I really, really like C# and I gotta say, I'm a big fan of operator overloading, a feature lacking in Java that always manages to piss me off.
I found my work in.NET to be pleasant and I actually really dig ASP MVC for web development. It's not my favorite, but I'd say it's my favorite statically typed language. I wish people would evaluate.NET beyond the fact that it's a Microsoft creation.
Revenue, the environment, foreign oil and hybrids have nothing to do with this. This has to do, plain and simple, with keeping track of people. Of course, the naysayers will be asked the age old question, "Well, if you haven't got anything to hide..." How anyone with an organ RESEMBLING a brain can make that argument is beyond me.
This is about knowing where you go and what you do.
Here's an idea, instead of trying to figure out how to offset the loss in gas taxes by finding new taxes how about you fat fucking greedy pieces of dog shit in DC stop filling every motherfucking bill passed, from those on military issues to cutting emissions, with pork that just oozes from every single crevice.
"With my taxes I pay for civilization." No. You don't. You pay for corrupt people with the most flexible sorts of morality on the planet to figure out ways to steal even more money from you.
What the fuck is wrong with this country? Every couple years I think, "Well, it has to rebound at some point." Apparently not.
Exactly how doesn't it apply? School officials work for the government and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." seems to apply in a pretty obvious manner.
I tried. I really did. I've more or less sworn off reading SCOTUS decisions because reading legal decisions, I've found, actually erodes vital parts of my soul and there's no way get it back after the fact. However, in order to respond I read the first 8 pages of Thomas' opinion and couldn't take anymore. Unless the last bit reads, "LOL! J/K" I can't imagine reading anymore is going to do anything to affect my life in a positive or useful manner.
While I agree with you that the majority got it wrong for the reason you mentioned... Thomas managed to get it even wronger. The main problem I have with his opinion (other than the fact that it's dead wrong) is how selective all judges are about when it's okay for the judiciary to actively involve itself (here's a hint assholes: never). In this case, Thomas' opinion is:
1. The girl's rights were not violated.
2. The officials should not be punished.
3. We shouldn't dictate the details of school administration. (I'd say that it is correct in that the judiciary shouldn't legislate but is wrong in the sense that the court SHOULD rule that the administrators absolutely should have to worry and be punished when do completely insane things that BLATANTLY violate someone's rights.)
4. The search was "reasonable" based on "reasonable suspicion." (Which is a joke. Cops can't strip search you on the spot using only the standard of "reasonable suspicion" but school officials can based on a tip from another student?)
And on and on. This fucking asshole goes out of his way to justify something that is patently wrong using mountains of case law. (And this is why I say that the legal community as a whole is more or less completely disconnected with reality.)
We don't need a new law. We have a law. It's called the 4th amendment and most states have provisions in their own constitutions that are similar. More laws lead to more legal convoluted insanity. When need fewer laws and we need a system that replaces the inane concept of "case law." Protections should be broad and exceptions should be specific. However, thanks to case law we get the never ending deluge of meaningless words like "reasonable" and "substantial" and other words that really mean, "Up to the broad and sweeping decision of whatever bureaucrat happens to be making any given decision."
I don't even know where to start. I was pissed off about this decision yesterday but having read Thomas' decision I feel ill. To think that someone would write 22 pages of legal bullshit to justify STRIP SEARCHING A CHILD and that this same fucking crazy son of a bitch isn't some freak living in a cave somewhere writing this kind of crap by the boatload, but rather, in the highest court of the land is astounding. How the fuck did this happen?
I do agree that there's no excuse for a search either, which was my beef with the majority opinion. Every time I talked about this yesterday and someone emphasized "and it was just Ibuprophen" I'd say, "That's all fine and dandy but irrelevant. Can you tell me what she could have been hiding--heroine, crack, whatever, a machete, a.45--that would have made the search reasonable." There is NOTHING that would have made that search reasonable. Nothing.
That's what the majority opinion should have held. I could have written it for them:
"Strip searching a 13-year-old--or any other child for that matter--is not the job nor within the scope of power of any school official. Period. There is absolutely no exception to this standard. The officials who conducted this search, because of the clear and obvious nature of this violation, have no qualified immunity whatsoever to civil or criminal action being taken."
There's no need for 1,000 citations. There's no need for 30 pages.
