Until your 20s or so, 'friends' are usually the least objectionable acquaintances from school. Now, that's potentially a large pool of people so you can get lucky and find real friends in that group.
For a brief period in your 20s, you may form some friendships with coworkers or somebody you meet socially. Usually a limited pool of people, and that's the pool you're choosing a spouse from.
In your 30s (if you have kids), your friends are the parents of your kids' friends.
It often isn't until retirement that you're actually free to form relationships with someone based on common interests instead of common circumstances. And guess what? They're all old and moderately set in their ways so the odds of a friendship forming are lower. And they're going to die at a higher rate than in your youth, so there's that, too.
As a general rule I think communities are stronger the more diverse (but tolerant (within reason)) they are, and secession is a bad idea.
However, the USA seems so divided on whether to be a robber baron libertarian 'paradise' of God-fearing Christians or an Orwellian liberal state where everyone thinks what the state tells them is correct to think., that sometimes I think secession might be the way to go.
It seems Americans are extremely keen to fight based on party lines for no reason other than they're party lines, and the political system doesn't really allow for a viable third party to appear on the scene - you'd just split the right or left vote and ensure victory to the ones you most oppose.
Let the hard-red and the hard-blue states go their own way, and handle their interdependency as a matter of international trade instead of national policy. Jesusland can believe in a 6000 year old Earth, and Leftwingtopia can force everyone to memorize 100 new gender pronouns.
The cameras, the connections, and the back-end storage and processing are relatively inexpensive now.
The cops should be running their own camera systems from a COTS solution, put a tech on the police payroll, and then keep 100% of the revenue rather than paying an ongoing percentage to an outside company to do something that it now essentially technically trivial.
And it's not a surveillance state if you can keep the cops to merely scanning wanted plates instead of tracking everyone. If you're breaking the law, they should be looking for you. (The problem is stopping them from looking for you when you're NOT breaking the law... data is always used against you)
Don't make it easy - if you fail to win the suit you'd have to cover reasonable legal costs or something - but when someone advertises a magic sticker that fixes your health problems, ANYONE ought to be able to sue the snake oil salesmen regardless of whether or not they have personally purchased the product.
I'm sure there are packs of hungry lawyers out there who would love to make a living reading ads searching for a payday, I say let's put them to good use.
Not bad, actually; Have the scooter slide out from underneath and treat the bag like a side car, or leave the scooter underneath and the handle shaft leans forward so you can comfortably tow the bag behind you.
If you're clever enough and add a wheel lock, you could even use a modified handle as a portable chair.
Then the question becomes... do you leave it with tiny wheels expecting it to only be used on very smooth surfaces, or do you waste some space and weight on bigger wheels, maybe make it detachable from the bag for more general use?
>But microwave links as well are being sabotaged by some one. Not sure who it is. Everything from aluminum spray paint on the dish to metallic epoxy injected into the device shorting it out. And of course, making it un-repairable.
Here in Canada, without American gun culture, it appears to be a kind of 'sport' to illegally discharge firearms at microwave dishes on communications towers.
Not that it really does much damage most of the time, but at a minimum it allows the elements in and water (or snow and ice) isn't particularly good for the equipment.
If someone is actually climbing the towers to reach those dishes, that's a professional effort.
I think what's really going on here is a wheelbase that is too narrow for the height of the centre of mass.
What's needed is pop-out wheels to extend the wheelbase, possibly also with a small computer and an electric motor so the suitcase can follow you (perhaps a pager-type object on your belt) and scream if somebody tries to steal it from you.
Or go one step further and design it to carry a human and provide a Bluetooth joystick control so not only don't you have to carry or pull the thing, it can carry or pull you.
Yes, any terrestrial species that wants its descendants to survive more than another 700 million years or so must expand its territory beyond Earth orbit before that time has passed and the Sun cooks the Earth dry.
Any species that wants its descendants to survive any arbitrary amount of time less that that still has to work on the same issue in case of asteroid strike or other major catastrophe that could happen somewhere in the next five minutes to 700 million years.
So yes, we ought to be working on how to survive and thrive in space with just an energy gradient and a source of raw materials to keep us going.
However, Hawking also beaks off about aliens wanting to invade and kill/enslave us, so however good he may be at figuring out the math of black holes, he's not so great at interstellar economics. Sometimes he talks about how we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust next Thursday, just for variety.
Personally, I think he likes staying in the public eye and nobody's talking about A Brief History of Time any more.
It's so common in business it's almost a tautology.
