Scientists have a pretty good estimate for how common Supernovas are, but that number does not match well with how many were reported in history. We know that the Chinese observed at least one supernova that nobody in Europe bothered to write down. There's evidence suggesting that a lot of the 'plague of this, plague of that' events in Exodus are concurrent with a massive volcanic eruption on the isle of Santorini and that the Egyptians were, at the very least, informed about this eruption by traders, but if so, it's not in any official Egyptian record (and you think it would have been to their advantage, if only to counter any claims by their ex-slaves that all the Egyptian gods had just had their asses kicked by something called Yahweh).
Yes, you would think somebody should have recorded an event like the Carrington auroras, but we do have examples where a large and well developed culture seems to have just stuck their fingers in their ears and ignored the whole plague of miracles/mind-numbing-problem/disaster/end of the world/whatever till it went away. This seems to be exactly the thing the phrase "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence." was coined for. Your best guess is 'once', mine is 'once, baring something weird that seems to happen more than you'ld think, when humans are involved'.
I suspect the general public sees the hyped claims of various consultants a lot more than it sees the rational steps being taken. Why? because those "consultants" are trying to get free advertisments for their services by using the news. As long as the news facilitates this, the public either gets a distorted view, or has to go to the much more radical step of rejecting the basic trustworthyness of ALL news. Deciding the whole of mass media, entering your home for hours every day, is trying to con you, is a much bigger step than deciding a bunch of power companies, scientists, and odd little government agencies you seldom think about (i.e. the National Institute of Standards) are doing it.
The tax in question is imposed on the Telco's, and recovered by a fee they add each month on the phone bill. Legally, it is counted as a tax when the corporations pay it out, but called a fee when the individual actually pays it in. Anyone with a land line pays it, however poor they are. The EIC for a single person, at max, is $ 480. The fees the phone companies charge that subsidise the universal service charge are usually about $72 per year, so just having a land line phone would eat about 20% of that EIC you're invoking. Most single poor people do not even get all their witholding back - that's something that is much more possible if the poor person is raising a minor child or three. A single person can be well under the poverty level and still pay income taxes. As my example shows in part, other taxes may well mean the poor person is paying a good percentage of their income in taxes despite the EIC. Remember, to get the EIC, the person must work and thus have earned income. For more than 50% of the working poor, work translates to gas taxes for driving to work, plus vehicle liscence taxes. It can include state and local sales taxes of up to 10% (possible in California). Arguably, the rent most poor people pay includes covering the property taxes on the space they rent, (or their landlord is somehow willing to rent at a loss). You can beat $ 480 pretty easily, and it's quite likely for a single person making less than $10,000 to be a net tax payer. When you factor in the personal share of Social Security and Medicare, it's pretty frequent for a single person making 10K a year to be a net FEDERAL taxpayer.
You can also call some things a fee at one end to hide the fact they are taxes, and so falsely make it look like the poor are paying less taxes than they are. Then you can find some dumbass to parrot the false claim that the poor get all their money back via tax returns.
Highest point in Tennessee: Clingman's Dome at 6,643 feet (2,025 m), Highest point in Florida: Britton Hill at 345 feet (105 m).
The lowest point in Tennessee is 178 feet above sea level, at the Mississippi River near Memphis. The lowest points in Florida are all at sea level (0 ft.), unless you count a few coastal sinkholes.
The Mean Elevation of Tennessee is 900 feet above sea level. The Mean Elevation of Florida is 100 feet above sea level.
So the mean locations in Florida are under 78 feet of water before the lowest point in Tenn is flooded.
I have no idea what point postbigbang thinks he is making. I'd be interested to find out just how much ice he thinks lies over solid land, world wide. Maybe he's expecting the Mountains of Madness to be all ice and melt off.
It is possible to accidentally perform the actual hit. To run afterwards means you either knew you hit the person and then had depraved indifference to the potential to stop and assist and just maybe save that person's life, or that you were so unaware of what you were doing that you had a legal obligation not to drive in that condition, and the depraved indifference enters automatically at that point even if it's before the collision even happened. That's how my state views a hit and run fatality - you can't do one accidentally, because at some point in the process you had to deliberately decide to do what you did even if it resulted in you killing somebody. That's manslaughter at minimum, usually with aggravating conditions. Try and claim to a judge that the whole thing was somehow accidental and see what happens - it's a good way to get the maximum sentence.
I live close enough to the Charleston in TN that I have gotten used to checking whenever the word comes up without more info. You, yourself admitted that at least one item on Kr1ll1n (579971)'s list was reasonable. Other people are even now pointing out that what you claim was obvious is not obvious. I supect you'll be surprised how many people who don't live in the US also don't find ANYTHING about which Charlston is largest obvious, and in fact you'll probably hear from people who only know of a handfull of the very largest cities in the US and have never heard of ANY Charleston. Your claim that the mention of the general US Drug Enforcement Administration appearing in the summary invalidates all non-us locations is itself wrong (The US siezes assets in cases of INTERNATIONAL drug trafficing, so the summary is just assuming something is 'obvious' too - you've got a whole lot of "my side gets to declare EVERYTHING is obvious to win our Internet argument" going there.
Yet despite those issues, you're still busting someone's chops. You've jumped on somebody who 'obviously' took at least two minutes doing some research, to get the list you are declaring irrelevant. You see with your own eyes a piece of research that I feel confident took at least two minutes and your first nit-picking, obsessive compulsive act is to criticise the poster for not taking two minutes to research something. That's like me reading your post and then claiming you are 'obviously' a secret lifetime South Carolinian.
