If 3 men rob a bank, and the SWAT team has to storm it, and innocent people die, do you blame the SWAT team, or the bank robbers? Any harm that comes to someone as a result of your criminal actions is your fault.
If three men rob a bank, and the SWAT team blows it up with rockets, killing 30 hostages in the process, then yes, I'd blame the SWAT team. In fact I'm pretty sure they'd face a lengthy term in prison, or possibly execution. Any other stupid questions ?
Hamas spends five years launching rockets at schools and residential areas and not one word from anyone. Israel decides it has had enough and acts to stop the cowardly fucks and people complain about how mean Israel is and how it is hurting the Palestinians.
A cowardly fuck hides behind children and a murderous fuck shoots through those children to get at him. Fuck them both.
Personally, I'm starting to think that The Onion proposed the only workable solution.
Israel seems reluctant to actually use high tech weaponry. Why don't they intercept rockets fired from Gaza? There are plenty of theatre defence systems which can do that.
Then what would the local politicians heroically save Israel from ?
Consider how much energy it would take to move this massively long cable.
If you time the jerks so that you'll set up a harmonious vibration within the cable, almost nothing. Then it's basically sound waves travelling up and down the cable and reflecting on each end.
Then you have to consider the wear and tear on the mechanical parts, especially that really expensive long cable into space. This just seems like a bad idea all around.
While there will of course be stress on the cable, I'd imagine that it is not significantly worse than with any other method of powering the cab. After all, the cab is pulling the cable to climb it up anyway, then descending, so there's periodic stress and release cycle anyway.
My only concern is what happens when those bristles get a little worn out after all that high intensity cyclic stress and an elevator load of passengers plummet to their doom from 100 km up. Gonna need a really good preventative maintenance regimen, not something commercial operations are typically known for in the industrial sector.
Gonna need an emergency brake, just like any other elevator. Besides, you want the cabs to be able to go up and down anyway, so you'd simply build them so that they slide down gradually when the brake is released and power is disengaged.
There are some safety advantages in the good old "grab a rope and and climb" approach over the current "sit on a pile of high explosives and set them on fire" one;).
The only thing really requiring a player to log in is if you make money in the game by running missions. If you have an industrialist, you can make money while not logged in (buy materials and sell your player-made goods on the market while you're offline). You also advance your character even when not logged in.
So it's a kind of predecessor to ProgressQuest ?-)
Eve is perfectly happy without you. The brutal introduction is specifically designed to weed out fools, weaklings, idiots, and children afflicted with ADHD.
Suddenly, it all becomes clear: the economic crisis was actually caused by EVE rejects who, having no outlet, decided to re-enact the game with the real stock market.
What makes it different is that Welch did this as an ongoing practice so it was part of the company culture. If you were a productive employee and say a non-productive employee you'd think:"Oh well Joe won't be here much longer and won't cause much more damage."
Unless, of course, Joe manages to sabotage someone else to make them seem less productive than him. Such as myself. So I guess I'd better ally with Joe and sabotage some other good performer first; that way I have less competition, and I keep Joe from sabotaging me.
Why would anyone want to work in a place like that if they have a choice ? Way to pick the desperate losers.
as bad as lines of code is as a productivity measure, I would say number of code statements would be a better one.
I smell a market for an expanding compiler ! For example, "x += 2;" can be expanded into "x++;x++;" , and these statements perhaps moved around a bit so they aren't clustered right next to each other. And if we count things like "int x;" as statements too, we can have a lot of fun with lots and lots and lots of local variables, all in the name of readability of course;).
Ultranova Expanding Compiler - make your developers more productive, lease it today !
If a dull butter knife is sufficient for a killing blow equal to sharper and larger knives, why do people planning on using knives use larger and sharper ones?
For the same reason guns are preferred weapons to knives: both are deadly, but a large and sharp knife is deadlier. That is, you have more of a chance to kill your target without taking any damage yourself, or to give your target time to scream for help. It doesn't matter in a domestic dispute, where a berserking perpetrator basically hacks the victim to pieces while being drenched by streams of blood, but it sure matters to a calculating assassin who wants to get the job done and get out unnoticed.
Plus, there's psychological comfort in having a larger and more impressive weapon.
In other words, it's only a problem when government gets involved.
Or when a corporation gets a monopoly. As some will inevitably without regulation to stop them.
All three replies to me were like that. I like it when the opposition proves my point.
My response proved your point incorrect. A powerful enough corporation can force one to make business with it or die. And unlike a government, the poor captive customer doesn't have any way to influence it.
I hate it when libertarians purposefully misread to keep on believing in their fantasies.
Money is all about numbers, so quantifying "risk" in numerical terms is not only valid, but to be encouraged. You wouldn't bet on a horse if the odds were quoted as "almost impossible", "very unlikely" etc. You'd want to know what possible return you'd get for your bet and roughly what would be the chances of winning.