Essentially, if your business' continued existence depends entirely on one supplier or customer... it's not YOUR business, you just haven't figured it out yet. You're more like a department of the supplier or customer's company, in that you are entirely subject to their whims.
Sometimes - especially if it's a symbiotic relationship between companies that are essentially equally powerful - it works out. If, however, you're dealing with a megacorp like Apple and you're not also a megacorp, it's almost certain you'll eventually be crushed and then bought or replaced at some point.
Usually the smaller company is greedy, thinking very short term and/or complacent, and entirely caught off guard when the end finally comes.
I do my best to mark every crypto/blockchain submission in the firehose as 'stupid' - because everyone here should have enough brain cells to put together to have figured out why it's all shit that can't possibly work.
Most of the posters here do nothing but mock these submissions, though there are a few dedicated cultists... and even so they tend to have low discussion participation levels.
Yet Slashdot keeps approving the stupid things. There must be a cryptocultist among the editors. I can't imagine it's just approvals for click bait since they aren't working on that front.
And it is not unreasonable to accept that we could do 0.1c with a fusion drive.
The problem is this - space is really, really big, and even at 0.1c you're going to be in the void for generations. It seems more or less impossible there's another 'Earth' waiting out there that is tuned to supporting our particular needs, so even another watery 1G nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere'd planet in the habitable zone of a calm yellow dwarf would mean a major terraforming effort and more generations living in enclosed environments.
But that doesn't matter - If you can build a ship that can keep a genetically diverse population safe in interstellar space for hundreds (and more likely thousands) of years, you've built a ship you wouldn't want to leave. It'd be far easier to just enter an elliptical orbit around a red dwarf with a heavy disc of material, scooping up energy when close and raw materials for expansion when further out. And you could do that for trillions of years.
In other words, once you can get to another planet, you wouldn't want to bother.
>from now on the appearance of angels in the finale and imaginary spirit advisors are to be the hallmarks of good writing.
So... DS9 and B5 had it right? Maybe also ST:Voy if you count Chakotay getting high to converse with his spirit totem or whatever. Oh, and the Ascended of SG1.
I don't know about that. I mean, it was an almost perfect recreation of the old series, with the special effects and makeup improved a bit (without destroying the 60s feel) but it still had a bit of 'fan effort' air to it, and... it was an almost perfect recreation of the old series.
I think there's a limited audience for that. Also, some of the casting was off, and (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield notwithstanding) some of the moralizing was heavy-handed and amateurish.
Or the new series could really be so bad that a decent fan series mimicking a 50 year old low budget show kicks its ass. That's a possibility too.
"We have a game here that customers really enjoy adding their own content to, at their own time and expense, which results in the game remaining entertaining longer and increases purchases... we've let that go for years because it benefits us. So what the hell, let's shut it down, reduce the value of our product, and piss off our customer base. It's a bold plan, let's see how it plays out!"
They want to protect their DLC which apparently makes more than the game itself... but their DLC is already making money. Shutting down 3rd party content isn't going to result in a boost to that income stream, and since they turn out new content at a pathetically slow pace, it's actually likely to go down as players get bored and move on to something else.
>Here is my suspicion, as an old programmer. The REASON why spaces are encourage over tables is for consistency of printing on a physical paper.
Not just. I tend to use tabs because hey, 5 spaces for one key press, and also because it aligns non-proportional fonts.
However, MS SQL is inconsistent in its rendering of tabs. If I copy code from a script window to a SQL Agent job, everything looks like garbage... so sometimes spaces win out.
I suspect a good part of the spaces vs. tabs debate ignores what environment the developer is working in.
This is why your opinion isn't worth shit. You're part of the problem, dividing everyone into two groups and demonizing people who aren't in yours. That causes the other side to do the same, and you get a self-reinforcing cycle. Then the fringe nutbars feel supported and have a convenient target group.
And also because it's "through and through". If you're trying to feel clever using colloquialisms, at least get them right. Though you might have been aiming for "tried and true" which would have been wrong in at least two ways instead of just one.
You want to 'MAGA'? Grow up, discover what 'empathy' is, value educated fact-backed opinions, and learn to compromise instead of backing your side like it's some kind of sporting event. And yes, that goes for the extreme democrats as well.
> he wouldn't accept any argument I made after that, because there isn't the office of "the President of the EU".
Then who the hell did he think Jean-Claude Juncker is? Did it really not register that the President of the European Commission, who chooses the responsibilities of the other commission members and can dismiss them (sounds like a cabinet!), proposes EU law, and negotiates and enforces treaties... might be just a bit analogous to the POTUS?
All a bit less democratically than the American system, too.
