I'm waiting for a comment remotely germaine to the discussion, which your is not. Mine is, though.
Oh, forgot, yours is the strategy of most people when presented with an argument that they are unable to win; to wit: change the topic, and at the same time try to belittle your opposition. I agree this usually works for bleeding heart liberals when debating gun control, and it works because most rational people decide to drop the subject once you employ it (because there is no use arguing like this), thereby quashing intelligent debate. This time you failed. Sorry, loser.
WRONG. One slice of a good sharp knife across the external carotid artery is all it takes for a very swift death by knife. Equally, one good full swing bash to the head with a 20 pound sledge hammer is equally deadly. It takes nothing more than a tiny bit of knowledge, and the willingness to do so. In the same way, merely shooting someone once (or even a few times) isn't a guarantee of death unless you happen to hit them in the right place (or enough times) - as evidenced by the fact that the father lived.
I whole-heartedly agree. There is almost no place for IT in elementary school. What is the point of teaching children how to make powerpoint presentations about their fluffy bunny when they can't even read a sentence such as this one, or do long division, or explain how the moon moves around the earth, and the earth around the sun. I can rationalize a computer lab in Jr.High/High school; but, there again, I have serious misgivings about wasting months training this age group how to copy and paste in Word, or send an e-mail in Outlook. I suppose these skills are considered basic now, and do have a place, but so much time is devoted to such trivialities that it's cringe-worthy. Meanwhile the type of computer course I grew up with (starting in Jr. High), were we had to understand how to use a recursive function call, or verify a hash over a domain is simply not taught until college. This is just pathetic.
I know schools have dumbed down substantially in my life-time. I can see it with my own children who are now leaving school for University with a much less well rounded education than I had. It's time our schools and politician stopped treating computers and IT like cargo cult cultures would, and concentrate on education again.
Unlikely. From personal experience I have decided that the ability to drive well is inversely proportional to intelligence. The smartest people I know are the worst drivers, while the best drivers I know are amongst the dumbest people I know.
Your prejudice towards some idiotic test which supposedly measures intelligence is noted, however. I wouldn't take much consolation from having an IQ at 110, the last time mine was supposedly measured when I was in the fourth grade, it was 155, and I can assure you, I'm nothing special in the brains department.
IQ is a joke, and people who trust it are fools. Mensah is nothing more than a elitest club for people who think they're smart.
Shee-yit, Word isn't 100% compatbile with Word documents ! I frequently need to 'repair' Word 2007 documents before I can re-open them. This of course begs the question, if Word can repair it, why doesn't it just open it ? This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
...once the referee makes the initial spot of the ball
That's my whole point. The location that the Ref chooses is completely arbitrary, although usually relatively close to reality. The ref can't possibly be placing the ball to a degree of accuracy which subsequent markers - like that stupid chain - then rely upon. I wasn't actually commenting upon the accuracy of the yellow line, rather the essentially arbitrary location decided upon by the Ref.
I mean this: http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/apod/ap080104.html Of course, I've never seen it quite that bold, but I recall in my youth being able to see the galaxy edge on distinctly in the night sky. You could tell that the galaxy was shaped at least something like what the text books were saying (instead of just a big sphere) , because you could look into it, or off away from it, and see the difference in star density. You could descern a distinct shape or structure, and even a buldge in the middle if you looked at the right time of year. Now, I can barely tell where it is. That's the difference between light pollution and no light pollution.
... All that technology applied to paint a yellow line in a completely arbitrary position. The rules need to be changed so that the location of the ball touching the ground is the location of the line. Also, the ball should have some kind of RFID chip in it, and the entire field should be built on top of a fine mesh of RFID sensors. Until then the location of the line is subject to too much human error, and as a result completely arbitrarily placed anyway.
Can you see the milky way, I no longer can. I used to be able to as a child, but now, with so much light pollution, I can only make out the brightest of the stars. I live 20 miles south-east of the City of London. Light pollution is a real problem. It affects animals, and even plants.
Why aren't people such as yourself concerned about just how counterproductive most of our security theater is?