You may want it, but you can't get it. No one can say with more certainty than "almost impossible", "very unlikely" etc. whether a given horse will win a race (assuming there's no foul play). There are simply too many factors to calculate numbers, so the only way to get them is to pull them out of your ass.
Now, a horse race is a simple enough affair that the wager-makers can actually come up with numbers that somewhat reflect reality. A stock market, on the other hand, is a very complex thing where everything affects everything, and the rules are constantly being changed. As the end result, every number is just a more or less educated guess; and since the people making those guesses usually have their own interests on the line, there's a very strong temptation to be just a teensy bit overly optimistic or pessimistic. It's not necessarily even dishonesty; just the human tendency to pay more attention to good news than bad news.
Add lots of people who like to think of themselves as smarter than average, and you don't have to be Nostradamus to predict that shit will happen.
I will say one positive thing about corporations. They can't reach into your wallet. Bill Gates may have a stranglehold on the personal computer, but he still can't access my wallet. (Thank God.) I haven't handed Mr. Gates any money since I bought Windows XP in 2002. My Congressman on the other hand - he rifles through my wallet as if it was his own personal treasury - grabbing whatever he desires to take. So that makes corporations the lesser of two evils (imho).
You forget that the government uses Microsoft software. And that is paid for with your tax money. So yes, your money is indeed being transferred to Bill, even ignoring the harmful effects of Microsoft's court-confirmed abuses of monopoly power have had on the economy.
Corporations are not the lesser evil than the government, since in many ways, they are the darkest part of it.
The difference with physics is that when physicists start saying "assuming that this body is of negligible mass and at non-relativistic speeds" they don't end their exposé with "thus we have a solution to the three body problem for three super massive black holes at 0.999 c"
But if we could repeal the physical regulations, so the three black holes would be free to contract amongst themselves how they wish to move without being burdened by nanny physics, we would have that solution !
A friend of mine had his life ruined and all of his PC gear confiscated when a jilted X girlfriend (we presume) "dobbed him in" to the cops for Kiddie Porn.
Let that be a lesson to everyone: online porn is free and plentiful. Why take the risk with an actual human being ?
Pure democracy is essentially 2 wolves and a lamb voting about what you have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb protesting the vote.
So basically, liberty means that the majority - which likely includes me - starves to death while the few powerful prosper ?
Yes, I'm trolling; but it's also something to think about. Especially since it seems to be the obvious outcome of libertarian ideology: the rich prosper, the rest face the choice between slavery or death.
UK citizens no longer have a leg to stand on in any arguement regarding civil rights if they support this shit.
The way to prevent knife crime is to NOT have mercy on perpetrators. IOW, Death Penalty.
The way to reduce all crime, including knife crime, is to leave behind barbaric bullshit like Death Penalty. Not even the Roman Empire, which it's habit of crucifying criminals or throwing them to lions if they were feeling nice, managed to stop people from being criminals. "No mercy" simply means that the criminals will respond in kind, and make sure to leave no witnesses; it won't make them stop them being criminals, or others from becoming criminals. It will just turn a life of crime into an outright war, with all the collateral damage that implies.
Besides, all rights are dependant on the right to life. If the state has a right to suppress that just to make you feel safer from knife crime, why wouldn't it have the right to suspend any other right to make anyone else feel safer from the criminals/terrorists too ? And, if Death Penalty is an option, how much effort do you think it would take the government to frame a political dissident and have him executed ?
You can't stop knife crime no matter what you do, and getting "though on crime" will simply make the criminals though on you and cause lots of unnecessary grief for no gain. Just like the War on Drugs, or any other similar campaign. It makes for a nice election speech, but is quite a brain-dead policy to actually implement.
But that's simply not true. There are enough crimes of passion that people would never stop in the middle of to fabricate a weapon. That alone would save lives.
No, it won't. If you're performing a crime of passion, you will likely strike at full force. Human flesh isn't very strong; even a butter knife will do serious damage, simply because it is a thin object.
A sharp knife allows you to cut meat with precision, since you don't need as much force for it. A dull one will still cut meat, but you lose that precision and need to use more force, thus increasing the chances that the knife will slip and the damage it does if it will. Thus this kind of idiocy is likely to cost, not save, lives.
I'm not saying it's a worthy justification, but it simply isn't true to say that they'd find another deadly weapon.
I'm pretty sure you can kill a human with a meat tenderizer. It's a spiked steel mallet, after all, and usually stored near sharp meat-cutting knives.
There are times when people with the authority make the decision that civil liberties are less important than the safety of the masses and rightly so.
Police do not have the authority to make this decision, thought. And even if they did, how does taking pictures of trains endanger anyone's safety ? Do you perhaps think that the photographer is going to use voodoo magic on the picture to make the train crash ?
Publicly-funded how? They've gotten government subsidies, but then again most things have.
Then most things are publicly-funded. Do the profits and control also go to the public ? If not, then what you have is a system which combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Either embrace socialism, which means nationalizing everything which has gotten public subsidies, or embrace capitalism, which means forcing everyone and everything which has gotten subsidies to pay back every last cent and never again get anything, but the current "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor"-system has to go.