Despite his denial, it is obvious from the quote that he was suggesting someone shoot his opponent for him. Yes, he was probably joking but he was doing so from a position of influence in a context in which such jokes should never be made.
OK, so I'm OK with 'live by the sword, die by the sword', and therefore I'd find it to be hypocritical if Trump were to do anything but offer a presidential pardon to anyone trying to shoot HIM. But not random politicians or cops, thank you very much.
Only people who have advocated violence as a solution to political issues should be considered to have consented to being on the wrong end of such violence.
>At what point should the first two options be considered exhausted?
When the consequences of shooting people are actually worse than the consequences of not shooting them and instead looking for other ways to effect change. Figuring that out is where 99% of people seem to go off the reservation... so convinced they're right that they're willing to kill their neighbour over it and surprised when people are willing to kill them in turn.
>If record setting protests are perpetually ignored, do you keep using the soap box?
At some point, you have to accept that your view isn't popular enough to cause change. Just because you're convinced, loud, persistent, and manage to get a lot of supporters doesn't mean the other side of the debate doesn't feel the same way.
> If one party keeps winning office, despite losing the popular vote, can you still count on the ballot box?
The national popular vote doesn't matter the way you think it does, and it's not improper.
Now, I'm a foreigner so I expect I have a different perspective on things, but the POTUS to me seems to be more of a head of the government of the states, and the states in turn govern their people. Just because there's a lot of inter-state integration, unguarded borders, and agreement to be bound by common federal law doesn't mean they aren't really like distinct countries in a lot of ways.
POTUS is like the President of the EU. As such the POTUS is elected by the states, with each state having a degree of influence as per the agreement they signed upon joining the union.
Soap box, ballot box, ammo box. There's nothing happening in the USA right now that can't be fixed by judicious use of the second after some campaigning with the first.
I am curious as to the shooter's personal politics and motivations. Hopefully they're more nuanced than "He's just nuts", because random violence is less predictable and thus less preventable and more frightening than predictable violence.
Slashdot Mirror
Until your 20s or so, 'friends' are usually the least objectionable acquaintances from school. Now, that's potentially a large pool of people so you can get lucky and find real friends in that group.
For a brief period in your 20s, you may form some friendships with coworkers or somebody you meet socially. Usually a limited pool of people, and that's the pool you're choosing a spouse from.
In your 30s (if you have kids), your friends are the parents of your kids' friends.
It often isn't until retirement that you're actually free to form relationships with someone based on common interests instead of common circumstances. And guess what? They're all old and moderately set in their ways so the odds of a friendship forming are lower. And they're going to die at a higher rate than in your youth, so there's that, too.
As a general rule I think communities are stronger the more diverse (but tolerant (within reason)) they are, and secession is a bad idea.
However, the USA seems so divided on whether to be a robber baron libertarian 'paradise' of God-fearing Christians or an Orwellian liberal state where everyone thinks what the state tells them is correct to think., that sometimes I think secession might be the way to go.
It seems Americans are extremely keen to fight based on party lines for no reason other than they're party lines, and the political system doesn't really allow for a viable third party to appear on the scene - you'd just split the right or left vote and ensure victory to the ones you most oppose.
Let the hard-red and the hard-blue states go their own way, and handle their interdependency as a matter of international trade instead of national policy. Jesusland can believe in a 6000 year old Earth, and Leftwingtopia can force everyone to memorize 100 new gender pronouns.
The cameras, the connections, and the back-end storage and processing are relatively inexpensive now.
The cops should be running their own camera systems from a COTS solution, put a tech on the police payroll, and then keep 100% of the revenue rather than paying an ongoing percentage to an outside company to do something that it now essentially technically trivial.
And it's not a surveillance state if you can keep the cops to merely scanning wanted plates instead of tracking everyone. If you're breaking the law, they should be looking for you. (The problem is stopping them from looking for you when you're NOT breaking the law... data is always used against you)
If you could sue on the basis of 'prove it!'.
Don't make it easy - if you fail to win the suit you'd have to cover reasonable legal costs or something - but when someone advertises a magic sticker that fixes your health problems, ANYONE ought to be able to sue the snake oil salesmen regardless of whether or not they have personally purchased the product.
I'm sure there are packs of hungry lawyers out there who would love to make a living reading ads searching for a payday, I say let's put them to good use.
Every. Time.
I've been doing this all my adult life - come up with an idea and then find out one of you other 7.5 billion idiots has already done it!
Not bad, actually; Have the scooter slide out from underneath and treat the bag like a side car, or leave the scooter underneath and the handle shaft leans forward so you can comfortably tow the bag behind you.