Actually, my original point is that I'm entirely unsympathetic to the 'innocent' Muslims ejected from their airplane seats over some 'unusual' comments. My initial thoughts, after reading the news item, were: 1.) Wow, they must have been saying something quite weird for anyone (stupid Americans) to have noticed something unusual. 2.) Wow, they must have been speaking quite loudly in order to be heard above the normal roar of noise inside an commercial airplane during passenger loading. 3.) Wow, the fact that they were ejected, no questions asked is very strange, I'll bet there's more to this story that we're not being told.
My response to all this, and the snivelling about how their rights were being trampled upon was that I'm unsympathetic to their plight primarily becuase the Muslim community has brought this upon themselves. I stand by that statement. We never hear the Muslim community being up in arms about a Muslim suicide bomber smearing the good (?) name of Islam, but we always see a fanatical rage about something as innocuous as a political cartoon in a foreign newspaper
Now, I entirely agree that so far no actions that I've seen DHS take are in any way effective towards preventing a determined terrorist from doing just about anything they could do previously. Yes, I agree the vast majority of what I see DHS doing seems to be a complete waste of time, nothing more than a show. However, I think back to my days in the U.S. Navy many years ago, and wonder about the whole 'show of force' doctrine. While I was living through it, I used to laugh at the idiocy of it too. However, now with the perspective of hindsight, and hopefully, increased wisdomI think perhaps that 'show' was a significant part of the overall strategy. I'm of the opinion that there was more to the show than meets the eye, if you'll excuse the expression. The show really was more than just a show, because every once in a while we did make things go boom! I'm pretty sure there's more to DHS than the mess they've made of airport security - at least I hope so.
Really? Just attending a Madrasa, or listening to your government's foreign policy stance, is sufficient to make someone strap on a bomb and blow themselves up?
Apparently, yes. Or haven't you noticed that the number of (suicide or not) bombings has been steadily rising ?
Besides, even granting tens of millions of them, that's still less than a hundredth of a percent odds that the Muslim you're sitting next to is a terrorist.
Perhaps, but it's far higher than the likelihood of sitting next to a Christian/Jewish/Hindu bomber. This is the issue at hand, you may choose to ignore the threat, but that policy is just plain dumb, don't you think ?
The Muslim community has brought this upon themselves, and unfortunately, others. Racial profiling, yes, so what, what other profiling can be used. If Arabic looking people with names like Muhammad, or Fatih act suspicious, that's three separate pieces of a puzzle. How many pieces do you need before you transition from unfair to fair profiling?. Is it fair, maybe not; but then neither is suicide bombing. Tough shit, I say. Clean your own house (Islam) before telling me how to clean mine (democracy).
I don't know of any condition that makes fresh breast milk a dietary requirement for a grownup
Neither do I, but let's assume that one exists. Is it then acceptable for such a thing to be done in public ? If not, why not ? I've seen people take insulin injections in public. I've seen some even more extreme use of prescription injections (A woman on heart transplant anti-rejection drugs, for example, had about three different injections right in front of me as if it was no big deal). These actually quite personal behaviours that one wouldn't expect to see in public; but, somehow they're acceptable. Why ? How is this more acceptable than breast feeding. It's pretty weird. I'm actually all for breast feeding, and it hardly bothers me to see it anywhere, the more I see it, the less it bothers me. Now, I presume the same thing would happen if we allowed oral sex in public, eventually we'd all be used to it, and wouldn't think anything of it.
I can think of plenty of things I don't mind that others find very distrubing: Farting, Belching. But when it comes to Nose Picking, I draw the line. Why ?
So, you're OK with a 2 y/o sucking milk from a breast. What about a 3 y/o ? What's the age limit ?
What if I, a 45 y/o had some peculiar dietary requirement for fresh breast milk - actually, I'm not a huge fan, although the few times I've tasted it I kind of liked it, perhaps it's a re-acquired taste ?
Is it acceptable to you that a twenty year old person (male or female) sucks milk from a womans breast in public. I think I would find such a scene disturbing, although a two year old sucking on the same breast is totally acceptable to me.
So, at what age is breast feeding no longer acceptable ?
