A certain acquaintance of mine has a collection of firearms worth... well... a lot of money. He/she/it prefers to remain anonymous because it wouldn't be the first time such a collection was stolen. However, in order to acquire some of the more rare and forgotten pieces of this collection, he/she/it needs some level of publicity. His/her/its website shows some of the pieces from the collection, a brief history, and an email address someone can use to contact the owner of the collection in case they have any pieces from it that they would like to sell. This is a legitimate, legal use of a website, and one where not having your name, address, and phone number all over it are some fairly major benefits.
Oh wow. Tack a link on there, and it all makes sense. Too bad I didn't get modded funny.:-P "Programming language flash cards? That doesn't make much sense... And you PAY for them? Sheesh." I feel like a choad.
Man, the languages I picked up, I picked up because they were all free to learn. PHP especially has got to be the easiest USEFUL language for anyone to learn, given the great documentation, community, and the fact that the "compiler" and developing environments are free.
I'm no fan of homosexuals. However, I can't quite bring myself to say "You can't be married." because I have no satisfying (to me) answer as to why that should be so. There is a moral that has been instilled in me that there is something wrong with homosexuals. If I were religious, I could point to the bible, which is a physical object where one could derive their morals.
To me, religion serves two purposes... it gives someone meaning to life, and it is a source of basic morals.
I am the same as any religious individual who wants to ban gay marriage, except I can't point you to where my morals saying "This is wrong" came from.
The government a LONG time ago got into the act of legislating more than just basic morality. Those morals have to come from somewhere, and for a lot of people, that place is the bible. Whether that's better or worse than anyone else's set of morals, is a moral question, is something that varies from person to person. But in any case...
The FCC is the government's wing of legislating what is morally acceptable and unacceptable to be on public television during (I assume) daylight hours.
The set of morals they use will either be mine, which you find ridiculous, or yours, which I find inappropriate. Morality is typically not something you simply hold for yourself, you want your whole world (country in this case) to be moral.
Is there anything wrong with showing hardcore porn on channel 8 at 11:00am when I used to be getting ready to go to school? What about romantic sex? What about dry humping? What abound fondling? What about talking about it? What about talking about it scientifically? What about talking about love?
You have to draw a line somewhere... Where you draw that line is dictated by your morals, not your logic, though sometimes logic is used in an attempt to justify or disprove someone's morals.
Ah, now you're just blaming what some religious people did on religion itself. I tend to blame the people. Not the religion. The church out here (Which I used to attend) isn't full of people who burn old women, hijack airplanes, or mutilate children.
People can use anything as their cause and taint that cause, but it doesn't necessarily make that cause a bad thing.
Yes, Hollywood violence and shows that further the belief that only cops and bad guys have guns do SO much for the NRA.
I have never seen a movie involving firearms that didn't have me cringing because of how it depicted gun owners or some particular class of firearm.
I'm not sure where glorifying violence fits into my agenda... Actually... It doesn't.
Hell, gun boards went crazy after Tom Cruise's "Collateral" because it was the first time in a long time that someone took some training and performed something realistically... because of ONE SCENE in the movie (The alley scene, where he's getting his briefcase back.) Does this help the NRA though? No. Cruise was a bad guy with a gun. It's only ever the bad guys with the guns. So outlawing guns will make the bad guys give them up, and it won't effect anyone else.
Glorifying violence does NOTHING for the NRA. It is not an organization about violence. It is an organization that believes in the second ammendment: the right to self-preservation and the right to defend the country from an oppressive government in times of need. Amazingly, "hunting" is just a more publicly accepted use of firearms, so that works into the agenda too, even though that's not what the good old 2ndA is about.
Why is anything that a left-winger or European (Ha!) disagrees with immediately decided to be the workings of the mystical "religious right"? None of my family is religious. But none of us voted for Kerry. Are we just seriously fucked up then? On top of that, since when is being religious a bad thing?
$500,000 is a lot to you and me. But it's not a HUGE sum of money to a broadcast corporation.