Except there's NO SUCH THING as the lesser of two evils. That's where the joke is on everyone who thinks that way. How many people voted for Obama because he was the "lesser" of two evils? And what are we getting now? Not only do we have someone who has no intention of any real "change" but his party is also in control of congress which can help expedite tyranny.
And, as I always say, give me the greater of two evils. Democracy is a useless fat asshole who will always follow the path of least resistance and apathy. In order to get that fat ass to rise to action, the situation has to get really, really bad. I was really hoping McCain made it in to office because I think he was losing it anyway and with Palin we'd have had a pair of lunatics that would have caused such an obvious nightmare that maybe, just maybe, the bloated and disgusting Cheeto-eating diabetic soda drinking toothless brainless blob that best represents the American people may have been so scared that it moved.
Or it would have eaten up the rampant nationalism and authoritarianism and imploded on itself. I'm okay with either one really.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is more dangerous than putting a lunatic in office who is bad enough to wake the people from their collective stupor. It slows the erosion of liberty down to a slow enough pace that the Kentucky Fried Majority never even notices they've been robbed of their rights.
You can't mitigate the damage coming down from on high in Washington. They're ALL bought and paid for. Obama is as much of a stooge as Bush... and Clinton... and Reagan... etc. You can be a harbinger of POSITIVE change while working for one of the two political machines that's been sodomizing this nation for the past century plus. Neither of those organizations is designed with anything in mind but consolidation of power and wealth lining its own pockets.
If every asshole out there who voted for the "lesser of two evils" (and make no mistake, Democrats are not the only people who do that) voted their conscience and went third party or independent instead, I don't know who would win but I can tell you, it probably won't be any of the front runners since virtually ALL their "supporters" cast their vote while holding their noses.
Thank you. That was the first thing I noticed. Mr. "Change" and "Transparency" is neither. Not that I'm surprised though. There's a reason I've never voted R or D. People say voting third party is a waste, but hell... voting for ANY of these assholes is a waste.
When you're part of an organization that is systematically working toward eroding the rights of everyone in the nation, strip searching children eventually becomes perfectly acceptable. At least the ration is currently only 1 to 8, but I expect we'll be closer to half by the time my kids are old enough to be abused like this.
If you haven't had rationality, honesty and logic ground out of your brain by law school, it doesn't take much reading of Supreme Court decisions to come to a few conclusions really fast:
1. These assholes think their words are right up there with Socrates.
2. They have no actual consideration for how their decisions will affect actual Americans.
3. They're completely detached from reality.
The court system in America is terrible and it has been since the inception of the country. When you start with a really bad idea (English courts and English common law), make the terrible assumption that ANYONE is capable of actually being impartial and then don't bother doing any real enumeration of specific powers and restrictions (Article III of the Constitution) you end up where we are today.
"Contrary to all correct example, [the Federal judiciary] are in the habit of going out of the question before them, to throw an anchor ahead and grapple further hold for future advances of power. They are then in fact the corps of sappers and miners, steadily working to undermine the independent rights of the States and to consolidate all power in the hands of that government in which they have so important a freehold estate." -- Thomas Jefferson
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Eh, I don't know how much common sense is going on here.
1. The fact that it needed to go this high up tells us that there isn't exactly an "outbreak" of commonsense.
2. Clarence Thomas is insane. When you start making Scalia look like he might not be the most insane person on the SCOTUS that's impressive, but in a very bad way.
3. Despite saying the girl's rights were violated only two, count'em two, justices thought it would be acceptable to prosecute the boneheads in charge of this. On the rare occasion you can get the government to admit any wrongdoing it's always followed up with, "Well, they were just doing their job..." or "Well, yeah her rights were violated but you can't really expect people working for the government to be liable for anything." I guess you're only allowed to hold people morally accountable for their actions if they're Nazis. Apparently anyone else can just say, "I was just following orders" or "I was just following the law" no matter how obviously grotesque and clusterfuck batshit nuts their actions are.
The only thing to like about this ruling is that it ISN'T the worst possible ruling they could have made and that it wasn't divided by much.
Question: Why aren't you campaigning to get rid of the "socialized" fire service, "socialized" highways, and "socialized" police services you already have. Surely according to your line of thinking they will never work.
This is actually an interesting question and while I don't know that I have a specific answer, if you ever have to deal with any of these three systems directly you know what a mess they are. Police and road work are easy to pick on.