I have never met you before, but my first impression is you are the sort of pedantic fool who trys to bully people at near random to bolster his flagging self esteem, falls back on a claim of Aspergers when called on it, and you have the sort of underlying, monumental anger-management issues that make you an impossibly annoying jerk for everyone who has to deal with you day to day. In fact, that's "Obvious!".
This article is about the very thin, topmost portions of the atmosphere, with basically less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the air. Warming related data there looks funny, compared to the main bulk of the atmosphere (roughly 99.9%). Remember "climategate"? That was about somebody either trying to fudge data or honestly reconcile odd data on high altitude forests. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the researcher was totally guilty of some kind of deliberate fraud - it was still data about roughly the fringe 1/10th of 1 percent of forests (part of that data was specifically from odd trees actually found above the normal treelines of certain mountains - that's practically the definition of quirky data). Yes, the argument is confused, because one side will say "See, one whole tenth of one percent is flaky/fixed/fraudulent - that matters so much the other 99.9% should be tossed immediately and everybody should make up their minds based only on the 'one tenth of one' evidence. If you really decide scientific questions by letting a fringe 1/10th of 1 % overide all other data, then enjoy throwing out Evolution, Relativity, and really every other theory. I'm pretty sure if we run 1,000 brand new experiments about Newton's gravitational theory, we can get one result that says it's all hogwash and we should invest our entire national science budget in Philogeston futures and Phrenology for national defense. If you let 1/10th of 1 % count for 50% (which is basically what the news media do every time they give equal space to 'both' sides on that 1/10th of 1 basis), the argument will become confused and stay that way. In the news "1/10th of 1 % of single males looking for eligible women believe a makeshift plywood pillory figures prominently in keeping them around. Now CSBBRCNBSLSMFTFOCX presents a special on two popular ways of finding that special somebody. ".
The USPS is now supposedly set up completely outside the Executive Branch. Since DOJ, the FBI and all those other Law Enforcement bits are set up under the Executive Branch, SHOULDN'T that whole pesky constitutional 'separation of powers' bit mean pieces of mail WOULD normally be hidden from law enforcement? (Not that I ever really thought they would be...).
There's a difference between thinking that the law actually supports the situation and thinking the government doesn't give a damn what the law supports and will do it anyway.
For one thing, if the government tracks all transactions, they are approaching law enforcement as though there is a pretty significant chance any random person is a criminal. Does anyone really want all other government agencies proceeding on that assumption? Do we want any person working for HEW to approach every contact with a parent as though they are probably a criminal? Do we want the National Endowment for the Arts to be able to do background checks and issue special passes before citizens can enter public Museums? Do we want some bureaucrat at NASA to stop letting the general public attend launches because they get to presume there are a significant number of criminals in the crowd and that gives them unilateral authority? Do we close down public access to the national parks, or have the rangers search everybody's trunks? Is it OK to have a checkpoint demanding papers every time an interstate crosses another state line? Can the government keep a big, well sorted data base of who buys perfectly legal sex toys or adult video through the internet (and what perfectly legal orientation those purchases imply)?
If you don't have to restrict data gathering based on a general presumption of innocence, you can gather a lot of data on things that are not criminal. Then, when, the Wisconsin state representitive who stopped another from speaking because what he was going to say was 'doubtless going to be unbiblical', somehow becomes President of the US, 80% of the population will probably end up being minced into dog-food at the camps. You really have to ask yourself, what happens if this situation leads up to government at the hands of a Torquemada, a Richlieu, or a Pol Pot? What would the man who said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", do with this sort of information? Because that's the sort of men who might be in the decision making spots some day.
The bill of rights is very largely about limiting what the federal government can do. Even if it says that it is totally unconsititutional for the government to do X, there won't be an accompanying constiutional clause against non-government entities doing X, and there may be no laws passed against non-government entities doing X either. A lot of us think that the constitution explicity saying the "Federal Government can't do X", damned-well means "the Federal Government can't spend tax dollars on getting a private entity to do X for them", either. But when we try to open public debate on this, we seem to have to deal with people who are aguing that there is no actual law, just that pesky, trivial, no-big-deal Constitution. Your post reads like that. Sorry, but the Constitution is a bigger deal than all the specific laws the Federal government passes, and not the other way around.
I have an old HP box that is still running ME. The biggest issue is that it won't run IE above 6.0, or a recent Firefox, and so I only connect it to the internet with Opera (and pretty damned rarely now that it's set up properly). It probably has better up times than Win 98 SE, as I've left it running for up to a full week without problems. Once I replaced the default Explorer with a 3rd party file manager, I'd give it overall higher marks than 98SE Right now, it's been about a month since I booted it. It's full of old games, back to TSR.Gold box days, and has all the old cursors, icons, and other such graphics I did during that era. With KVM support, it's vaguely worth keeping.
It's a shame MS finally got software that would stay up more than a week, but only after I learned about Linux. When XP came out, the early reports I heard were that it still wasn't much more stable than 2000 or ME, and that's where I started looking for something better, and switched, about StormLinux 3. Now I run a couple of boxes with Kubuntu and Mint, and the Microsoft box is next to the Amiga 500 and the C-64 SX.