If you're clever enough and add a wheel lock, you could even use a modified handle as a portable chair.
Then the question becomes... do you leave it with tiny wheels expecting it to only be used on very smooth surfaces, or do you waste some space and weight on bigger wheels, maybe make it detachable from the bag for more general use?
How about pedals for manual assist?
>But microwave links as well are being sabotaged by some one. Not sure who it is. Everything from aluminum spray paint on the dish to metallic epoxy injected into the device shorting it out. And of course, making it un-repairable.
Here in Canada, without American gun culture, it appears to be a kind of 'sport' to illegally discharge firearms at microwave dishes on communications towers.
Not that it really does much damage most of the time, but at a minimum it allows the elements in and water (or snow and ice) isn't particularly good for the equipment.
If someone is actually climbing the towers to reach those dishes, that's a professional effort.
I think what's really going on here is a wheelbase that is too narrow for the height of the centre of mass.
What's needed is pop-out wheels to extend the wheelbase, possibly also with a small computer and an electric motor so the suitcase can follow you (perhaps a pager-type object on your belt) and scream if somebody tries to steal it from you.
Or go one step further and design it to carry a human and provide a Bluetooth joystick control so not only don't you have to carry or pull the thing, it can carry or pull you.
Yes, any terrestrial species that wants its descendants to survive more than another 700 million years or so must expand its territory beyond Earth orbit before that time has passed and the Sun cooks the Earth dry.
Any species that wants its descendants to survive any arbitrary amount of time less that that still has to work on the same issue in case of asteroid strike or other major catastrophe that could happen somewhere in the next five minutes to 700 million years.
So yes, we ought to be working on how to survive and thrive in space with just an energy gradient and a source of raw materials to keep us going.
However, Hawking also beaks off about aliens wanting to invade and kill/enslave us, so however good he may be at figuring out the math of black holes, he's not so great at interstellar economics. Sometimes he talks about how we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust next Thursday, just for variety.
Personally, I think he likes staying in the public eye and nobody's talking about A Brief History of Time any more.
It's so common in business it's almost a tautology.
Essentially, if your business' continued existence depends entirely on one supplier or customer... it's not YOUR business, you just haven't figured it out yet. You're more like a department of the supplier or customer's company, in that you are entirely subject to their whims.
Sometimes - especially if it's a symbiotic relationship between companies that are essentially equally powerful - it works out. If, however, you're dealing with a megacorp like Apple and you're not also a megacorp, it's almost certain you'll eventually be crushed and then bought or replaced at some point.
Usually the smaller company is greedy, thinking very short term and/or complacent, and entirely caught off guard when the end finally comes.
I do my best to mark every crypto/blockchain submission in the firehose as 'stupid' - because everyone here should have enough brain cells to put together to have figured out why it's all shit that can't possibly work.
Most of the posters here do nothing but mock these submissions, though there are a few dedicated cultists... and even so they tend to have low discussion participation levels.
Yet Slashdot keeps approving the stupid things. There must be a cryptocultist among the editors. I can't imagine it's just approvals for click bait since they aren't working on that front.
And it is not unreasonable to accept that we could do 0.1c with a fusion drive.
The problem is this - space is really, really big, and even at 0.1c you're going to be in the void for generations. It seems more or less impossible there's another 'Earth' waiting out there that is tuned to supporting our particular needs, so even another watery 1G nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere'd planet in the habitable zone of a calm yellow dwarf would mean a major terraforming effort and more generations living in enclosed environments.
But that doesn't matter - If you can build a ship that can keep a genetically diverse population safe in interstellar space for hundreds (and more likely thousands) of years, you've built a ship you wouldn't want to leave. It'd be far easier to just enter an elliptical orbit around a red dwarf with a heavy disc of material, scooping up energy when close and raw materials for expansion when further out. And you could do that for trillions of years.
In other words, once you can get to another planet, you wouldn't want to bother.
>from now on the appearance of angels in the finale and imaginary spirit advisors are to be the hallmarks of good writing.
So... DS9 and B5 had it right? Maybe also ST:Voy if you count Chakotay getting high to converse with his spirit totem or whatever. Oh, and the Ascended of SG1.
I don't know about that. I mean, it was an almost perfect recreation of the old series, with the special effects and makeup improved a bit (without destroying the 60s feel) but it still had a bit of 'fan effort' air to it, and... it was an almost perfect recreation of the old series.
I think there's a limited audience for that. Also, some of the casting was off, and (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield notwithstanding) some of the moralizing was heavy-handed and amateurish.