Few people with a brain think, "Wow, those boys in blue do nothing but protect the innocent and save lives. They always tell the truth and never pull anyone over just to increase state revenue." And I've never been anywhere in the USA where people say, "Man, the road work here is done in such a well thought out manner and they're not constantly ripping things up over and over again and they're always on schedule." Corruption and greased palms go hand in hand with everything the government pays for--this includes the FEW things I think the government ought to pay for. So, even for someone like me (who is very much opposed to socializing most things), you're right that there are some things meet a certain threshold where they're good that the government pays for them.
Those aside though, I want to point out something that 2.5 of those have that most people proposing socialized medicine advocates generally don't advocate: local control. I don't have federal police officers or federal firemen and although there are SOME (this is the 2.5 deal) federal highways, a majority of the roads are handled by the state and county, not by the federal government. This gives locals more control and, in theory, leads to higher accountability to the people directly.
I would be much more willing to consider some kind of socialized medicine IF it was at a state level with no federal strings attached.
However, socializing medicine is a government "solution" to a government "problem" and the problem of corrupt medical and pharmaceutical companies. It's a way to get the government to pay for the excessive costs and fees being pushed out by the medical industry in general rather than dealing with the problem of what is, more or less, a price fixed quasi-monopoly. So now you have the government paying into these companies and with that kind of money they buy all the government they need to keep their cartel going. At least if it's localized there's a competitive market of sorts among the states rather than a big fat stupid bloated contract from the feds.
Health care in this country is broken and I have to say, it wasn't always broken. When my grandfather was born a stay in the hospital (and I have the bill) for his mother including all the delivery and care and everything came to a wooping $28. While inflation accounts for some of the disparity in costs, think of how much a week's stay would cost now without insurance. Why has the cost risen so much?
That's the real problem with healthcare. Instead of just saying, "No one can afford it, the government needs to pay for it..." no one seems to be asking, "Why can't people afford it?" The generations before my parents, my grandparents and up managed to be healthy and afford their doctors on the wages of working men and women. What's changed?
The answer is not as simply "do we socialize or not socialize?"
And it's not just the medical industry either. It's the American lifestyle. Healthcare is about surgery and pills and not about taking care of yourself. All one has to do is look at the rise of obesity here. My mom was on what seemed like 100 medications for multiple sclerosis for years. She was living in a state of just... numbness. More or less, one day she had an epiphany of sorts and changed her diet, started exercising regularly, lost 100ish pounds over the course of 16 months and now is on no meds, has stable blood pressure and is doing better than she's done in her entire life.
Should me or my neighbors have been forced to pay for someone like my mom
I have no idea. How many grandmothers and moms install Windows? My mom ran Linux for a number of years before I bought her a Mac. I set the laptop up for her and it worked and she used it. No problem.
I don't know about that. When it dips consistently below 5%, maybe.
What I do though is I generally use the IE6 specific conditional header stuff to grab some css and js and make everything functional but, generally, it's a lesser experience. A lot of the eye candy is stripped and certain things just aren't as nice. It works, and it requires a lot less time than making everything work perfectly and match perfectly. That way I'm free to do fun stuff on the newer browsers and still have functionality on IE6. (jQuery does wonders.)
"Tip: There are no performance differences between these three types, apart from increased storage size when using the blank-padded type, and a few extra cycles to check the length when storing into a length-constrained column. While character(n) has performance advantages in some other database systems, it has no such advantages in PostgreSQL. In most situations text or character varying should be used instead."
There is more to learn when using Postgres, but not too much just to get up and running. I managed to get it running with an ORM that had been using MySQL in a few hours. The docs are really good too. Oh yeah, and my favorite animal is an elephant.
Thank you. I was about to say something, but attaching "deniers" to anything anymore has become offensive. "You disagree with me? Well you're an X denier--which, of course, implies that you're a Nazi of some sort." Of course, whenever I see an evolution related article on slashdot, like someone with Stockholm Syndrome I:
1. Read the comments knowing that it's going boil down to a lot of monkeys throwing digital feces at one another.
2. Have to deal with a bunch of smug assholes.
Kind of like any global warming related article. There's nothing useful to extract. Why do I even read the comments? Because I'm a fucking morning.
I want to point out that, I'm sure, if we took a poll right now Wrath of Khan would be considered the #1 Trek movie. At the very least, I have no doubt it'd be at the top of the movies derived from TOS. Wrath of Khan was great not because of all the specifically cerebral issues you mention but because of something that didn't require sci-fi at all: the interaction of the primary characters.