The difference is, 75,000 points vrs. 150,000. Sid didn't just catch one curve ball, he played the analogic equivalent of a whole perfect game of baseball. He could have 'just' memorized all the levels up to 75,000 points, but he kept right on going for that other 75,000 points as well. That means he had to extrapolate from the base data, to project how the system would change at higher levels he hadn't yet seen. (Assuming the game actually kept getting harder - I've never played it, but if the difficulty stops scaling below 75,000 points, I'm sure some people will point that out). So, the question here is not about fancy words, or the social dynamics of intimidation, it's more straightforward. Is it good to use a word such as algorythm instead of a longer phrase where you want to describe "extending what you've memorized from watching to cover the upper half of the game"? I suspect there's no way to stick to simple words, and be reasonably accurate AND not create a pretty long explanation. Personally, if I have to use phrases such as that, I'm likely to use some more complex words to shorten what I'm saying. (Note that it would have made perfect sense to use a word such as 'extrapolate' - in fact I even used it naturally earlier in this post. Probably some readers thought that was hoity-toity, but I doubt most of them did.).
If a lot of libertarians are right, this initiative will rapidly be adopted. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information, and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info. Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.
My own bet is that this will not happen. Fifty years from now, most of the organizations that 'should' voluntarily embrace this initiative, will still be ignoring it, and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along.
In classic models of natural selection, a gene comes into existence through mutation, and then spreads widely because it is subject to natural selection. The time it takes to spread widely depends on how long a generation is for the organism, and how much of an advantage the gene confers over its alternates. Lateral transfer lets a gene spread widely regardless of how much of an advantage it confers (or doesn't). In the long run, it will be natural selection that determines if the gene really confers an advantage and stays around, but in the short run, the gene is spreading from some other cause than natural selection. Mendel's Code with Mutation and Darwin's Natural Selection are the two theories that together make up the Theory of Evolution. Where you don't have both of those, you don't have Evolution, you have something else.
What I find 'funny' is all the "it's just his word against hers" type responses, when actually reading the article and such says that he at the very least stole her property and lied to the Polish police. (I think we are both using funny in the same way here).
I wouldn't find him guilty of this particular crime simply based on that, but we all have reason here to think his word isn't of equal weight with an average person's, if we simply believe that he really took her phone and passport. If that part's true, the two individuals are not equally reliable. Personally, I don't believe in the slightest that Charles Manson really assassinated Beethoven, but that doesn't mean I would rate both of them as equally able or likely to make true statements (please adjust for timeframe as needed to make that analogy make sense).
This is not about what an imaginary person would say, it is about what a court would define by applying a reasonable man test. You have not yet stated an alternative to determine whether it would pass such a test or not. Let's see. Two people enter a room with no black eyes. One person comes out with a black eye. Is it reasonable to assume the other inflicted the black eye? Yes. Without some specific alternate (Such as the knuckle pattern on her shiner resembling her own fist, or some object other than a fist, it's just about the only reasonable assumption. No, a reasonable person would NOT conclude the opposite, at least without additional facts not so far in evidence. Might a reasonable person conclude there may be more to the story? Might a reasonable person suggest some specific alternates that could also be reasonable? Yes, but that's not what YOU are claiming. Courts frequently determine what a hypothetical reasonable person might or might not conclude, and it has the force of law. If you stuck to your position as a juror in an actual case like this, in the US, you would automatically be removed from the jury pool for having already formed an unreasonable opinion. Make your claim in court instead and the judge will tell you what is actually reasonable and instruct you to stick to his or her definition, and if the trial is at all far along will likely make a determination that you have disregarded the jury instructions and quite possibly even lied in swearing your oath as a juror. In a situation such as this case, he or she will definitely tell you your position is unreasonable, period. If you want to argue without evidence or specific alternate explanations that a black eye is not proof that an altercation occured, or there could have been an invisible third person hiding in the room who could have inflicted the eye, or something similarly strange, you will be told what is reasonable, and no, it's not whatever you say.
I don't think you are a deliberate troll, mind you. I think you know nothing about the law, had no clue that some of the other posters were using terms such as 'reasonable man' or 'reasonable doubt' in a specific legal sense rather than the more general way you want to use it, and stuck your two cents in without knowing. You are adding more heat than light here.
We're currently in an era where lawyers have fought to extend copyright law into some sort of generic Intellectual Property law, and then make that ambiguous enough that their company could win two cases back to back on exactly opposite claims. The GPL can easily be abused in this way, as can all the alternatives. Blaming the GPL, or any other license, is a mistake, when the real problem is widespread legal abuse by powerful corporations.
There is no almost certain chance it will never actually happen. Over 3/4 of people sentenced to death row are actually executed eventually. Most criminals newly arrived on death row rate their chances of eventually being executed at less than 1%, despite the actually figures.
The typical person who gets the death penalty in the US has great difficulty imagining they will still be the same person in six months, let alone 20 years. More than a third of them can't pass the tests used to see if fifth graders are learning to project long term consequences as far as the month level. A t least half typically have little to no ability to empathize with anyone not very like them in race, gender, age, and even accent. By some studies, up to 60% of them have a mental health history involving incidents of psychosis. By others, over half were abusing a psychoactive drug at the time of the offense.
If you want to deter them with the death penalty, you need the time from the actual comission of a crime to execution, to be less than two weeks, with all appeals. You need to show them somebody sufficiently like them being executed, within two weeks of the time they consider a death penalty crime of their own, and what you show them needs to be substantially for the same crime, as in, they won't shoot the clerk at the all night gas station, if they have seen a man who looks like them shoot a victim who looks like that clerk,in a similar setting, at night, for similar reasons, and then be given the death penalty for it. Show them a realistic dramatization of the crime and follow it immediately with showing the actual execution, and you have a good chance of deterring them from committing that particular style of crime for a few weeks to a few months. show them something with differences, including ones you probably think should make no difference, and that chance drops.
