sympathy is nothing more than a prop for Mr. Moore. He's got an agenda to push and he's going to use this kid's circumstances to push it. He cares not a single damn what happens to that kid.
So yeah, I'm disturbed that you were so easily taken in by Mr. Moore. His crockumentary is fairly transparent, what were you thinking?
When are you people at Slashdot going to realize that electric vehicles do not stop air pollution, they only move the place it gets made?
You have to charge up the battery. That takes electricity from the wall. Which comes from a power plant. Which BURNS something, usually coal in China. Really gawdawful brown coal too, not the nice hard stuff we get in the USA and Canada.
Smokestack or exhaust pipe, take your pick. You want to be green, you better pedal it yourself. True, you will be burning sugar and making CO2 while you pedal, but unless you plan on going "back to the land" by stopping breathing on a permanent basis, you'll be doing that anyway.
Theoretically the hybrid is able to A) make use of energy regained by regenerative braking and coasting, and B) run its gas engine at the most efficient rpm rather than having to continuously vary engine speed as we normally do.
Those are the up-side. The down side is that electric generators do not convert 100% of the torque energy you put into them, electric motors do not give you 100% of the electric energy you put in back as torque, and batteries do not give back 100% of the energy you put it storage.
So you have all the losses normally associated with a gas engine PLUS all these electric drive train losses as well.
Consequently it is no surprise that highway mileage is worse with the hybrid than a standard engine, because the standard is tuned for highway driving. There's no energy lost to braking, so the hybrid's advantages are all neutralised.
In the city there is plenty of stop and go driving, with speeding up and slowing down, and this is where the hybrid has the advantage with regenerative braking and constant engine speed.
In concept all you are doing is using a smaller engine to wind up a big spring. Sometimes this is an advantage, sometimes it isn't.
If you are driving all in the city, chose a hybrid. If you are driving mostly on the highway, stick with the standard style.
By the way, the small difference in even city mileage is more of a testament to the superb design of modern engines and cars than a strike against the hybrid car. Cars these days are absolutely amazing.
Here we have some twinkletoes in NYC cycling around stealing services from the people who own the WiFi equipment he's sniffing for. The fact that he helps other people steal it too doesn't raise my opinion of him.
To compare this knob to a guy who contributes an actual -service- to his community in Cambodia is quite incorrect. One's a thief, one's not.
It is nice to see some good come of an idea created to steal something. Kind of like EMS using a slim jim to rescue a baby out of a car. Proving that nothing is so debased it can't be turned to good with a bit of ingenuity and a bunch of work.
And before you bleeding hearts start in telling me its not like that and anyway people should secure their WiFi, answer me this:
If the candy machine is accidentally left unlocked and you take a candy without paying, is it still stealing?
If people want you to access their network, they will put up a sign.
Gotta love a guy who resigns from an open software org because he's anti-war and doesn't want the military using his toys.
"Linux is free to everyone, except the people we don't like this week." Nice principled stand there dickweed.
Open software means the US military gets to use it, Saddam Hussein's Master Torturer gets to use it, the Chicom Ministry of Nuclear Fucking Missiles gets to use it (Red Flag Linux, baby!), Arab slave traders get to use it, and your Aunt Maisy gets to use it. Open is OPEN, free for all.
Which to my mind brings the whole concept of Open Software into question. Maybe there are some people we don't want to have access to high powered computing resources, eh? Kim Jong Ill springs rather forcefully to mind.
On a more personal note, and as a non-US citizen I might add, I'd just like to emphasize my personal disdain for a man so STUPID that he wouldn't resign over the North Korean Army using Linux (you can bet your ass they do!) but he will over the US Army using it. That's got to be the pinacle of jackass behaviour.
Mr. Claiborne sir, you are a true blue Useful Idiot. Your disrespect for the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect your worthless ass is contemptible.
Nobody gets a pass. If they report doo doo, I don't read 'em. If their political slant is so extreme that it affect the truth of what they say, they line the parrot cage. Drudge has his slant of course, but it doesn't prevent him from printing the truth. If GW Bush pulls a Clinton with an intern, Drudge will print it first, with a red light on it.
Drudge puts his corrections up front and in bold, and I don't see too many of them. The NY Slimes puts theirs in a back corner of page six, and there's a bunch every day. I don't read the Slimes.
Bottom line, if I want to find out what's going on in the world I read a bunch of sites, Drudge first among them. If I want to know what the Democratic Party of the USA is pushing today, I'll read the New York Times.
Blogs are good for pointing things out that you may have missed, not so good for origional reporting. Read many, apply bullshit meter to all.
Just don't watch re-runs. I only watch three or four shows anyway, refusing to watch re-runs cuts even that down tremendously. ~:D
If you make the tax easy enough and small enough, it isn't worth it to dodge through loopholes. The accounting and capital cost are more than what you save by fiddling about if the top rate is under 20%.
On the other hand, the top marginal rate is 35%+, then hell yeah go for the loopholes.
Besides, if some rich guy chissels the taxman for a few hundred grand, do we care? He's paying a buttload anyway, you want the pennies off his eyes too?
At a certain point the "make the rich pay!!!" concept starts costing more than its worth. I belive we passed that point in about 1930 and it has been downhill ever since. Time for a re-look before the whole thing crashes and burns, eh?
Besides, I didn't say you shouldn't go after cheaters. I just think 45 cents is a ludicrous ammount to pay for collecting a measly buck. Flat tax would go a long way to fixing that. You have a better idea, go for it.