Kirk, Spock and McCoy and how they interacted was the core of that movie. Although Khan being driven by Ricardo Montalbán was awesome, he really served as a catalyst to bring out the depths of those three characters. Spock's sacrifice at the end, McCoy's attempt to stop him against logic and Kirk's emotion to Spock's death were huge. Kirk's failure to be "by the book" costing cadets' their lives at the beginning was huge as well as the themes of aging and yearning to be young men out romping the galaxy again. There was a lot to that movie, and almost none of it was specifically sci-fi.
With all that said, Wrath of Khan was one of the most action packed of TOS based movies, if not the most.
I found the exploration of Spock's past and his attachment to his mother to be very interesting and I think this movie made a much bigger deal about his dual heritage than any previous movies did. They even touched on his father, who lied to his son when he was young and only in her death revealed his emotions. I thought the Vulcan's were given a very interesting look. I think that portion alone was good "Star Trek."
I'm not a Trekkie. But I watch TOS and TNG casually and I've see the movies but Insurrection and Nemesis. By my casual standards, there was plenty of "real" Trek in this. Like a number of other people out there, I put this movie under Wrath of Khan and above the rest. (Admittedly though, I'm quite biased in favor of TOS characters.)
The lack of planetary defenses was probably the biggest irk I had. A couple dorks with blasters could knock it out without any problem but on an entire planet--and on earth they were right next to the academy in San Francisco for crying out loud, you'd think it was the most militarized place--there wasn't so much as a gunship or a ground battery?
I didn't dwell on it because it was the first time I'd seen a movie that I just flat out enjoyed in a long time. I really had a lot of fun and I guess I got more caught up in the characters than the story. Not perfect, but I think a sequel to this will be even better. The rather flagrant "we will create our own timeline" story is out of the way. The backstory has been established. The new stage has been set. A sequel can just kind of be its own thing and with the current crew I'm pretty happy about the prospect.
(I did have one more gripe. I wasn't super happy with the new look of the Enterprise. But to me, the "real" enterprise will always be the "A" model from The Wrath of Khan. That was the movie that brought me into Trek and I'll always rate it unfairly. Although really, it's still the best one! But I have to admit, not as "fun" as this one.)
But since, at a minimum, the concept exists, it can be killed and replaced. Whether or not an actual being or deity exists isn't relevant in this context. All that matters is that humans are all too willing to be religious whether it's God, global warming, OS X or Emacs.
Which is exactly what every other fanatic would say. There's a reason people can go on selling snake oil until hell freezes over: statements like that will whip the gullible into a frenzy time and time again.
We've killed God around here so people need some fiction to replace it. The people around here, for instance, have global warming. (And when that's not enough, someone always starts up a conversation about superior programming styles or paradigms, which is far more religious than any tent revival I've ever seen.)
I don't know that House glorifies it. (Maybe something changed in the last two seasons.) However, I've never noticed that the show portrays him as a terribly happy person or someone you'd want to be.
However, I'll take an asshole who gets the job done over 95% of the people that have worked in any office I've ever worked in. I don't need to be coddled, I need the job done! It's not necessarily about being narcissistic, it's about trying to do some REAL work and not have to worry about the cover sheet on TPS reports.
I find that arguments concerning hardware and/or software platforms around here generally devolve down to the level of religious sniping. (Which, for a group that seems fairly irreligious, I find really funny.) There's a really funny duality here though, in regards to Apple in particular:
1. Apple is a lock-in bunch of overpriced bastards. I hate them.
2. OS X is really shiny though and I want it and Apple should provide it to me in the package I want. (Even though I hate Apple.)
And don't get me wrong, I don't particularly love Apple. The iPhone development model makes me ill and it's a reflection of some of the levels of their insanity. But seriously, Dell and Lenovo don't exactly love me personally either so it comes down to me choosing which faceless company that only cares about my money that I buy from. I understand people getting annoyed by nonobjective fanboys but... I've found that most of the people who get really loud about fanboys are... other fanboys.
Huh. I remember when I looked a few months ago and every card but the expensive one had at least a couple negative reviews from Mac people. Maybe I'll try that out. It'd be nice to save $60.
Slashdot Mirror
I really, really like C# and I gotta say, I'm a big fan of operator overloading, a feature lacking in Java that always manages to piss me off.