Or the new series could really be so bad that a decent fan series mimicking a 50 year old low budget show kicks its ass. That's a possibility too.
I was unaware they'd done that. That's horrible. It was a perfect continuation of the old series.
They should have bought it out and kept it going if they couldn't abide it's independent existence.
New York is Metropolis. Isn't Gotham supposed to be Chicago?
"We have a game here that customers really enjoy adding their own content to, at their own time and expense, which results in the game remaining entertaining longer and increases purchases... we've let that go for years because it benefits us. So what the hell, let's shut it down, reduce the value of our product, and piss off our customer base. It's a bold plan, let's see how it plays out!"
They want to protect their DLC which apparently makes more than the game itself... but their DLC is already making money. Shutting down 3rd party content isn't going to result in a boost to that income stream, and since they turn out new content at a pathetically slow pace, it's actually likely to go down as players get bored and move on to something else.
>Here is my suspicion, as an old programmer. The REASON why spaces are encourage over tables is for consistency of printing on a physical paper.
Not just. I tend to use tabs because hey, 5 spaces for one key press, and also because it aligns non-proportional fonts.
However, MS SQL is inconsistent in its rendering of tabs. If I copy code from a script window to a SQL Agent job, everything looks like garbage... so sometimes spaces win out.
I suspect a good part of the spaces vs. tabs debate ignores what environment the developer is working in.
> He was a leftist, true and true
This is why your opinion isn't worth shit. You're part of the problem, dividing everyone into two groups and demonizing people who aren't in yours. That causes the other side to do the same, and you get a self-reinforcing cycle. Then the fringe nutbars feel supported and have a convenient target group.
And also because it's "through and through". If you're trying to feel clever using colloquialisms, at least get them right. Though you might have been aiming for "tried and true" which would have been wrong in at least two ways instead of just one.
You want to 'MAGA'? Grow up, discover what 'empathy' is, value educated fact-backed opinions, and learn to compromise instead of backing your side like it's some kind of sporting event. And yes, that goes for the extreme democrats as well.
>It is not obvious.
Trump has plenty of supporters who will swear the Sun orbits the Earth should he ever declare that to be the truth.
Most of them are willing to put their names to their foolishness, but you can't even manage that.
Sad.
> he wouldn't accept any argument I made after that, because there isn't the office of "the President of the EU".
Then who the hell did he think Jean-Claude Juncker is? Did it really not register that the President of the European Commission, who chooses the responsibilities of the other commission members and can dismiss them (sounds like a cabinet!), proposes EU law, and negotiates and enforces treaties... might be just a bit analogous to the POTUS?
All a bit less democratically than the American system, too.
Despite his denial, it is obvious from the quote that he was suggesting someone shoot his opponent for him. Yes, he was probably joking but he was doing so from a position of influence in a context in which such jokes should never be made.
OK, so I'm OK with 'live by the sword, die by the sword', and therefore I'd find it to be hypocritical if Trump were to do anything but offer a presidential pardon to anyone trying to shoot HIM. But not random politicians or cops, thank you very much.
Only people who have advocated violence as a solution to political issues should be considered to have consented to being on the wrong end of such violence.
>At what point should the first two options be considered exhausted?
When the consequences of shooting people are actually worse than the consequences of not shooting them and instead looking for other ways to effect change. Figuring that out is where 99% of people seem to go off the reservation... so convinced they're right that they're willing to kill their neighbour over it and surprised when people are willing to kill them in turn.
>If record setting protests are perpetually ignored, do you keep using the soap box?
At some point, you have to accept that your view isn't popular enough to cause change. Just because you're convinced, loud, persistent, and manage to get a lot of supporters doesn't mean the other side of the debate doesn't feel the same way.
> If one party keeps winning office, despite losing the popular vote, can you still count on the ballot box?
The national popular vote doesn't matter the way you think it does, and it's not improper.
Now, I'm a foreigner so I expect I have a different perspective on things, but the POTUS to me seems to be more of a head of the government of the states, and the states in turn govern their people. Just because there's a lot of inter-state integration, unguarded borders, and agreement to be bound by common federal law doesn't mean they aren't really like distinct countries in a lot of ways.
POTUS is like the President of the EU. As such the POTUS is elected by the states, with each state having a degree of influence as per the agreement they signed upon joining the union.
Soap box, ballot box, ammo box. There's nothing happening in the USA right now that can't be fixed by judicious use of the second after some campaigning with the first.
I am curious as to the shooter's personal politics and motivations. Hopefully they're more nuanced than "He's just nuts", because random violence is less predictable and thus less preventable and more frightening than predictable violence.