It's like, if the only punishment for speeding was a $50 fine... It would probably still keep me from doing it, because I'm a poor bastard, but Bill Gates in his V12 armchair wouldn't care, because to him, $50 is well worth the enjoyment derived from driving fast.
And the nuclear thing... So what if that was the biggest fine issued last year... Maybe there weren't any violation deserving of their bigger fines.
Wow... Good God almighty.... You make it sound as if American soldiers have killed all those civilians... Ummm... no. Most of the insurgents are not even from Iraq... The insurgents blowing up 40 Iraqis at a time are the ones increasing the death toll, not the U.S. or any other army. How the hell can you sick twisted people ignore that? If I blow up your entire family while trying to kill you, did YOU kill them, or did I?
You've got MY support, U.S. soldiers. Hell, you might even be in the unit one of my forums sent a big ol' Christmas box to.
Am I the only one who thinks the idea of Counter-Strike players being "the most physically capable" is +1 funny?
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along
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It does shine on Linux users if someone wants it to. Even though you didn't do it yourself, you're going to get painted with the same brush. The average Joe news-reader doesn't know what "Linux" is, much less understand why anyone would want to use it... So "Linux" comes to mean "child who defaces websites". This is the only exposure the average guy is going to have to "Linux users". They're not going to hear about you running Linux on your GameCube or saving the school system $3,000 by running Linux.... Because those aren't things you'll really read about in the average online news-outlet. Same story with what you think of when you hear "man with a gun". You're not going to think of the positive things, but only recall what you've seen and heard from whatever news source. "Hacker" means pimply teenager who is up to no good, "Linux" means rebellious operating system that only "hackers" use.... Bah. I need tea.
The air-borne ballistics can hardly be disputed, I would think... those things are pretty cut and dry. However, when it comes to what a bullet does once inside a human body, these are definitely "cartoon physics". Bullets deform, deformed bullets tumble, drag through flesh and bone.... This is a pretty much desirable "mushroom" in a hunting round. Even with this essentially "ideal" expansion, you can imagine how such a bullet would react somewhat... randomly... in a mixture of differently viscous fluids and solids, such as the human body. The "magic bullet" theory, if I remember it correctly, would have required quite a random path through the body. And a simple mix of velocity and gravitational calculations on a "perfect" bullet flying through the air just wouldn't cut it. The ballistic coefficient, the air pressure, temperature, and humidity... All of these things effect the exterior ballistics of the bullet. And the interior ballistics are even more difficult to nail down.
This is perhaps redundant... but... No one who carries a gun for self defense is going to be interested in this. Put it on your fast-access gun safe, sure, with some kind of battery-less backup system, but no one would want this on a gun. First, it makes things more expensive. If you're going to make a gun more expensive, it damn sure better be doing some amazing stuff for me. Second, electronics break. Slashdot made a huge stink about electronic voting and how uneasy it made them because electronics do weird things. I don't want my concealed carry piece to blue-screen when I need it. Reliability is of such extreme importance... Glocks have an unsupported chamber, which makes it more reliable at feeding ammo, but hand-loads have the potential of causing the entire gun to destroy itself due to that chamber design. People are willing to make the sacrifice of not using handloads (Or being REALLY damn careful with them.) just for reliability. When you buy anything new for your gun, magazines, get it refinished, switch ammo... you're supposed to put AT LEAST 100 rounds through it to make sure the thing is still reliable. Self defense ammo costs like $20 for 20. We take reliability seriously. Very seriously. The third thing... Batteries! People are leery of wireless headphones and having to change the batteries, but not of a firearm (Which your life may very well depend on) that requires batteries? Maybe I'll just leave it plugged in on AC backup. Fourth... Ruggedness. Firearms are mechanically simple devices. You can completely disassemble them down to their bare parts without being a gun smith or electrical engineer, and you can clean them by throwing them into a big 5 gallon bucket of solvent (Dunkit) which probably wouldn't treat a "biometric" device very well at all. Fifth. Versatility. You may be required to use your right hand or your left hand to fire your gun. The device would have to handle that. In my family of 7, I would want anyone in my family to be able to use it, as well as my friends that I live with. Can the device handle all of that and STILL not be a clunky, unreliable, sensitive, battery-hog addon?
