Ruining things for the rest of us? Not really, because most of them were also raised to judge not, and they tend to leave you alone. It's the moralist busybodies you have to worry about, and there are plenty of them on both sides.
Your "logic" is inconsistent. The external tank on the Shuttle was also jettisoned and burned up on reentry. This it must not have been a spaceship either.
Traitors is a bit harsh. Actually, uncalled for. That said, it's really bizarre that so many Republicans in Congress keep trying to kill private enterprise in favor of a statist space program. The hypocrisy, it burns. On the other hand, once private enterprise starts becoming really successful at opening space, I expect this to reverse, with GOP pushing private space and the Dems trying to tax and regulate it to death. Both parties suck.
Special pleading. "Now" is always different from "then." Yet human nature is fairly constant, and humans are by their nature very adaptable. The environment can be better than now or worse (it's been both), and yet we will muddle through.
I suspect option 3: human nature being largely unchanging, we will continue to muddle along. This will often be worse than now, occasionally and briefly better. But the world of human interaction will largely resemble a thousand years from now the way it was a thousand years ago.
The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?
Would it have been clearer if I had said "prescriptive, not proscriptive"? Dictionaries catalog common usage, specifically common pronunciations of and meanings for a term, as opposed to forbidding odd usages which are, nonetheless, clearly understandable. Or maybe I'm missing your point, and you were amplifying what I said, rather than mocking incorrectly.
Compilers are not working with natural languages. They are working with constructed languages. In that case, the language definition is absolutely correct. Either I or the compiler could be wrong, if one or both of us misinterprets the language definition, but the language definition is (by definition, actually) correct.
I'm inferring that the post I was agreeing with was correct in that there may be dialectical differences, but what makes a language "correct" is whether it's understood by the hearer. If a native speaker is talking, and a native listener is hearing, and the listener understands the speaker, then the speaker's language was "correct" to whatever degree that term is meaningful in this context. The reason that dictionaries change over time is that usage changes over time. Even grammar changes over time. (If you don't believe that, go look at studies of comma usage in English over the last couple of hundred years.)
The thing is, I'm very much in favor of strict grammar and careful definition of terms, and I hate it when people redefine words on the fly. Nonetheless, it is still true that if you understood the meaning and are fluent in the language, then the original speaker might have been able to say it better, or might have been speaking in dialect or slang, but their usage was not inherently incorrect. Dictionaries and grammars follow usage, not the other way around.
I'm totally on board. As a native speaker of English, if I and the dictionary disagree, the dictionary is wrong. People forget that dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.
Investing is inherently risky. When you invest other people's money, you are passing the risk to them. In this case, a successful investment would have enriched the owners, while what actually happened soaked not the owners, nor the politicians, but the taxpayers. This is why it's a bad idea to have politicians "invest" public funds: there is no risk to them, and potentially the gain of having helped out their financial and political supporters. Moral hazard is vast in such situations. If you are having a problem seeing it, imagine Mitt Romney investing public funds in Koch Brothers companies, and I'm sure it will be more clear.
... and poorer logic. So let's just think about this for a moment. Do we really want government policy to be subject to control by lawsuits? If we do, there are at least three side effects to keep in mind.
First, the use of government resources would shift from making and enforcing policy to defending policy in court. This would mean that the government would become ineffective, while still costing the same or more in both money and lost liberty to maintain it.
Second, the opportunities for malicious mischief abound. I don't like the administration, so I will sue over every policy they try to implement. Even long-standing policy would be subject to suit. Fundraising will be good and easy.
Legislatures and executive departments would become subordinate to courts, and judges could impose policy at whim, to a greater degree than they did at the height of judicial activism.
For these reasons, it strikes me as a terrible idea to even attempt this. The suit should certainly be dismissed, and I wouldn't object to fining the adults involved for wasting the court's time. This is abuse of the system as it is, and would be utterly destructive of the courts and the law if allowed to proceed.
That's one of the problems I have with global warming. The precision of the best made, best sites thermometers is about a degree. One common class is +/- 5 degrees. Yet these are being used to derive results in tenths of a degree. Satellite proxy measures help, but that's a very short record in climate-significant time frames. Is the Earth warming? Almost certainly. Is that outside the norm? Hell, we don't even know if it's outside the margin of error.
Pretty much the entire premise of the Left, going back to Rousseau, is that human nature is a social construct. Why would they blink at lightbulb use when there are so much bigger things to do to mold people to the service of the State?
The problem is that government artificially limits competition, and then uses that as justification for why the government needs to intervene. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the regulator and the regulated, where the regulator needs regulated businesses to justify his job and the regulated business needs the regulator to keep competitors out and thus justify their horrible practices and prices. Then the fans of big government come along and try to tell us that this cozy arrangement shows us why free markets don't work, and why government regulation is needed to protect us from these horrible companies, as if the market were free and as if the companies' behavior weren't both conditioned and allowed by the regulators. Yes, companies only care about money. Guess what: regulators only care about power. Guess what else: money and power are transmutable to each other.