I found my work in .NET to be pleasant and I actually really dig ASP MVC for web development. It's not my favorite, but I'd say it's my favorite statically typed language. I wish people would evaluate .NET beyond the fact that it's a Microsoft creation.
Revenue, the environment, foreign oil and hybrids have nothing to do with this. This has to do, plain and simple, with keeping track of people. Of course, the naysayers will be asked the age old question, "Well, if you haven't got anything to hide..." How anyone with an organ RESEMBLING a brain can make that argument is beyond me.
This is about knowing where you go and what you do.
Here's an idea, instead of trying to figure out how to offset the loss in gas taxes by finding new taxes how about you fat fucking greedy pieces of dog shit in DC stop filling every motherfucking bill passed, from those on military issues to cutting emissions, with pork that just oozes from every single crevice.
"With my taxes I pay for civilization." No. You don't. You pay for corrupt people with the most flexible sorts of morality on the planet to figure out ways to steal even more money from you.
What the fuck is wrong with this country? Every couple years I think, "Well, it has to rebound at some point." Apparently not.
Garth Brooks on Slashdot?
Holy shitsville!
Exactly how doesn't it apply? School officials work for the government and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." seems to apply in a pretty obvious manner.
I tried. I really did. I've more or less sworn off reading SCOTUS decisions because reading legal decisions, I've found, actually erodes vital parts of my soul and there's no way get it back after the fact. However, in order to respond I read the first 8 pages of Thomas' opinion and couldn't take anymore. Unless the last bit reads, "LOL! J/K" I can't imagine reading anymore is going to do anything to affect my life in a positive or useful manner.
While I agree with you that the majority got it wrong for the reason you mentioned... Thomas managed to get it even wronger. The main problem I have with his opinion (other than the fact that it's dead wrong) is how selective all judges are about when it's okay for the judiciary to actively involve itself (here's a hint assholes: never). In this case, Thomas' opinion is:
1. The girl's rights were not violated.
2. The officials should not be punished.
3. We shouldn't dictate the details of school administration. (I'd say that it is correct in that the judiciary shouldn't legislate but is wrong in the sense that the court SHOULD rule that the administrators absolutely should have to worry and be punished when do completely insane things that BLATANTLY violate someone's rights.)
4. The search was "reasonable" based on "reasonable suspicion." (Which is a joke. Cops can't strip search you on the spot using only the standard of "reasonable suspicion" but school officials can based on a tip from another student?)
And on and on. This fucking asshole goes out of his way to justify something that is patently wrong using mountains of case law. (And this is why I say that the legal community as a whole is more or less completely disconnected with reality.)
We don't need a new law. We have a law. It's called the 4th amendment and most states have provisions in their own constitutions that are similar. More laws lead to more legal convoluted insanity. When need fewer laws and we need a system that replaces the inane concept of "case law." Protections should be broad and exceptions should be specific. However, thanks to case law we get the never ending deluge of meaningless words like "reasonable" and "substantial" and other words that really mean, "Up to the broad and sweeping decision of whatever bureaucrat happens to be making any given decision."
I don't even know where to start. I was pissed off about this decision yesterday but having read Thomas' decision I feel ill. To think that someone would write 22 pages of legal bullshit to justify STRIP SEARCHING A CHILD and that this same fucking crazy son of a bitch isn't some freak living in a cave somewhere writing this kind of crap by the boatload, but rather, in the highest court of the land is astounding. How the fuck did this happen?
I do agree that there's no excuse for a search either, which was my beef with the majority opinion. Every time I talked about this yesterday and someone emphasized "and it was just Ibuprophen" I'd say, "That's all fine and dandy but irrelevant. Can you tell me what she could have been hiding--heroine, crack, whatever, a machete, a .45--that would have made the search reasonable." There is NOTHING that would have made that search reasonable. Nothing.
That's what the majority opinion should have held. I could have written it for them:
"Strip searching a 13-year-old--or any other child for that matter--is not the job nor within the scope of power of any school official. Period. There is absolutely no exception to this standard. The officials who conducted this search, because of the clear and obvious nature of this violation, have no qualified immunity whatsoever to civil or criminal action being taken."
There's no need for 1,000 citations. There's no need for 30 pages.
Except there's NO SUCH THING as the lesser of two evils. That's where the joke is on everyone who thinks that way. How many people voted for Obama because he was the "lesser" of two evils? And what are we getting now? Not only do we have someone who has no intention of any real "change" but his party is also in control of congress which can help expedite tyranny.