I don't really want to live in a nation where we have to televise 10 executions a week to cover all the possible combinations, and always sentence somebody within a week of the crime so that we have a week to squeeze in the appeals and actual execution. I don't think that's a workable deterrent. Considering that the time for deterrence basically is between the crime and the execution, not from arrest to execution, deterrence sounds like it just can't work with the typical subject.
The first drones used in military situations were unarmed. Drone use in actual combat dates back at least to WW2, but they were confined to serving as targets training or photo-recon uses. In the 1980s, Iran deployed an armed drone (fitted with 6 RPG-7 grenades for payload). While technically functional, the Iranian design did not see much use and may not have been very effective in the eyes of field commanders. Eventually, the US started deploying armed designs, most probably beginning with the Predator in the 1990s. (The US has had separate drone programs under the Military and CIA control for close to fifty years, and all public claims about the primacy of the Predator program must simply assume there is nothing still in many, many, relevant classified documents which contradicts them).
That's the big twofold greasy slope: 1 - if you allow unarmed drones for police or other civilian organizations, does that mean they will eventually want to deploy armed ones? 2 - if civil deployment is abetted and probably even managed by prior experts from the military and CIA, will they act under a veil of secrecy imported from those same sources?
Doesn't your definition mean that persons who have had voluntary sterilization, i.e. a vasectomy, have committed suicide? Talk about mental health issues - there appear to be whole groups of walking, talking people you can't accept as living, quite possibly including me and others who have chosen by surgical means to stop doing any more reproducing.
Even if you aren't lumping me in your special group, classifying some people you disagree with as dead certainly stops you from having to consider their current opinions, but it doesn't sound like an evolutionarily successful strategy, anymore than classifying some traffic signs as not being real, working traffic signs would be.
If you really want to check facts, the Vatican was first recognized as a separate nation in 1929 a.d. by the Lateran Treaty, signed by representitives of the then current pope on one hand and Benito Mussolini on the other. 1929 is just a tad later than the end of the Roman empire.* Maybe you are thinking of 'the' Holy See,** or some of the Papal Estates that went back to at least Medieval times.
* Watch someone post "citation needed".
**Technically, any Bishop's diocese is a See, and presumably at least some Bishops in some eras have been not particularly unholy, so what the Pope, as Bishop of Rome, has, is merely a holy see, even though a lot of lay people seem to use the term like he has a lock on it.
I'd be skin and bones at 170. I can stay at 200 and still be under 16% bodyfat. OTOH, maybe it will scale. Get it to a base payload of about 250 lbs, and I'd give it a try.
If you want diet that tastes like sugar, there are some options:
For the big producers: Pepsi's Aquafina FlavorSplash waters - grape, raspberry and wild berry, use just Sucralose, (a 0 calorie substitute) last I checked. No other Pepsi products use just Sucralose to my knowledge, but rather mix it with something else such as Apartamine and/or Ace-K. Ace-K is a big issue for diet soda safety, in that it's not commonly mentioned and less seems to be known about it than other non-sugar alternatives. Sucralose occasionally tends to upset digestion, but mostly in people who are consuming quite a few cans a day, and switching over to it gradually helps - 80% or more of people who do a lot of sodas a day, do OK by gradually switching and giving the digestive system a couple of weeks to adapt. There are no Coca-Cola products with just Sucralose, as far as I can tell. Diet-Rite cola is usually made with just Splenda (sucralose), as is Diet RC cola. It doesn't hurt to check the labels on any of these, as there may be some canned or bottled in other countries than the US that isn't exactly to the US formula.
Honest Fizz is a bit pricy, running about 1.20$ US a can. It's sweetened with a mixture of Stevia Leaf Extract and Erythritol. Erythritol is a complex alchohol and means one can has about 5 grams of carbs. (that's not a lot, but it's a few calories - about 30-40). Just like Sucralose, some people get increased gas or even cramping from Erythritol, some don't, at least if they aren't drinking eight cans a day. Just because one of these substances causes discomfort in some users doesn't mean the other one will affect the same people.
For pure Stevia sweetener, you could try Zevia, which now has 15 flavors, including Mountain Zevia, Doctor Zevia, and Caffine Free Cola.
I don't get paid to plug any of these. I don't own stock in them and nobody with them has asked me to say anything about them.
You need to be at plus 5, just for that first sentence, and the rest are as good.
1, Company has trouble with commonly skilled criminal crackers. 2. Company gets special permission to take matters into its own hands. To get this, company does special favors for a nation state.
(You don't think the politicians just ask for campaign contributions when they can also ask for "law enforcement assistance" against terrorists, do you? Or that those same terrorists, who think of themselves as involved in a war, respect a strong distinction between homeland security and the US military, or similar set ups in other countries?) 3. More skilled political/military crackers, who may also even be backed by the full special resources of another nation, now treat the company as just another arm of a government's military, and even if they have some strange desire to abide by the Geneva convention or other limits, can make a fair case it's a 'legitimate' target. 4. War between two nation states breaks out, starting with computer actions, and with the Company's assets as the primary battlefield. 5. Since everyone thinks cyber-war sounds dumb, there are no firm lines, and the war that starts inside computers ends as the company's employees face special attention from landmines, IEDs and rocket propelled grenades.
Yes, I left out the "?" and "profit" steps. Anyone really think they need to be there?