Now, If you have no problem with an adult sucking breast milk in public, do you have a problem with an adult sucking semen from a penis in public ? What if it were a 18 month old baby sucking semen from a penis ? What if an adult was licking the shit out of someones ass in public ? I'm trying to decide how we make such arbitrary decisions about what is acceptable and what is not.
Personally I have no issue with public breast feeding. But I certainly would not want to see some of the other activities I described, although I can't say for sure where I draw the line.
Idiot - There's a very good reason you don't want to see anyone shitting or pissing near you in public. That's because if everyone did it, your environment would be filthy. Breast feeding, on the other hand, does no harm to your environment at all. In fact, a case could be made that it improves it.
Perhaps you should reflect upon what it is you find so distasteful about an infant sucking a tit. Is it the bare breast (which is mostly covered by the babies face anyway), or is it the baby eating, or what ? Would you object if the baby was sicking a breast shaped bottle ? Would you object if the woman was bottle feeding while wearing a tiny bikini ?
Oddly, my ISP seems to have experienced some kind of problem starting just after midnight. I monitor my aDSL modem/router activity every 10 minutes, and discovered that between 00:00:02 (the last entry in the log) and 00:10:01 the router reports zero network traffic, and continued like that until some time late yesterday afternoon. I did the usual diagnostics tests to ensure I wasn't to blame, but all seems well on my end. Without me taking any corrective action the problem disappeared, so I'm pretty confident it was in fact my ISP.
What's odd is that I was able to gain aDSL sync, and establish a PPP session (which involves logging in), but there seemed to be no IP routing going on at all. Pings would simply vanish.
It's times like this that I wish I had a more sophisticated modem/router so that I could capture the 'out' side of the device and see what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for a comment remotely germaine to the discussion, which your is not. Mine is, though.
Oh, forgot, yours is the strategy of most people when presented with an argument that they are unable to win; to wit: change the topic, and at the same time try to belittle your opposition. I agree this usually works for bleeding heart liberals when debating gun control, and it works because most rational people decide to drop the subject once you employ it (because there is no use arguing like this), thereby quashing intelligent debate. This time you failed. Sorry, loser.
WRONG. One slice of a good sharp knife across the external carotid artery is all it takes for a very swift death by knife. Equally, one good full swing bash to the head with a 20 pound sledge hammer is equally deadly. It takes nothing more than a tiny bit of knowledge, and the willingness to do so. In the same way, merely shooting someone once (or even a few times) isn't a guarantee of death unless you happen to hit them in the right place (or enough times) - as evidenced by the fact that the father lived.
I whole-heartedly agree. There is almost no place for IT in elementary school. What is the point of teaching children how to make powerpoint presentations about their fluffy bunny when they can't even read a sentence such as this one, or do long division, or explain how the moon moves around the earth, and the earth around the sun. I can rationalize a computer lab in Jr.High/High school; but, there again, I have serious misgivings about wasting months training this age group how to copy and paste in Word, or send an e-mail in Outlook. I suppose these skills are considered basic now, and do have a place, but so much time is devoted to such trivialities that it's cringe-worthy. Meanwhile the type of computer course I grew up with (starting in Jr. High), were we had to understand how to use a recursive function call, or verify a hash over a domain is simply not taught until college. This is just pathetic.
I know schools have dumbed down substantially in my life-time. I can see it with my own children who are now leaving school for University with a much less well rounded education than I had. It's time our schools and politician stopped treating computers and IT like cargo cult cultures would, and concentrate on education again.
OK, but it's still a crap analogy. and very confusing to read.
Unlikely. From personal experience I have decided that the ability to drive well is inversely proportional to intelligence. The smartest people I know are the worst drivers, while the best drivers I know are amongst the dumbest people I know.
Your prejudice towards some idiotic test which supposedly measures intelligence is noted, however. I wouldn't take much consolation from having an IQ at 110, the last time mine was supposedly measured when I was in the fourth grade, it was 155, and I can assure you, I'm nothing special in the brains department.
IQ is a joke, and people who trust it are fools. Mensah is nothing more than a elitest club for people who think they're smart.
I stand corrected. s/begs/raises
... 100% compatible ...