And, as I always say, give me the greater of two evils. Democracy is a useless fat asshole who will always follow the path of least resistance and apathy. In order to get that fat ass to rise to action, the situation has to get really, really bad. I was really hoping McCain made it in to office because I think he was losing it anyway and with Palin we'd have had a pair of lunatics that would have caused such an obvious nightmare that maybe, just maybe, the bloated and disgusting Cheeto-eating diabetic soda drinking toothless brainless blob that best represents the American people may have been so scared that it moved.
Or it would have eaten up the rampant nationalism and authoritarianism and imploded on itself. I'm okay with either one really.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is more dangerous than putting a lunatic in office who is bad enough to wake the people from their collective stupor. It slows the erosion of liberty down to a slow enough pace that the Kentucky Fried Majority never even notices they've been robbed of their rights.
You can't mitigate the damage coming down from on high in Washington. They're ALL bought and paid for. Obama is as much of a stooge as Bush... and Clinton... and Reagan... etc. You can be a harbinger of POSITIVE change while working for one of the two political machines that's been sodomizing this nation for the past century plus. Neither of those organizations is designed with anything in mind but consolidation of power and wealth lining its own pockets.
If every asshole out there who voted for the "lesser of two evils" (and make no mistake, Democrats are not the only people who do that) voted their conscience and went third party or independent instead, I don't know who would win but I can tell you, it probably won't be any of the front runners since virtually ALL their "supporters" cast their vote while holding their noses.
Thank you. That was the first thing I noticed. Mr. "Change" and "Transparency" is neither. Not that I'm surprised though. There's a reason I've never voted R or D. People say voting third party is a waste, but hell... voting for ANY of these assholes is a waste.
When you're part of an organization that is systematically working toward eroding the rights of everyone in the nation, strip searching children eventually becomes perfectly acceptable. At least the ration is currently only 1 to 8, but I expect we'll be closer to half by the time my kids are old enough to be abused like this.
If you haven't had rationality, honesty and logic ground out of your brain by law school, it doesn't take much reading of Supreme Court decisions to come to a few conclusions really fast:
1. These assholes think their words are right up there with Socrates.
2. They have no actual consideration for how their decisions will affect actual Americans.
3. They're completely detached from reality.
The court system in America is terrible and it has been since the inception of the country. When you start with a really bad idea (English courts and English common law), make the terrible assumption that ANYONE is capable of actually being impartial and then don't bother doing any real enumeration of specific powers and restrictions (Article III of the Constitution) you end up where we are today.
"Contrary to all correct example, [the Federal judiciary] are in the habit of going out of the question before them, to throw an anchor ahead and grapple further hold for future advances of power. They are then in fact the corps of sappers and miners, steadily working to undermine the independent rights of the States and to consolidate all power in the hands of that government in which they have so important a freehold estate." -- Thomas Jefferson
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Eh, I don't know how much common sense is going on here.
1. The fact that it needed to go this high up tells us that there isn't exactly an "outbreak" of commonsense.
2. Clarence Thomas is insane. When you start making Scalia look like he might not be the most insane person on the SCOTUS that's impressive, but in a very bad way.
3. Despite saying the girl's rights were violated only two, count'em two, justices thought it would be acceptable to prosecute the boneheads in charge of this. On the rare occasion you can get the government to admit any wrongdoing it's always followed up with, "Well, they were just doing their job..." or "Well, yeah her rights were violated but you can't really expect people working for the government to be liable for anything." I guess you're only allowed to hold people morally accountable for their actions if they're Nazis. Apparently anyone else can just say, "I was just following orders" or "I was just following the law" no matter how obviously grotesque and clusterfuck batshit nuts their actions are.
The only thing to like about this ruling is that it ISN'T the worst possible ruling they could have made and that it wasn't divided by much.
This is actually an interesting question and while I don't know that I have a specific answer, if you ever have to deal with any of these three systems directly you know what a mess they are. Police and road work are easy to pick on.
Few people with a brain think, "Wow, those boys in blue do nothing but protect the innocent and save lives. They always tell the truth and never pull anyone over just to increase state revenue." And I've never been anywhere in the USA where people say, "Man, the road work here is done in such a well thought out manner and they're not constantly ripping things up over and over again and they're always on schedule." Corruption and greased palms go hand in hand with everything the government pays for--this includes the FEW things I think the government ought to pay for. So, even for someone like me (who is very much opposed to socializing most things), you're right that there are some things meet a certain threshold where they're good that the government pays for them.