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Scientists have a pretty good estimate for how common Supernovas are, but that number does not match well with how many were reported in history. We know that the Chinese observed at least one supernova that nobody in Europe bothered to write down. There's evidence suggesting that a lot of the 'plague of this, plague of that' events in Exodus are concurrent with a massive volcanic eruption on the isle of Santorini and that the Egyptians were, at the very least, informed about this eruption by traders, but if so, it's not in any official Egyptian record (and you think it would have been to their advantage, if only to counter any claims by their ex-slaves that all the Egyptian gods had just had their asses kicked by something called Yahweh).
Yes, you would think somebody should have recorded an event like the Carrington auroras, but we do have examples where a large and well developed culture seems to have just stuck their fingers in their ears and ignored the whole plague of miracles/mind-numbing-problem/disaster/end of the world/whatever till it went away. This seems to be exactly the thing the phrase "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence." was coined for. Your best guess is 'once', mine is 'once, baring something weird that seems to happen more than you'ld think, when humans are involved'.
I suspect the general public sees the hyped claims of various consultants a lot more than it sees the rational steps being taken. Why? because those "consultants" are trying to get free advertisments for their services by using the news. As long as the news facilitates this, the public either gets a distorted view, or has to go to the much more radical step of rejecting the basic trustworthyness of ALL news. Deciding the whole of mass media, entering your home for hours every day, is trying to con you, is a much bigger step than deciding a bunch of power companies, scientists, and odd little government agencies you seldom think about (i.e. the National Institute of Standards) are doing it.
The tax in question is imposed on the Telco's, and recovered by a fee they add each month on the phone bill. Legally, it is counted as a tax when the corporations pay it out, but called a fee when the individual actually pays it in. Anyone with a land line pays it, however poor they are. The EIC for a single person, at max, is $ 480. The fees the phone companies charge that subsidise the universal service charge are usually about $72 per year, so just having a land line phone would eat about 20% of that EIC you're invoking. Most single poor people do not even get all their witholding back - that's something that is much more possible if the poor person is raising a minor child or three. A single person can be well under the poverty level and still pay income taxes. As my example shows in part, other taxes may well mean the poor person is paying a good percentage of their income in taxes despite the EIC. Remember, to get the EIC, the person must work and thus have earned income. For more than 50% of the working poor, work translates to gas taxes for driving to work, plus vehicle liscence taxes. It can include state and local sales taxes of up to 10% (possible in California). Arguably, the rent most poor people pay includes covering the property taxes on the space they rent, (or their landlord is somehow willing to rent at a loss). You can beat $ 480 pretty easily, and it's quite likely for a single person making less than $10,000 to be a net tax payer. When you factor in the personal share of Social Security and Medicare, it's pretty frequent for a single person making 10K a year to be a net FEDERAL taxpayer.
You can also call some things a fee at one end to hide the fact they are taxes, and so falsely make it look like the poor are paying less taxes than they are. Then you can find some dumbass to parrot the false claim that the poor get all their money back via tax returns.
Highest point in Tennessee: Clingman's Dome at 6,643 feet (2,025 m),
Highest point in Florida: Britton Hill at 345 feet (105 m).
The lowest point in Tennessee is 178 feet above sea level, at the Mississippi River near Memphis.
The lowest points in Florida are all at sea level (0 ft.), unless you count a few coastal sinkholes.
The Mean Elevation of Tennessee is 900 feet above sea level.
The Mean Elevation of Florida is 100 feet above sea level.
So the mean locations in Florida are under 78 feet of water before the lowest point in Tenn is flooded.
I have no idea what point postbigbang thinks he is making. I'd be interested to find out just how much ice he thinks lies over solid land, world wide. Maybe he's expecting the Mountains of Madness to be all ice and melt off.
It is possible to accidentally perform the actual hit. To run afterwards means you either knew you hit the person and then had depraved indifference to the potential to stop and assist and just maybe save that person's life, or that you were so unaware of what you were doing that you had a legal obligation not to drive in that condition, and the depraved indifference enters automatically at that point even if it's before the collision even happened. That's how my state views a hit and run fatality - you can't do one accidentally, because at some point in the process you had to deliberately decide to do what you did even if it resulted in you killing somebody. That's manslaughter at minimum, usually with aggravating conditions. Try and claim to a judge that the whole thing was somehow accidental and see what happens - it's a good way to get the maximum sentence.
If you are a man, I would still advise not going to strange places with strange men and leaving your drink unattended.
I live close enough to the Charleston in TN that I have gotten used to checking whenever the word comes up without more info.
You, yourself admitted that at least one item on Kr1ll1n (579971)'s list was reasonable.
Other people are even now pointing out that what you claim was obvious is not obvious.
I supect you'll be surprised how many people who don't live in the US also don't find ANYTHING about which Charlston is largest obvious, and in fact you'll probably hear from people who only know of a handfull of the very largest cities in the US and have never heard of ANY Charleston.
Your claim that the mention of the general US Drug Enforcement Administration appearing in the summary invalidates all non-us locations is itself wrong (The US siezes assets in cases of INTERNATIONAL drug trafficing, so the summary is just assuming something is 'obvious' too - you've got a whole lot of "my side gets to declare EVERYTHING is obvious to win our Internet argument" going there.
Yet despite those issues, you're still busting someone's chops. You've jumped on somebody who 'obviously' took at least two minutes doing some research, to get the list you are declaring irrelevant. You see with your own eyes a piece of research that I feel confident took at least two minutes and your first nit-picking, obsessive compulsive act is to criticise the poster for not taking two minutes to research something. That's like me reading your post and then claiming you are 'obviously' a secret lifetime South Carolinian.