Biometrics are great for gun safes. People LOVE the fingerprint access safes. They plug into the wall and run on a rechargeable lead-acid battery. In case the thumbprint doesn't work, there's the good old fashioned quick-access combo keypad. Apply it to those things, sure, but keep it the heck off my XD.
Ok... so, I keep hearing people posting saying that "Bush is outsourcing jobs". Hogwash. It's companies that outsource jobs. Not George Bush. Why do they do it? To make more money. It's called capitalism. When I shop for hotdog buns, I buy the cheapest hotdog buns. When I shop for workers, I buy the cheapest workers who can get the job done. You do it. I do it. And businesses do it every day. Capitalism! Competition means lower prices and/or higher quality. You know WHY capitalism used to work? Because people didn't complain about businesses getting away with stuff like this. People would say "Hey, Dell is offshoring a bunch of jobs. I'm not going to buy Dell anymore." Remember the old "Buy American!" commercials? Do you know why they had to tell people to Buy American? Because American-made goods are more expensive. So, instead of telling the government that it needs to pass more legislation to "encourage" businesses to stay on shore, why don't you put capitalism and your right to choose what you buy to work, instead of just complaining and taking the democrats path which is "Please fix this for me!". Government should NOT have that much of a thumb in businesses' pies that they can dictate where they do business. That's what consumers are for. Tell Dell and whatever other companies you hate that you disapprove of their practices by buying from their competitors and recommending that others do the same. Oh, what, the competitors' goods are more expensive or of lesser quality? Surprise surprise. But laws and hefty changes aren't going to help that. You have to show companies that you want their businesses in the U.S, and that is your duty, not the government's.
Aiming? The mechanics of moving a mouse so that what you want to kill is in the center of your screen is far from something I would classify as teaching "aiming". Pointing a gun at something is the easiest part. Then there's breath control (No, AA:O's "breathing" does not count), stance, and most importantly (and hardest to master), trigger control. As much as I played video games, it did absolutely nothing for my ability to aim a rifle or pistol. Only through practice with the actual weapons would you get any better with them.
But maybe that's just because I don't own a BFG 9000 or plasma rifle...
Not that I'm going to argue... much... because you seem fairly set in your oppinion...
But those civilians who died in the initial campaign... might it have been reasonable to think that that action, which resulted in Saddam's removal, could/should have resulted in fewer Iraqi's being killed or tortured for holding different religious beliefs or views on the government?
Moqtada is the good guy? Why is it that for every 1 target of military value, his guys blow up 30 of their own countrymen?
Tens of thousands? Tens of thousands of what? Soldiers? Then they weren't defenseless. Civilians? I don't remember the numbers every coming any where near that...
"Get of your high fucking moral horse and take some responsibility for the shit you've put the rest of the world through."
Well, there's one way terrorism happens. Whoever you're responding to doesn't have any responsibility for "the shit that you've put the rest of the world through". We don't blame "Iraqis" for Muqtada's actions. We blame Muqtada and those who do his dirty work.
Communism is great for poor people. It doesn't reward people for spending $80,000 on college. I mean, a world where I spend 5 years struggling to get through a 4 year college and drop $80,000 and have just as many community-owned cars as that guy down the street who just drinks and beats his wife all day would be sooooooooo cool.
Slashdot Mirror
A certain acquaintance of mine has a collection of firearms worth... well... a lot of money. He/she/it prefers to remain anonymous because it wouldn't be the first time such a collection was stolen. However, in order to acquire some of the more rare and forgotten pieces of this collection, he/she/it needs some level of publicity. His/her/its website shows some of the pieces from the collection, a brief history, and an email address someone can use to contact the owner of the collection in case they have any pieces from it that they would like to sell. This is a legitimate, legal use of a website, and one where not having your name, address, and phone number all over it are some fairly major benefits.