Those aside though, I want to point out something that 2.5 of those have that most people proposing socialized medicine advocates generally don't advocate: local control. I don't have federal police officers or federal firemen and although there are SOME (this is the 2.5 deal) federal highways, a majority of the roads are handled by the state and county, not by the federal government. This gives locals more control and, in theory, leads to higher accountability to the people directly.
I would be much more willing to consider some kind of socialized medicine IF it was at a state level with no federal strings attached.
However, socializing medicine is a government "solution" to a government "problem" and the problem of corrupt medical and pharmaceutical companies. It's a way to get the government to pay for the excessive costs and fees being pushed out by the medical industry in general rather than dealing with the problem of what is, more or less, a price fixed quasi-monopoly. So now you have the government paying into these companies and with that kind of money they buy all the government they need to keep their cartel going. At least if it's localized there's a competitive market of sorts among the states rather than a big fat stupid bloated contract from the feds.
Health care in this country is broken and I have to say, it wasn't always broken. When my grandfather was born a stay in the hospital (and I have the bill) for his mother including all the delivery and care and everything came to a wooping $28. While inflation accounts for some of the disparity in costs, think of how much a week's stay would cost now without insurance. Why has the cost risen so much?
That's the real problem with healthcare. Instead of just saying, "No one can afford it, the government needs to pay for it..." no one seems to be asking, "Why can't people afford it?" The generations before my parents, my grandparents and up managed to be healthy and afford their doctors on the wages of working men and women. What's changed?
The answer is not as simply "do we socialize or not socialize?"
And it's not just the medical industry either. It's the American lifestyle. Healthcare is about surgery and pills and not about taking care of yourself. All one has to do is look at the rise of obesity here. My mom was on what seemed like 100 medications for multiple sclerosis for years. She was living in a state of just... numbness. More or less, one day she had an epiphany of sorts and changed her diet, started exercising regularly, lost 100ish pounds over the course of 16 months and now is on no meds, has stable blood pressure and is doing better than she's done in her entire life.
Should me or my neighbors have been forced to pay for someone like my mom
I have no idea. How many grandmothers and moms install Windows? My mom ran Linux for a number of years before I bought her a Mac. I set the laptop up for her and it worked and she used it. No problem.
I don't know about that. When it dips consistently below 5%, maybe.
What I do though is I generally use the IE6 specific conditional header stuff to grab some css and js and make everything functional but, generally, it's a lesser experience. A lot of the eye candy is stripped and certain things just aren't as nice. It works, and it requires a lot less time than making everything work perfectly and match perfectly. That way I'm free to do fun stuff on the newer browsers and still have functionality on IE6. (jQuery does wonders.)
And that doesn't even include Pulse! Thank you. I want to cry now.
MySQL's documentation is nowhere near as good as Postgres and when I found out this little tidbit about Postgres, I was sold:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/datatype-character.html
In particular:
"Tip: There are no performance differences between these three types, apart from increased storage size when using the blank-padded type, and a few extra cycles to check the length when storing into a length-constrained column. While character(n) has performance advantages in some other database systems, it has no such advantages in PostgreSQL. In most situations text or character varying should be used instead."
There is more to learn when using Postgres, but not too much just to get up and running. I managed to get it running with an ORM that had been using MySQL in a few hours. The docs are really good too. Oh yeah, and my favorite animal is an elephant.
Thank you. I was about to say something, but attaching "deniers" to anything anymore has become offensive. "You disagree with me? Well you're an X denier--which, of course, implies that you're a Nazi of some sort." Of course, whenever I see an evolution related article on slashdot, like someone with Stockholm Syndrome I:
1. Read the comments knowing that it's going boil down to a lot of monkeys throwing digital feces at one another.
2. Have to deal with a bunch of smug assholes.
Kind of like any global warming related article. There's nothing useful to extract. Why do I even read the comments? Because I'm a fucking morning.
I want to point out that, I'm sure, if we took a poll right now Wrath of Khan would be considered the #1 Trek movie. At the very least, I have no doubt it'd be at the top of the movies derived from TOS. Wrath of Khan was great not because of all the specifically cerebral issues you mention but because of something that didn't require sci-fi at all: the interaction of the primary characters.
