Do guns & bullets serve a purpose other than murder?
Based on what I've read on Slashdot, I'd say that their main use is self-deception: they let people pretend the populace is armed and thus capable of staging a coup, should a need arise. It's ridiculous, of course, but perhaps not that surprising, considering the state of affairs in the modern world.
It's like a guy who's lost in woods and hears the howling of a wolfpack, so he grabs a stick and tells himself that he'll fight them off with that.
To consider atheism a religion is to completely belittle actual atheism. What do we have to do until you get it.
A better question would be: why do you care? Why do you care if someone belittles atheism? And as long as you do, how could anyone possibly avoid drawing parallels between that and the "insulting Islam" bullshit, and concluding that your relationship to atheism is similar to a religious person's to his religion, and thus that atheism is, for all intents and purposes, a religion?
Scenario 1: an always-on computer running near-idle for four years.
Given that a more efficient power supply generates less heat, does it last longer? And does it generate less noise, since it doesn't need as fast a fan? Which gets kinda importat at the wee hours of the morning.
Remember that these are the same kinds of people that caused tens of thousands of Muslims to be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by triggering "The War on Terror" by killing three thousand civilians.
No they aren't. They've yet to kill a single person with this attack, nor is there any reasonable scenario where they possibly could. Don't libel.
Who is going to pay for the goods and services at the burger flipping place?
No one, so it will close down. After all, it provided services to a class that's now useless. In the end, only the factories that provide luxury goods for the rich will be left operating; the rest of us will starve to death or, in the absolute best case, be treated as cattle and provided the basic necessities as charity by whatever echoes of conscience might remain in the necrotic souls of some of the owning class.
It doesn't have to go this way, of course, but having it go another way requires changing our economic system. It's not even capitalism that's the problem, but the very idea that you should work for a living - it simply doesn't work when paired off with increasing automation. Already we have persistent unemployment because we simply don't require as much human labour as can be supplied by everyone doing full work week.
I suggest we start reducing working hours per week, while keeping the hourly wage intact and compensating by paying a monthly "citizenship pay". This is to give various businesses an incentive to further automate their functions, thus cutting the need for human labour ever more. At the same time, our schools should shift their focus to philosophy, art, history, all the so-called "soft" subjects necessary for people who'll be spending most of their time without any pressing external needs. But of course they shouldn't forget the "hard" sciences either, and indeed since we'll be having a very large pool of otherwise idle people, it should be easy to recruit far more teachers per class, increasing the quality of education in all subjects.
No, because they're not doing anything, they're just owning stuff. Technology can only replace labour, it cannot help someone getting the fruits of someone else's work without doing anything.
Snark aside, I think we should encourage the transition from real to this kind of financial cyber-terrorism - not only does it not get anyone killed, but the targets have almost certainly deserved it many times over. Heck, harassing the banks could well end up helping the economy by hindering their ability to parasite off it.
Two evils duking it out is great for the rest of us, who get a break from both, and some free entertainment on top of it. Make some popcorn, pop a few beers, and watch the fireworks.
So it's legalized theft performed with the intent of redistributing wealth. It's still taking property from its rightful owners without their consent; in a word, theft.
Define "rightful". What, exactly speaking, gives you the right to claim something as yours, and why should your claim take precedence over anyone else's claim, including the IRS's?
The percentage of taxes required to have civilization is far lower than what we have now, as demonstrated by the fact that in times past, the taxes collected were far lower than they are now.
And the quality and average length of life were also far lower than they are now. Sure, it was good times for robber barons, but not for anyone else. So, far from disproving the claim that taxes are necessary for civilization, you have provided evidence for it.
No, the proper response is to call the cops, which the store did. The police then proceeded to taze her, which may or may not have been excessive but is not the store's or Apple's fault either way. Or at least that's what I got from the summary.
I can't fault anyone for taking advantage of legal loopholes.
Why not? "I' won't be punished for it" is hardly good moral reasoning - indeed, it's literally infantile morality. And it actively harms society, not only by pushing tax burden on its weaker members but also by acting as an incentive to control all aspects of behaviour through laws.
Why on Earth should we not fault executives for refusing to grow up?
So, are you actually making the argument that it is preferable for a 13 year old child to be exposed to goatse than it is for the same child to be exposed to parenting that would seek to keep them from being exposed to goatse?
Goatse is simply an image of someone with a particularly ugly asshole mooning the camera. It is not going to give anyone any kind of traumas. It's not going to affect anyone's development. It's not sexual, it's not violent, it's not anything except ugly. It's utterly irrelevant whether a 13-year old - or anyone of any age - sees it, thus parenting that seeks to keep them from seeing it is based on taking pointless Internet memes seriously. So yes, seeing Goatse is preferable to being rised by someone who's having troubles telling fantasy from reality.
Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
Personally, I'm more annoyed at macro-stuttering: the tendency of AMD drivers to repeatedly crash and recover in some games, resulting in screen freezing for several seconds.