I have never met you before, but my first impression is you are the sort of pedantic fool who trys to bully people at near random to bolster his flagging self esteem, falls back on a claim of Aspergers when called on it, and you have the sort of underlying, monumental anger-management issues that make you an impossibly annoying jerk for everyone who has to deal with you day to day. In fact, that's "Obvious!".
This article is about the very thin, topmost portions of the atmosphere, with basically less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the air. Warming related data there looks funny, compared to the main bulk of the atmosphere (roughly 99.9%).
Remember "climategate"? That was about somebody either trying to fudge data or honestly reconcile odd data on high altitude forests. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the researcher was totally guilty of some kind of deliberate fraud - it was still data about roughly the fringe 1/10th of 1 percent of forests (part of that data was specifically from odd trees actually found above the normal treelines of certain mountains - that's practically the definition of quirky data).
Yes, the argument is confused, because one side will say "See, one whole tenth of one percent is flaky/fixed/fraudulent - that matters so much the other 99.9% should be tossed immediately and everybody should make up their minds based only on the 'one tenth of one' evidence. If you really decide scientific questions by letting a fringe 1/10th of 1 % overide all other data, then enjoy throwing out Evolution, Relativity, and really every other theory. I'm pretty sure if we run 1,000 brand new experiments about Newton's gravitational theory, we can get one result that says it's all hogwash and we should invest our entire national science budget in Philogeston futures and Phrenology for national defense.
If you let 1/10th of 1 % count for 50% (which is basically what the news media do every time they give equal space to 'both' sides on that 1/10th of 1 basis), the argument will become confused and stay that way. In the news "1/10th of 1 % of single males looking for eligible women believe a makeshift plywood pillory figures prominently in keeping them around. Now CSBBRCNBSLSMFTFOCX presents a special on two popular ways of finding that special somebody. ".
The USPS is now supposedly set up completely outside the Executive Branch. Since DOJ, the FBI and all those other Law Enforcement bits are set up under the Executive Branch, SHOULDN'T that whole pesky constitutional 'separation of powers' bit mean pieces of mail WOULD normally be hidden from law enforcement? (Not that I ever really thought they would be...).
There's a difference between thinking that the law actually supports the situation and thinking the government doesn't give a damn what the law supports and will do it anyway.
For one thing, if the government tracks all transactions, they are approaching law enforcement as though there is a pretty significant chance any random person is a criminal. Does anyone really want all other government agencies proceeding on that assumption? Do we want any person working for HEW to approach every contact with a parent as though they are probably a criminal? Do we want the National Endowment for the Arts to be able to do background checks and issue special passes before citizens can enter public Museums? Do we want some bureaucrat at NASA to stop letting the general public attend launches because they get to presume there are a significant number of criminals in the crowd and that gives them unilateral authority? Do we close down public access to the national parks, or have the rangers search everybody's trunks? Is it OK to have a checkpoint demanding papers every time an interstate crosses another state line? Can the government keep a big, well sorted data base of who buys perfectly legal sex toys or adult video through the internet (and what perfectly legal orientation those purchases imply)?
If you don't have to restrict data gathering based on a general presumption of innocence, you can gather a lot of data on things that are not criminal. Then, when, the Wisconsin state representitive who stopped another from speaking because what he was going to say was 'doubtless going to be unbiblical', somehow becomes President of the US, 80% of the population will probably end up being minced into dog-food at the camps. You really have to ask yourself, what happens if this situation leads up to government at the hands of a Torquemada, a Richlieu, or a Pol Pot? What would the man who said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", do with this sort of information? Because that's the sort of men who might be in the decision making spots some day.
The bill of rights is very largely about limiting what the federal government can do. Even if it says that it is totally unconsititutional for the government to do X, there won't be an accompanying constiutional clause against non-government entities doing X, and there may be no laws passed against non-government entities doing X either. A lot of us think that the constitution explicity saying the "Federal Government can't do X", damned-well means "the Federal Government can't spend tax dollars on getting a private entity to do X for them", either. But when we try to open public debate on this, we seem to have to deal with people who are aguing that there is no actual law, just that pesky, trivial, no-big-deal Constitution. Your post reads like that. Sorry, but the Constitution is a bigger deal than all the specific laws the Federal government passes, and not the other way around.
I have an old HP box that is still running ME. The biggest issue is that it won't run IE above 6.0, or a recent Firefox, and so I only connect it to the internet with Opera (and pretty damned rarely now that it's set up properly). It probably has better up times than Win 98 SE, as I've left it running for up to a full week without problems. Once I replaced the default Explorer with a 3rd party file manager, I'd give it overall higher marks than 98SE Right now, it's been about a month since I booted it. It's full of old games, back to TSR .Gold box days, and has all the old cursors, icons, and other such graphics I did during that era. With KVM support, it's vaguely worth keeping.
It's a shame MS finally got software that would stay up more than a week, but only after I learned about Linux. When XP came out, the early reports I heard were that it still wasn't much more stable than 2000 or ME, and that's where I started looking for something better, and switched, about StormLinux 3. Now I run a couple of boxes with Kubuntu and Mint, and the Microsoft box is next to the Amiga 500 and the C-64 SX.