Oh wow. Tack a link on there, and it all makes sense. Too bad I didn't get modded funny. :-P "Programming language flash cards? That doesn't make much sense... And you PAY for them? Sheesh." I feel like a choad.
Man, the languages I picked up, I picked up because they were all free to learn. PHP especially has got to be the easiest USEFUL language for anyone to learn, given the great documentation, community, and the fact that the "compiler" and developing environments are free.
I'm no fan of homosexuals. However, I can't quite bring myself to say "You can't be married." because I have no satisfying (to me) answer as to why that should be so. There is a moral that has been instilled in me that there is something wrong with homosexuals. If I were religious, I could point to the bible, which is a physical object where one could derive their morals.
To me, religion serves two purposes... it gives someone meaning to life, and it is a source of basic morals.
I am the same as any religious individual who wants to ban gay marriage, except I can't point you to where my morals saying "This is wrong" came from.
The government a LONG time ago got into the act of legislating more than just basic morality. Those morals have to come from somewhere, and for a lot of people, that place is the bible. Whether that's better or worse than anyone else's set of morals, is a moral question, is something that varies from person to person. But in any case...
The FCC is the government's wing of legislating what is morally acceptable and unacceptable to be on public television during (I assume) daylight hours.
The set of morals they use will either be mine, which you find ridiculous, or yours, which I find inappropriate. Morality is typically not something you simply hold for yourself, you want your whole world (country in this case) to be moral.
Is there anything wrong with showing hardcore porn on channel 8 at 11:00am when I used to be getting ready to go to school? What about romantic sex? What about dry humping? What abound fondling? What about talking about it? What about talking about it scientifically? What about talking about love?
You have to draw a line somewhere... Where you draw that line is dictated by your morals, not your logic, though sometimes logic is used in an attempt to justify or disprove someone's morals.
I have forgotten what I was responding to.
Ah, now you're just blaming what some religious people did on religion itself. I tend to blame the people. Not the religion. The church out here (Which I used to attend) isn't full of people who burn old women, hijack airplanes, or mutilate children.
People can use anything as their cause and taint that cause, but it doesn't necessarily make that cause a bad thing.
Now, is this human life case you speak of an accidental death case?
"and without no bloody adverts!"
Yeah, that would somehow rake in a LOT of money! Would Howard Stern be selling jewely and blenders during his show?
Yes, Hollywood violence and shows that further the belief that only cops and bad guys have guns do SO much for the NRA.
I have never seen a movie involving firearms that didn't have me cringing because of how it depicted gun owners or some particular class of firearm.
I'm not sure where glorifying violence fits into my agenda... Actually... It doesn't.
Hell, gun boards went crazy after Tom Cruise's "Collateral" because it was the first time in a long time that someone took some training and performed something realistically... because of ONE SCENE in the movie (The alley scene, where he's getting his briefcase back.) Does this help the NRA though? No. Cruise was a bad guy with a gun. It's only ever the bad guys with the guns. So outlawing guns will make the bad guys give them up, and it won't effect anyone else.
Glorifying violence does NOTHING for the NRA. It is not an organization about violence. It is an organization that believes in the second ammendment: the right to self-preservation and the right to defend the country from an oppressive government in times of need. Amazingly, "hunting" is just a more publicly accepted use of firearms, so that works into the agenda too, even though that's not what the good old 2ndA is about.
I'm not religious. But I'm right. :-P
I still kept Kerry out of the W-house.
Why is anything that a left-winger or European (Ha!) disagrees with immediately decided to be the workings of the mystical "religious right"? None of my family is religious. But none of us voted for Kerry. Are we just seriously fucked up then? On top of that, since when is being religious a bad thing?
$500,000 is a lot to you and me. But it's not a HUGE sum of money to a broadcast corporation.
It's like, if the only punishment for speeding was a $50 fine... It would probably still keep me from doing it, because I'm a poor bastard, but Bill Gates in his V12 armchair wouldn't care, because to him, $50 is well worth the enjoyment derived from driving fast.