Shee-yit, Word isn't 100% compatbile with Word documents ! I frequently need to 'repair' Word 2007 documents before I can re-open them. This of course begs the question, if Word can repair it, why doesn't it just open it ? This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
...once the referee makes the initial spot of the ball
That's my whole point. The location that the Ref chooses is completely arbitrary, although usually relatively close to reality. The ref can't possibly be placing the ball to a degree of accuracy which subsequent markers - like that stupid chain - then rely upon. I wasn't actually commenting upon the accuracy of the yellow line, rather the essentially arbitrary location decided upon by the Ref.
I believe that you meant anthropocentric. I'm pretty sure the root is anthrop, not anthro.
I mean this: http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/apod/ap080104.html Of course, I've never seen it quite that bold, but I recall in my youth being able to see the galaxy edge on distinctly in the night sky. You could tell that the galaxy was shaped at least something like what the text books were saying (instead of just a big sphere) , because you could look into it, or off away from it, and see the difference in star density. You could descern a distinct shape or structure, and even a buldge in the middle if you looked at the right time of year. Now, I can barely tell where it is. That's the difference between light pollution and no light pollution.
... All that technology applied to paint a yellow line in a completely arbitrary position. The rules need to be changed so that the location of the ball touching the ground is the location of the line. Also, the ball should have some kind of RFID chip in it, and the entire field should be built on top of a fine mesh of RFID sensors. Until then the location of the line is subject to too much human error, and as a result completely arbitrarily placed anyway.
Can you see the milky way, I no longer can. I used to be able to as a child, but now, with so much light pollution, I can only make out the brightest of the stars. I live 20 miles south-east of the City of London. Light pollution is a real problem. It affects animals, and even plants.
You can be efficient as all hell at making buggy whips...
But, but, but, buggies are less efficient than automobiles, that's the flaw in your rebuttal.
...this is a girl who drives a car better than most of you probably did at her age ...
Sorry, you lost me on the significance of this.
Why aren't people such as yourself concerned about just how counterproductive most of our security theater is?
Actually, my original point is that I'm entirely unsympathetic to the 'innocent' Muslims ejected from their airplane seats over some 'unusual' comments. My initial thoughts, after reading the news item, were: 1.) Wow, they must have been saying something quite weird for anyone (stupid Americans) to have noticed something unusual. 2.) Wow, they must have been speaking quite loudly in order to be heard above the normal roar of noise inside an commercial airplane during passenger loading. 3.) Wow, the fact that they were ejected, no questions asked is very strange, I'll bet there's more to this story that we're not being told.
My response to all this, and the snivelling about how their rights were being trampled upon was that I'm unsympathetic to their plight primarily becuase the Muslim community has brought this upon themselves. I stand by that statement. We never hear the Muslim community being up in arms about a Muslim suicide bomber smearing the good (?) name of Islam, but we always see a fanatical rage about something as innocuous as a political cartoon in a foreign newspaper
Now, I entirely agree that so far no actions that I've seen DHS take are in any way effective towards preventing a determined terrorist from doing just about anything they could do previously. Yes, I agree the vast majority of what I see DHS doing seems to be a complete waste of time, nothing more than a show. However, I think back to my days in the U.S. Navy many years ago, and wonder about the whole 'show of force' doctrine. While I was living through it, I used to laugh at the idiocy of it too. However, now with the perspective of hindsight, and hopefully, increased wisdomI think perhaps that 'show' was a significant part of the overall strategy. I'm of the opinion that there was more to the show than meets the eye, if you'll excuse the expression. The show really was more than just a show, because every once in a while we did make things go boom! I'm pretty sure there's more to DHS than the mess they've made of airport security - at least I hope so.
Really? Just attending a Madrasa, or listening to your government's foreign policy stance, is sufficient to make someone strap on a bomb and blow themselves up?
Apparently, yes. Or haven't you noticed that the number of (suicide or not) bombings has been steadily rising ?
Besides, even granting tens of millions of them, that's still less than a hundredth of a percent odds that the Muslim you're sitting next to is a terrorist.
Perhaps, but it's far higher than the likelihood of sitting next to a Christian/Jewish/Hindu bomber. This is the issue at hand, you may choose to ignore the threat, but that policy is just plain dumb, don't you think ?