"Free market" does not mean what you think it means. Either that, or you are massively unaware of how much the provision of content by broadcast, cable, satellite and the like are regulated.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruining things for the rest of us? Not really, because most of them were also raised to judge not, and they tend to leave you alone. It's the moralist busybodies you have to worry about, and there are plenty of them on both sides.
Can I mod your sig up?
They did not, unless you count high speed impact as landing. Recovery of those stages is planned future capability.
Your "logic" is inconsistent. The external tank on the Shuttle was also jettisoned and burned up on reentry. This it must not have been a spaceship either.
Traitors is a bit harsh. Actually, uncalled for. That said, it's really bizarre that so many Republicans in Congress keep trying to kill private enterprise in favor of a statist space program. The hypocrisy, it burns. On the other hand, once private enterprise starts becoming really successful at opening space, I expect this to reverse, with GOP pushing private space and the Dems trying to tax and regulate it to death. Both parties suck.
Special pleading. "Now" is always different from "then." Yet human nature is fairly constant, and humans are by their nature very adaptable. The environment can be better than now or worse (it's been both), and yet we will muddle through.
I suspect option 3: human nature being largely unchanging, we will continue to muddle along. This will often be worse than now, occasionally and briefly better. But the world of human interaction will largely resemble a thousand years from now the way it was a thousand years ago.
The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?
Well they can't rap, silly!
I am on the same side of an issue as Daniel Ellsberg. That's probably a first.
Ten? Try nearly eighty.
Would it have been clearer if I had said "prescriptive, not proscriptive"? Dictionaries catalog common usage, specifically common pronunciations of and meanings for a term, as opposed to forbidding odd usages which are, nonetheless, clearly understandable. Or maybe I'm missing your point, and you were amplifying what I said, rather than mocking incorrectly.
Compilers are not working with natural languages. They are working with constructed languages. In that case, the language definition is absolutely correct. Either I or the compiler could be wrong, if one or both of us misinterprets the language definition, but the language definition is (by definition, actually) correct.
The thing is, I'm very much in favor of strict grammar and careful definition of terms, and I hate it when people redefine words on the fly. Nonetheless, it is still true that if you understood the meaning and are fluent in the language, then the original speaker might have been able to say it better, or might have been speaking in dialect or slang, but their usage was not inherently incorrect. Dictionaries and grammars follow usage, not the other way around.
Yes, you can keep your number in the US when you switch. I've had the same number for twelve years across three carriers.
I'm totally on board. As a native speaker of English, if I and the dictionary disagree, the dictionary is wrong. People forget that dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.
Investing is inherently risky. When you invest other people's money, you are passing the risk to them. In this case, a successful investment would have enriched the owners, while what actually happened soaked not the owners, nor the politicians, but the taxpayers. This is why it's a bad idea to have politicians "invest" public funds: there is no risk to them, and potentially the gain of having helped out their financial and political supporters. Moral hazard is vast in such situations. If you are having a problem seeing it, imagine Mitt Romney investing public funds in Koch Brothers companies, and I'm sure it will be more clear.
First, the use of government resources would shift from making and enforcing policy to defending policy in court. This would mean that the government would become ineffective, while still costing the same or more in both money and lost liberty to maintain it.
Second, the opportunities for malicious mischief abound. I don't like the administration, so I will sue over every policy they try to implement. Even long-standing policy would be subject to suit. Fundraising will be good and easy.
Legislatures and executive departments would become subordinate to courts, and judges could impose policy at whim, to a greater degree than they did at the height of judicial activism.
For these reasons, it strikes me as a terrible idea to even attempt this. The suit should certainly be dismissed, and I wouldn't object to fining the adults involved for wasting the court's time. This is abuse of the system as it is, and would be utterly destructive of the courts and the law if allowed to proceed.
By what measure is either company failing?
That's one of the problems I have with global warming. The precision of the best made, best sites thermometers is about a degree. One common class is +/- 5 degrees. Yet these are being used to derive results in tenths of a degree. Satellite proxy measures help, but that's a very short record in climate-significant time frames. Is the Earth warming? Almost certainly. Is that outside the norm? Hell, we don't even know if it's outside the margin of error.
From memory, so could be wrong, Apple reports it's effective tax rate last year at about 24%.
The ones who try to blow up bridges are considered terrorists, yeah.
Pretty much the entire premise of the Left, going back to Rousseau, is that human nature is a social construct. Why would they blink at lightbulb use when there are so much bigger things to do to mold people to the service of the State?
The problem is that government artificially limits competition, and then uses that as justification for why the government needs to intervene. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the regulator and the regulated, where the regulator needs regulated businesses to justify his job and the regulated business needs the regulator to keep competitors out and thus justify their horrible practices and prices. Then the fans of big government come along and try to tell us that this cozy arrangement shows us why free markets don't work, and why government regulation is needed to protect us from these horrible companies, as if the market were free and as if the companies' behavior weren't both conditioned and allowed by the regulators. Yes, companies only care about money. Guess what: regulators only care about power. Guess what else: money and power are transmutable to each other.
"Free market" does not mean what you think it means. Either that, or you are massively unaware of how much the provision of content by broadcast, cable, satellite and the like are regulated.