The difference is, 75,000 points vrs. 150,000. Sid didn't just catch one curve ball, he played the analogic equivalent of a whole perfect game of baseball. He could have 'just' memorized all the levels up to 75,000 points, but he kept right on going for that other 75,000 points as well. That means he had to extrapolate from the base data, to project how the system would change at higher levels he hadn't yet seen. (Assuming the game actually kept getting harder - I've never played it, but if the difficulty stops scaling below 75,000 points, I'm sure some people will point that out). So, the question here is not about fancy words, or the social dynamics of intimidation, it's more straightforward. Is it good to use a word such as algorythm instead of a longer phrase where you want to describe "extending what you've memorized from watching to cover the upper half of the game"? I suspect there's no way to stick to simple words, and be reasonably accurate AND not create a pretty long explanation. Personally, if I have to use phrases such as that, I'm likely to use some more complex words to shorten what I'm saying. (Note that it would have made perfect sense to use a word such as 'extrapolate' - in fact I even used it naturally earlier in this post. Probably some readers thought that was hoity-toity, but I doubt most of them did.).
If a lot of libertarians are right, this initiative will rapidly be adopted. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information, and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info. Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.
My own bet is that this will not happen. Fifty years from now, most of the organizations that 'should' voluntarily embrace this initiative, will still be ignoring it, and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along.
In classic models of natural selection, a gene comes into existence through mutation, and then spreads widely because it is subject to natural selection. The time it takes to spread widely depends on how long a generation is for the organism, and how much of an advantage the gene confers over its alternates. Lateral transfer lets a gene spread widely regardless of how much of an advantage it confers (or doesn't). In the long run, it will be natural selection that determines if the gene really confers an advantage and stays around, but in the short run, the gene is spreading from some other cause than natural selection. Mendel's Code with Mutation and Darwin's Natural Selection are the two theories that together make up the Theory of Evolution. Where you don't have both of those, you don't have Evolution, you have something else.
Duuuh! Bacteria don't use Linux, they run something with a microkernel archetecture.
What I find 'funny' is all the "it's just his word against hers" type responses, when actually reading the article and such says that he at the very least stole her property and lied to the Polish police. (I think we are both using funny in the same way here).
I wouldn't find him guilty of this particular crime simply based on that, but we all have reason here to think his word isn't of equal weight with an average person's, if we simply believe that he really took her phone and passport. If that part's true, the two individuals are not equally reliable. Personally, I don't believe in the slightest that Charles Manson really assassinated Beethoven, but that doesn't mean I would rate both of them as equally able or likely to make true statements (please adjust for timeframe as needed to make that analogy make sense).
This is not about what an imaginary person would say, it is about what a court would define by applying a reasonable man test. You have not yet stated an alternative to determine whether it would pass such a test or not.
Let's see. Two people enter a room with no black eyes. One person comes out with a black eye. Is it reasonable to assume the other inflicted the black eye? Yes. Without some specific alternate (Such as the knuckle pattern on her shiner resembling her own fist, or some object other than a fist, it's just about the only reasonable assumption. No, a reasonable person would NOT conclude the opposite, at least without additional facts not so far in evidence. Might a reasonable person conclude there may be more to the story? Might a reasonable person suggest some specific alternates that could also be reasonable? Yes, but that's not what YOU are claiming.
Courts frequently determine what a hypothetical reasonable person might or might not conclude, and it has the force of law. If you stuck to your position as a juror in an actual case like this, in the US, you would automatically be removed from the jury pool for having already formed an unreasonable opinion. Make your claim in court instead and the judge will tell you what is actually reasonable and instruct you to stick to his or her definition, and if the trial is at all far along will likely make a determination that you have disregarded the jury instructions and quite possibly even lied in swearing your oath as a juror. In a situation such as this case, he or she will definitely tell you your position is unreasonable, period. If you want to argue without evidence or specific alternate explanations that a black eye is not proof that an altercation occured, or there could have been an invisible third person hiding in the room who could have inflicted the eye, or something similarly strange, you will be told what is reasonable, and no, it's not whatever you say.
I don't think you are a deliberate troll, mind you. I think you know nothing about the law, had no clue that some of the other posters were using terms such as 'reasonable man' or 'reasonable doubt' in a specific legal sense rather than the more general way you want to use it, and stuck your two cents in without knowing. You are adding more heat than light here.
We're currently in an era where lawyers have fought to extend copyright law into some sort of generic Intellectual Property law, and then make that ambiguous enough that their company could win two cases back to back on exactly opposite claims. The GPL can easily be abused in this way, as can all the alternatives. Blaming the GPL, or any other license, is a mistake, when the real problem is widespread legal abuse by powerful corporations.
There is no almost certain chance it will never actually happen. Over 3/4 of people sentenced to death row are actually executed eventually. Most criminals newly arrived on death row rate their chances of eventually being executed at less than 1%, despite the actually figures.
The typical person who gets the death penalty in the US has great difficulty imagining they will still be the same person in six months, let alone 20 years. More than a third of them can't pass the tests used to see if fifth graders are learning to project long term consequences as far as the month level. A t least half typically have little to no ability to empathize with anyone not very like them in race, gender, age, and even accent. By some studies, up to 60% of them have a mental health history involving incidents of psychosis. By others, over half were abusing a psychoactive drug at the time of the offense.
If you want to deter them with the death penalty, you need the time from the actual comission of a crime to execution, to be less than two weeks, with all appeals. You need to show them somebody sufficiently like them being executed, within two weeks of the time they consider a death penalty crime of their own, and what you show them needs to be substantially for the same crime, as in, they won't shoot the clerk at the all night gas station, if they have seen a man who looks like them shoot a victim who looks like that clerk,in a similar setting, at night, for similar reasons, and then be given the death penalty for it. Show them a realistic dramatization of the crime and follow it immediately with showing the actual execution, and you have a good chance of deterring them from committing that particular style of crime for a few weeks to a few months. show them something with differences, including ones you probably think should make no difference, and that chance drops.