I feel bad for those poor people, lets focus on precisely crash on Kim Jung Un.
But that won't help anyone, the next Kim will simply take power. What would help would be a direct hit on a member of Chinese government; maybe then they would rein in their puppet.
There are others out there who don't fill the stereotype who are otherwise normal people.
But if they don't fill the Wicca stereotype, how would anyone recognize them as Wicca? Which means they don't count for the purposes of evaluating and further refining the Wicca stereotype.
Sooner or later it's going to have to be our primary source.
Solar power can't be our primary energy source because it requires covering huge areas with collectors, and no matter where you'll put them they're always in someone's back yard, or spoil someone's view, or destroy some sand bug's habitat.
All fusion research is a toilet for flushing down money. Even if they produced a working and cheap reactor tomorrow, it still couldn't be used because it's still nuclear. Greenpeace, for example, has outright stated that they'll oppose fusion because it's nuclear. The opposition to nuclear power is ideological, thus fusion will not help.
I think you missed a couple of anti-American slams, try again.
She(?) missed the biggest: neoconservatism. USA insists on spreading an ideology that results in stagnating wages, constant economic crises, and preying on the common people by the scum on top. It's rather unreasonable to harm people and expect them to not hate you for it.
Just as it has been to every occupying force throughout all human history.
Israel and palastine are going at like there's no tomorrow with Iran standing none to calmly on the side,
Business as usual. Middle East is the world's ulcer and will remain so for the forseeable future, but it's not going to result in any large-scale conflicts.
china and japan hate each others guts,
They can hate each other all they want but what are they actually going to do about it? Nothing? Then it's de facto peace.
North Korean is trying to blow the South Koreans to hell and back
Doing what, exactly speaking? War? Not going to happen - Kim whatever might be crazy but he's not stupid. He's not going to risk his personal possessions on a nuclear war he's absolutely certain to lose.
and lets not even go into everything that's happening in Africa
Not to put too fine a point on it, but no one cares about Africa. They don't have a stable enough society or educated enough populace to offshore, nor any resources anyone cares enough to claim, so they'll continue fighting their tribal wars while the rest of the world ignores them for the foreseeable future.
AOf course it's not top notch, you ruined it by reading on a screen.
Is that actually possible? Can you effect permanent physical chances in your eyes by constantly focusing at short distances? Because, intuitively, you really shouldn't be able to - the only difference between looking at a screen or looking at something far away is how much your focusing muscles have to work, which might exhaust them for a few hours but not permanently.
If you were following a paper map that had the same mistake (i.e. had marked Mildura as being in the middle of the National Park) then you'd ended up in exactly the same life-threatening situation.
Actually, no, you wouldn't. The difference between a paper map and GPS map is that GPS places a city at some coordinates, while a paper map places it along some road. In practical terms this means that a paper map can be hugely distorted yet still let you find your goal, while a GPS map can't.
None of which chances the fact that if you're driving in hostile/uninhabited territory and consult only a single map of any kind, you're asking for a Darwin Award.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on what I've read on Slashdot, I'd say that their main use is self-deception: they let people pretend the populace is armed and thus capable of staging a coup, should a need arise. It's ridiculous, of course, but perhaps not that surprising, considering the state of affairs in the modern world.
It's like a guy who's lost in woods and hears the howling of a wolfpack, so he grabs a stick and tells himself that he'll fight them off with that.
A better question would be: why do you care? Why do you care if someone belittles atheism? And as long as you do, how could anyone possibly avoid drawing parallels between that and the "insulting Islam" bullshit, and concluding that your relationship to atheism is similar to a religious person's to his religion, and thus that atheism is, for all intents and purposes, a religion?
Given that a more efficient power supply generates less heat, does it last longer? And does it generate less noise, since it doesn't need as fast a fan? Which gets kinda importat at the wee hours of the morning.
No they aren't. They've yet to kill a single person with this attack, nor is there any reasonable scenario where they possibly could. Don't libel.
Filtering takes more resources than just blindly passing everything on. Why would an ISP accept filters from non-customers? Especially a bank?
No one, so it will close down. After all, it provided services to a class that's now useless. In the end, only the factories that provide luxury goods for the rich will be left operating; the rest of us will starve to death or, in the absolute best case, be treated as cattle and provided the basic necessities as charity by whatever echoes of conscience might remain in the necrotic souls of some of the owning class.
It doesn't have to go this way, of course, but having it go another way requires changing our economic system. It's not even capitalism that's the problem, but the very idea that you should work for a living - it simply doesn't work when paired off with increasing automation. Already we have persistent unemployment because we simply don't require as much human labour as can be supplied by everyone doing full work week.