And the nuclear thing... So what if that was the biggest fine issued last year... Maybe there weren't any violation deserving of their bigger fines.
They're seperate of any nuclear commission. Why compare the two?
The Department of Justice in the USA has recently decided that the second ammendment does in fact secure an individual's right to bear arms.
http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/secondamendment2.htm
It's amazing that the most clearly written of all the ammendments causes so much confusion.
Wow... Good God almighty.... You make it sound as if American soldiers have killed all those civilians... Ummm... no. Most of the insurgents are not even from Iraq... The insurgents blowing up 40 Iraqis at a time are the ones increasing the death toll, not the U.S. or any other army. How the hell can you sick twisted people ignore that? If I blow up your entire family while trying to kill you, did YOU kill them, or did I?
You've got MY support, U.S. soldiers. Hell, you might even be in the unit one of my forums sent a big ol' Christmas box to.
Stay safe.
Am I the only one who thinks the idea of Counter-Strike players being "the most physically capable" is +1 funny?
It does shine on Linux users if someone wants it to. Even though you didn't do it yourself, you're going to get painted with the same brush. The average Joe news-reader doesn't know what "Linux" is, much less understand why anyone would want to use it... So "Linux" comes to mean "child who defaces websites". This is the only exposure the average guy is going to have to "Linux users". They're not going to hear about you running Linux on your GameCube or saving the school system $3,000 by running Linux.... Because those aren't things you'll really read about in the average online news-outlet. Same story with what you think of when you hear "man with a gun". You're not going to think of the positive things, but only recall what you've seen and heard from whatever news source. "Hacker" means pimply teenager who is up to no good, "Linux" means rebellious operating system that only "hackers" use.... Bah. I need tea.
The air-borne ballistics can hardly be disputed, I would think... those things are pretty cut and dry. However, when it comes to what a bullet does once inside a human body, these are definitely "cartoon physics". Bullets deform, deformed bullets tumble, drag through flesh and bone.... This is a pretty much desirable "mushroom" in a hunting round. Even with this essentially "ideal" expansion, you can imagine how such a bullet would react somewhat... randomly... in a mixture of differently viscous fluids and solids, such as the human body. The "magic bullet" theory, if I remember it correctly, would have required quite a random path through the body. And a simple mix of velocity and gravitational calculations on a "perfect" bullet flying through the air just wouldn't cut it. The ballistic coefficient, the air pressure, temperature, and humidity... All of these things effect the exterior ballistics of the bullet. And the interior ballistics are even more difficult to nail down.
...to call a thief an "entrepreneur".
This is perhaps redundant... but... No one who carries a gun for self defense is going to be interested in this. Put it on your fast-access gun safe, sure, with some kind of battery-less backup system, but no one would want this on a gun. First, it makes things more expensive. If you're going to make a gun more expensive, it damn sure better be doing some amazing stuff for me. Second, electronics break. Slashdot made a huge stink about electronic voting and how uneasy it made them because electronics do weird things. I don't want my concealed carry piece to blue-screen when I need it. Reliability is of such extreme importance... Glocks have an unsupported chamber, which makes it more reliable at feeding ammo, but hand-loads have the potential of causing the entire gun to destroy itself due to that chamber design. People are willing to make the sacrifice of not using handloads (Or being REALLY damn careful with them.) just for reliability. When you buy anything new for your gun, magazines, get it refinished, switch ammo... you're supposed to put AT LEAST 100 rounds through it to make sure the thing is still reliable. Self defense ammo costs like $20 for 20. We take reliability seriously. Very seriously. The third thing... Batteries! People are leery of wireless headphones and having to change the batteries, but not of a firearm (Which your life may very well depend on) that requires batteries? Maybe I'll just leave it plugged in on AC backup. Fourth... Ruggedness. Firearms are mechanically simple devices. You can completely disassemble them down to their bare parts without being a gun smith or electrical engineer, and you can clean them by throwing them into a big 5 gallon bucket of solvent (Dunkit) which probably wouldn't treat a "biometric" device very well at all. Fifth. Versatility. You may be required to use your right hand or your left hand to fire your gun. The device would have to handle that. In my family of 7, I would want anyone in my family to be able to use it, as well as my friends that I live with. Can the device handle all of that and STILL not be a clunky, unreliable, sensitive, battery-hog addon?