Kirk, Spock and McCoy and how they interacted was the core of that movie. Although Khan being driven by Ricardo Montalbán was awesome, he really served as a catalyst to bring out the depths of those three characters. Spock's sacrifice at the end, McCoy's attempt to stop him against logic and Kirk's emotion to Spock's death were huge. Kirk's failure to be "by the book" costing cadets' their lives at the beginning was huge as well as the themes of aging and yearning to be young men out romping the galaxy again. There was a lot to that movie, and almost none of it was specifically sci-fi.
With all that said, Wrath of Khan was one of the most action packed of TOS based movies, if not the most.
I found the exploration of Spock's past and his attachment to his mother to be very interesting and I think this movie made a much bigger deal about his dual heritage than any previous movies did. They even touched on his father, who lied to his son when he was young and only in her death revealed his emotions. I thought the Vulcan's were given a very interesting look. I think that portion alone was good "Star Trek."
I'm not a Trekkie. But I watch TOS and TNG casually and I've see the movies but Insurrection and Nemesis. By my casual standards, there was plenty of "real" Trek in this. Like a number of other people out there, I put this movie under Wrath of Khan and above the rest. (Admittedly though, I'm quite biased in favor of TOS characters.)
The lack of planetary defenses was probably the biggest irk I had. A couple dorks with blasters could knock it out without any problem but on an entire planet--and on earth they were right next to the academy in San Francisco for crying out loud, you'd think it was the most militarized place--there wasn't so much as a gunship or a ground battery?
I didn't dwell on it because it was the first time I'd seen a movie that I just flat out enjoyed in a long time. I really had a lot of fun and I guess I got more caught up in the characters than the story. Not perfect, but I think a sequel to this will be even better. The rather flagrant "we will create our own timeline" story is out of the way. The backstory has been established. The new stage has been set. A sequel can just kind of be its own thing and with the current crew I'm pretty happy about the prospect.
(I did have one more gripe. I wasn't super happy with the new look of the Enterprise. But to me, the "real" enterprise will always be the "A" model from The Wrath of Khan. That was the movie that brought me into Trek and I'll always rate it unfairly. Although really, it's still the best one! But I have to admit, not as "fun" as this one.)
Yeah I was reading that thinking, "Isn't a netbook with a bigger screen a laptop? So the future of netbooks is laptops? Huh?"
I had a similar experience, only with sqlite. Weird. I'd come from a MySQL/MSSQL background and was used to things being case insensitive.
I agree.
But since, at a minimum, the concept exists, it can be killed and replaced. Whether or not an actual being or deity exists isn't relevant in this context. All that matters is that humans are all too willing to be religious whether it's God, global warming, OS X or Emacs.
Which is exactly what every other fanatic would say. There's a reason people can go on selling snake oil until hell freezes over: statements like that will whip the gullible into a frenzy time and time again.
We've killed God around here so people need some fiction to replace it. The people around here, for instance, have global warming. (And when that's not enough, someone always starts up a conversation about superior programming styles or paradigms, which is far more religious than any tent revival I've ever seen.)
I don't know that House glorifies it. (Maybe something changed in the last two seasons.) However, I've never noticed that the show portrays him as a terribly happy person or someone you'd want to be.
However, I'll take an asshole who gets the job done over 95% of the people that have worked in any office I've ever worked in. I don't need to be coddled, I need the job done! It's not necessarily about being narcissistic, it's about trying to do some REAL work and not have to worry about the cover sheet on TPS reports.
I find that arguments concerning hardware and/or software platforms around here generally devolve down to the level of religious sniping. (Which, for a group that seems fairly irreligious, I find really funny.) There's a really funny duality here though, in regards to Apple in particular:
1. Apple is a lock-in bunch of overpriced bastards. I hate them.
2. OS X is really shiny though and I want it and Apple should provide it to me in the package I want. (Even though I hate Apple.)
And don't get me wrong, I don't particularly love Apple. The iPhone development model makes me ill and it's a reflection of some of the levels of their insanity. But seriously, Dell and Lenovo don't exactly love me personally either so it comes down to me choosing which faceless company that only cares about my money that I buy from. I understand people getting annoyed by nonobjective fanboys but... I've found that most of the people who get really loud about fanboys are... other fanboys.
Huh. I remember when I looked a few months ago and every card but the expensive one had at least a couple negative reviews from Mac people. Maybe I'll try that out. It'd be nice to save $60.