I suggest we start reducing working hours per week, while keeping the hourly wage intact and compensating by paying a monthly "citizenship pay". This is to give various businesses an incentive to further automate their functions, thus cutting the need for human labour ever more. At the same time, our schools should shift their focus to philosophy, art, history, all the so-called "soft" subjects necessary for people who'll be spending most of their time without any pressing external needs. But of course they shouldn't forget the "hard" sciences either, and indeed since we'll be having a very large pool of otherwise idle people, it should be easy to recruit far more teachers per class, increasing the quality of education in all subjects.
No, because they're not doing anything, they're just owning stuff. Technology can only replace labour, it cannot help someone getting the fruits of someone else's work without doing anything.
The muslims or the banks?
Snark aside, I think we should encourage the transition from real to this kind of financial cyber-terrorism - not only does it not get anyone killed, but the targets have almost certainly deserved it many times over. Heck, harassing the banks could well end up helping the economy by hindering their ability to parasite off it.
Two evils duking it out is great for the rest of us, who get a break from both, and some free entertainment on top of it. Make some popcorn, pop a few beers, and watch the fireworks.
Define "rightful". What, exactly speaking, gives you the right to claim something as yours, and why should your claim take precedence over anyone else's claim, including the IRS's?
And the quality and average length of life were also far lower than they are now. Sure, it was good times for robber barons, but not for anyone else. So, far from disproving the claim that taxes are necessary for civilization, you have provided evidence for it.
No, the proper response is to call the cops, which the store did. The police then proceeded to taze her, which may or may not have been excessive but is not the store's or Apple's fault either way. Or at least that's what I got from the summary.
Some like daughters, some like mothers, some don't see any reason why they should look farther than their own.
Why not? "I' won't be punished for it" is hardly good moral reasoning - indeed, it's literally infantile morality. And it actively harms society, not only by pushing tax burden on its weaker members but also by acting as an incentive to control all aspects of behaviour through laws.
Why on Earth should we not fault executives for refusing to grow up?
Goatse is simply an image of someone with a particularly ugly asshole mooning the camera. It is not going to give anyone any kind of traumas. It's not going to affect anyone's development. It's not sexual, it's not violent, it's not anything except ugly. It's utterly irrelevant whether a 13-year old - or anyone of any age - sees it, thus parenting that seeks to keep them from seeing it is based on taking pointless Internet memes seriously. So yes, seeing Goatse is preferable to being rised by someone who's having troubles telling fantasy from reality.
Personally, I'm more annoyed at macro-stuttering: the tendency of AMD drivers to repeatedly crash and recover in some games, resulting in screen freezing for several seconds.
But that won't help anyone, the next Kim will simply take power. What would help would be a direct hit on a member of Chinese government; maybe then they would rein in their puppet.
But if they don't fill the Wicca stereotype, how would anyone recognize them as Wicca? Which means they don't count for the purposes of evaluating and further refining the Wicca stereotype.
How insidious.
What would it be compatible with, exactly speaking? Operating systems that expect to start in 16-bit mode wouldn't boot on it.
Solar power can't be our primary energy source because it requires covering huge areas with collectors, and no matter where you'll put them they're always in someone's back yard, or spoil someone's view, or destroy some sand bug's habitat.
All fusion research is a toilet for flushing down money. Even if they produced a working and cheap reactor tomorrow, it still couldn't be used because it's still nuclear. Greenpeace, for example, has outright stated that they'll oppose fusion because it's nuclear. The opposition to nuclear power is ideological, thus fusion will not help.
She(?) missed the biggest: neoconservatism. USA insists on spreading an ideology that results in stagnating wages, constant economic crises, and preying on the common people by the scum on top. It's rather unreasonable to harm people and expect them to not hate you for it.
Just as it has been to every occupying force throughout all human history.
Business as usual. Middle East is the world's ulcer and will remain so for the forseeable future, but it's not going to result in any large-scale conflicts.
They can hate each other all they want but what are they actually going to do about it? Nothing? Then it's de facto peace.
Doing what, exactly speaking? War? Not going to happen - Kim whatever might be crazy but he's not stupid. He's not going to risk his personal possessions on a nuclear war he's absolutely certain to lose.
and lets not even go into everything that's happening in Africa
Not to put too fine a point on it, but no one cares about Africa. They don't have a stable enough society or educated enough populace to offshore, nor any resources anyone cares enough to claim, so they'll continue fighting their tribal wars while the rest of the world ignores them for the foreseeable future.
Is that actually possible? Can you effect permanent physical chances in your eyes by constantly focusing at short distances? Because, intuitively, you really shouldn't be able to - the only difference between looking at a screen or looking at something far away is how much your focusing muscles have to work, which might exhaust them for a few hours but not permanently.
Isn't the world pretty much at peace right now? What major wars are going on at the moment?
Actually, no, you wouldn't. The difference between a paper map and GPS map is that GPS places a city at some coordinates, while a paper map places it along some road. In practical terms this means that a paper map can be hugely distorted yet still let you find your goal, while a GPS map can't.
None of which chances the fact that if you're driving in hostile/uninhabited territory and consult only a single map of any kind, you're asking for a Darwin Award.