Biometrics are great for gun safes. People LOVE the fingerprint access safes. They plug into the wall and run on a rechargeable lead-acid battery. In case the thumbprint doesn't work, there's the good old fashioned quick-access combo keypad. Apply it to those things, sure, but keep it the heck off my XD.
Can't we just call up Doc Brown and have him give us his design for Mr. Fission or whatever that device on the back of his Delorien was called?
Wait, I thought all guns were banned in Australia? That didn't fix this problem? Guess they better make like the EU and Germany and start banning simulations of shooting people such as Counter-Strike and Lasertag!
Ok... so, I keep hearing people posting saying that "Bush is outsourcing jobs". Hogwash. It's companies that outsource jobs. Not George Bush. Why do they do it? To make more money. It's called capitalism. When I shop for hotdog buns, I buy the cheapest hotdog buns. When I shop for workers, I buy the cheapest workers who can get the job done. You do it. I do it. And businesses do it every day. Capitalism! Competition means lower prices and/or higher quality. You know WHY capitalism used to work? Because people didn't complain about businesses getting away with stuff like this. People would say "Hey, Dell is offshoring a bunch of jobs. I'm not going to buy Dell anymore." Remember the old "Buy American!" commercials? Do you know why they had to tell people to Buy American? Because American-made goods are more expensive. So, instead of telling the government that it needs to pass more legislation to "encourage" businesses to stay on shore, why don't you put capitalism and your right to choose what you buy to work, instead of just complaining and taking the democrats path which is "Please fix this for me!". Government should NOT have that much of a thumb in businesses' pies that they can dictate where they do business. That's what consumers are for. Tell Dell and whatever other companies you hate that you disapprove of their practices by buying from their competitors and recommending that others do the same. Oh, what, the competitors' goods are more expensive or of lesser quality? Surprise surprise. But laws and hefty changes aren't going to help that. You have to show companies that you want their businesses in the U.S, and that is your duty, not the government's.
Aiming? The mechanics of moving a mouse so that what you want to kill is in the center of your screen is far from something I would classify as teaching "aiming". Pointing a gun at something is the easiest part. Then there's breath control (No, AA:O's "breathing" does not count), stance, and most importantly (and hardest to master), trigger control. As much as I played video games, it did absolutely nothing for my ability to aim a rifle or pistol. Only through practice with the actual weapons would you get any better with them.
:-)
But maybe that's just because I don't own a BFG 9000 or plasma rifle...
Will bunny hopping make my legs stronger?
And, while the U.S. wasn't "in" the war, weren't we sending supplies to the other Allies?
Not that I'm going to argue... much... because you seem fairly set in your oppinion...
But those civilians who died in the initial campaign... might it have been reasonable to think that that action, which resulted in Saddam's removal, could/should have resulted in fewer Iraqi's being killed or tortured for holding different religious beliefs or views on the government?
Moqtada is the good guy? Why is it that for every 1 target of military value, his guys blow up 30 of their own countrymen?
Tens of thousands? Tens of thousands of what? Soldiers? Then they weren't defenseless. Civilians? I don't remember the numbers every coming any where near that...
"Get of your high fucking moral horse and take some responsibility for the shit you've put the rest of the world through."
Well, there's one way terrorism happens. Whoever you're responding to doesn't have any responsibility for "the shit that you've put the rest of the world through". We don't blame "Iraqis" for Muqtada's actions. We blame Muqtada and those who do his dirty work.
What's he trying to say is...
In Soviet Russa, the car owns YOU.
Communism is great for poor people. It doesn't reward people for spending $80,000 on college. I mean, a world where I spend 5 years struggling to get through a 4 year college and drop $80,000 and have just as many community-owned cars as that guy down the street who just drinks and beats his wife all day would be sooooooooo cool.