I seriously want to know ...
Trying to build applications with Windows Workflow Foundation and Visual Studio ?
You can't find a PC with a fast enough processor or enough RAM for that piece of shit.
Let's be generous and say that there are 1,000,000 Muslim suicide bombers or potential bombers out there. That's not generous, that's conservative.
You clearly haven't looked into what gets taught in most Madrases, nore have you paid attention to the stated objectives of most Muslim governments.
The Muslim community has brought this upon themselves, and unfortunately, others. Racial profiling, yes, so what, what other profiling can be used. If Arabic looking people with names like Muhammad, or Fatih act suspicious, that's three separate pieces of a puzzle. How many pieces do you need before you transition from unfair to fair profiling?. Is it fair, maybe not; but then neither is suicide bombing. Tough shit, I say. Clean your own house (Islam) before telling me how to clean mine (democracy).
I don't know of any condition that makes fresh breast milk a dietary requirement for a grownup
Neither do I, but let's assume that one exists. Is it then acceptable for such a thing to be done in public ? If not, why not ? I've seen people take insulin injections in public. I've seen some even more extreme use of prescription injections (A woman on heart transplant anti-rejection drugs, for example, had about three different injections right in front of me as if it was no big deal). These actually quite personal behaviours that one wouldn't expect to see in public; but, somehow they're acceptable. Why ? How is this more acceptable than breast feeding. It's pretty weird. I'm actually all for breast feeding, and it hardly bothers me to see it anywhere, the more I see it, the less it bothers me. Now, I presume the same thing would happen if we allowed oral sex in public, eventually we'd all be used to it, and wouldn't think anything of it.
I can think of plenty of things I don't mind that others find very distrubing: Farting, Belching. But when it comes to Nose Picking, I draw the line. Why ?
So, you're OK with a 2 y/o sucking milk from a breast. What about a 3 y/o ? What's the age limit ?
What if I, a 45 y/o had some peculiar dietary requirement for fresh breast milk - actually, I'm not a huge fan, although the few times I've tasted it I kind of liked it, perhaps it's a re-acquired taste ?
Is it acceptable to you that a twenty year old person (male or female) sucks milk from a womans breast in public. I think I would find such a scene disturbing, although a two year old sucking on the same breast is totally acceptable to me.
So, at what age is breast feeding no longer acceptable ?
Now, If you have no problem with an adult sucking breast milk in public, do you have a problem with an adult sucking semen from a penis in public ? What if it were a 18 month old baby sucking semen from a penis ? What if an adult was licking the shit out of someones ass in public ? I'm trying to decide how we make such arbitrary decisions about what is acceptable and what is not.
Personally I have no issue with public breast feeding. But I certainly would not want to see some of the other activities I described, although I can't say for sure where I draw the line.
Idiot - There's a very good reason you don't want to see anyone shitting or pissing near you in public. That's because if everyone did it, your environment would be filthy. Breast feeding, on the other hand, does no harm to your environment at all. In fact, a case could be made that it improves it.
Perhaps you should reflect upon what it is you find so distasteful about an infant sucking a tit. Is it the bare breast (which is mostly covered by the babies face anyway), or is it the baby eating, or what ? Would you object if the baby was sicking a breast shaped bottle ? Would you object if the woman was bottle feeding while wearing a tiny bikini ?
Oddly, my ISP seems to have experienced some kind of problem starting just after midnight. I monitor my aDSL modem/router activity every 10 minutes, and discovered that between 00:00:02 (the last entry in the log) and 00:10:01 the router reports zero network traffic, and continued like that until some time late yesterday afternoon. I did the usual diagnostics tests to ensure I wasn't to blame, but all seems well on my end. Without me taking any corrective action the problem disappeared, so I'm pretty confident it was in fact my ISP.
What's odd is that I was able to gain aDSL sync, and establish a PPP session (which involves logging in), but there seemed to be no IP routing going on at all. Pings would simply vanish.
It's times like this that I wish I had a more sophisticated modem/router so that I could capture the 'out' side of the device and see what's going on.
that's better than what we had before, but not perfect by any means.
A significantly better than almost anywhere else in the world, BTW.