I don't really want to live in a nation where we have to televise 10 executions a week to cover all the possible combinations, and always sentence somebody within a week of the crime so that we have a week to squeeze in the appeals and actual execution. I don't think that's a workable deterrent. Considering that the time for deterrence basically is between the crime and the execution, not from arrest to execution, deterrence sounds like it just can't work with the typical subject.
A good starting source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/CunninghamDeathRowReview.pdf
For the mental ability assessment and mental state portions, try starting about page 198.
The first drones used in military situations were unarmed. Drone use in actual combat dates back at least to WW2, but they were confined to serving as targets training or photo-recon uses. In the 1980s, Iran deployed an armed drone (fitted with 6 RPG-7 grenades for payload). While technically functional, the Iranian design did not see much use and may not have been very effective in the eyes of field commanders. Eventually, the US started deploying armed designs, most probably beginning with the Predator in the 1990s. (The US has had separate drone programs under the Military and CIA control for close to fifty years, and all public claims about the primacy of the Predator program must simply assume there is nothing still in many, many, relevant classified documents which contradicts them).
That's the big twofold greasy slope:
1 - if you allow unarmed drones for police or other civilian organizations, does that mean they will eventually want to deploy armed ones?
2 - if civil deployment is abetted and probably even managed by prior experts from the military and CIA, will they act under a veil of secrecy imported from those same sources?
Doesn't your definition mean that persons who have had voluntary sterilization, i.e. a vasectomy, have committed suicide? Talk about mental health issues - there appear to be whole groups of walking, talking people you can't accept as living, quite possibly including me and others who have chosen by surgical means to stop doing any more reproducing.
Even if you aren't lumping me in your special group, classifying some people you disagree with as dead certainly stops you from having to consider their current opinions, but it doesn't sound like an evolutionarily successful strategy, anymore than classifying some traffic signs as not being real, working traffic signs would be.
If you really want to check facts, the Vatican was first recognized as a separate nation in 1929 a.d. by the Lateran Treaty, signed by representitives of the then current pope on one hand and Benito Mussolini on the other. 1929 is just a tad later than the end of the Roman empire.* Maybe you are thinking of 'the' Holy See,** or some of the Papal Estates that went back to at least Medieval times.
* Watch someone post "citation needed".
**Technically, any Bishop's diocese is a See, and presumably at least some Bishops in some eras have been not particularly unholy, so what the Pope, as Bishop of Rome, has, is merely a holy see, even though a lot of lay people seem to use the term like he has a lock on it.
I'd be skin and bones at 170. I can stay at 200 and still be under 16% bodyfat. OTOH, maybe it will scale. Get it to a base payload of about 250 lbs, and I'd give it a try.
If you want diet that tastes like sugar, there are some options:
For the big producers:
Pepsi's Aquafina FlavorSplash waters - grape, raspberry and wild berry, use just Sucralose, (a 0 calorie substitute) last I checked. No other Pepsi products use just Sucralose to my knowledge, but rather mix it with something else such as Apartamine and/or Ace-K. Ace-K is a big issue for diet soda safety, in that it's not commonly mentioned and less seems to be known about it than other non-sugar alternatives. Sucralose occasionally tends to upset digestion, but mostly in people who are consuming quite a few cans a day, and switching over to it gradually helps - 80% or more of people who do a lot of sodas a day, do OK by gradually switching and giving the digestive system a couple of weeks to adapt. There are no Coca-Cola products with just Sucralose, as far as I can tell. Diet-Rite cola is usually made with just Splenda (sucralose), as is Diet RC cola. It doesn't hurt to check the labels on any of these, as there may be some canned or bottled in other countries than the US that isn't exactly to the US formula.
Honest Fizz is a bit pricy, running about 1.20$ US a can. It's sweetened with a mixture of Stevia Leaf Extract and Erythritol. Erythritol is a complex alchohol and means one can has about 5 grams of carbs. (that's not a lot, but it's a few calories - about 30-40). Just like Sucralose, some people get increased gas or even cramping from Erythritol, some don't, at least if they aren't drinking eight cans a day. Just because one of these substances causes discomfort in some users doesn't mean the other one will affect the same people.
For pure Stevia sweetener, you could try Zevia, which now has 15 flavors, including Mountain Zevia, Doctor Zevia, and Caffine Free Cola.
I don't get paid to plug any of these. I don't own stock in them and nobody with them has asked me to say anything about them.
You need to be at plus 5, just for that first sentence, and the rest are as good.
1, Company has trouble with commonly skilled criminal crackers.
2. Company gets special permission to take matters into its own hands. To get this, company does special favors for a nation state.
(You don't think the politicians just ask for campaign contributions when they can also ask for "law enforcement assistance" against terrorists, do you? Or that those same terrorists, who think of themselves as involved in a war, respect a strong distinction between homeland security and the US military, or similar set ups in other countries?)
3. More skilled political/military crackers, who may also even be backed by the full special resources of another nation, now treat the company as just another arm of a government's military, and even if they have some strange desire to abide by the Geneva convention or other limits, can make a fair case it's a 'legitimate' target.
4. War between two nation states breaks out, starting with computer actions, and with the Company's assets as the primary battlefield.
5. Since everyone thinks cyber-war sounds dumb, there are no firm lines, and the war that starts inside computers ends as the company's employees face special attention from landmines, IEDs and rocket propelled grenades.
Yes, I left out the "?" and "profit" steps. Anyone really think they need to be there?