Lastly, what the heck is "Amtrak police" - some kind of private rent-a-thug organization trying to legitimize itself by calling itself police ?
Slashdot Mirror
If three men rob a bank, and the SWAT team blows it up with rockets, killing 30 hostages in the process, then yes, I'd blame the SWAT team. In fact I'm pretty sure they'd face a lengthy term in prison, or possibly execution. Any other stupid questions ?
They aren't hospitals, they are enemy treatment centers. And they heal terrorists.
A cowardly fuck hides behind children and a murderous fuck shoots through those children to get at him. Fuck them both.
Personally, I'm starting to think that The Onion proposed the only workable solution.
And yet there seems to be quite a few fundamentalist atheists, who are just as annoying as every other type of fundamentalist.
Then what would the local politicians heroically save Israel from ?
If you time the jerks so that you'll set up a harmonious vibration within the cable, almost nothing. Then it's basically sound waves travelling up and down the cable and reflecting on each end.
While there will of course be stress on the cable, I'd imagine that it is not significantly worse than with any other method of powering the cab. After all, the cab is pulling the cable to climb it up anyway, then descending, so there's periodic stress and release cycle anyway.
Gonna need an emergency brake, just like any other elevator. Besides, you want the cabs to be able to go up and down anyway, so you'd simply build them so that they slide down gradually when the brake is released and power is disengaged.
There are some safety advantages in the good old "grab a rope and and climb" approach over the current "sit on a pile of high explosives and set them on fire" one ;).
So it's a kind of predecessor to ProgressQuest ?-)
Suddenly, it all becomes clear: the economic crisis was actually caused by EVE rejects who, having no outlet, decided to re-enact the game with the real stock market.
Unless, of course, Joe manages to sabotage someone else to make them seem less productive than him. Such as myself. So I guess I'd better ally with Joe and sabotage some other good performer first; that way I have less competition, and I keep Joe from sabotaging me.
Why would anyone want to work in a place like that if they have a choice ? Way to pick the desperate losers.
I smell a market for an expanding compiler ! For example, "x += 2;" can be expanded into "x++;x++;" , and these statements perhaps moved around a bit so they aren't clustered right next to each other. And if we count things like "int x;" as statements too, we can have a lot of fun with lots and lots and lots of local variables, all in the name of readability of course ;).
Ultranova Expanding Compiler - make your developers more productive, lease it today !
For the same reason guns are preferred weapons to knives: both are deadly, but a large and sharp knife is deadlier. That is, you have more of a chance to kill your target without taking any damage yourself, or to give your target time to scream for help. It doesn't matter in a domestic dispute, where a berserking perpetrator basically hacks the victim to pieces while being drenched by streams of blood, but it sure matters to a calculating assassin who wants to get the job done and get out unnoticed.
Plus, there's psychological comfort in having a larger and more impressive weapon.
Or when a corporation gets a monopoly. As some will inevitably without regulation to stop them.
My response proved your point incorrect. A powerful enough corporation can force one to make business with it or die. And unlike a government, the poor captive customer doesn't have any way to influence it.
I hate it when libertarians purposefully misread to keep on believing in their fantasies.
You may want it, but you can't get it. No one can say with more certainty than "almost impossible", "very unlikely" etc. whether a given horse will win a race (assuming there's no foul play). There are simply too many factors to calculate numbers, so the only way to get them is to pull them out of your ass.
Now, a horse race is a simple enough affair that the wager-makers can actually come up with numbers that somewhat reflect reality. A stock market, on the other hand, is a very complex thing where everything affects everything, and the rules are constantly being changed. As the end result, every number is just a more or less educated guess; and since the people making those guesses usually have their own interests on the line, there's a very strong temptation to be just a teensy bit overly optimistic or pessimistic. It's not necessarily even dishonesty; just the human tendency to pay more attention to good news than bad news.
Add lots of people who like to think of themselves as smarter than average, and you don't have to be Nostradamus to predict that shit will happen.
Unless they're big enough to get government contracts, or have a monopoly in something you need, such as water, power or Internet access.
You forget that the government uses Microsoft software. And that is paid for with your tax money. So yes, your money is indeed being transferred to Bill, even ignoring the harmful effects of Microsoft's court-confirmed abuses of monopoly power have had on the economy.
Corporations are not the lesser evil than the government, since in many ways, they are the darkest part of it.
But if we could repeal the physical regulations, so the three black holes would be free to contract amongst themselves how they wish to move without being burdened by nanny physics, we would have that solution !
Let that be a lesson to everyone: online porn is free and plentiful. Why take the risk with an actual human being ?
</cynical>
With Baton-Based Persuasion. It's not like the signers are hard to track down.
So basically, liberty means that the majority - which likely includes me - starves to death while the few powerful prosper ?
Yes, I'm trolling; but it's also something to think about. Especially since it seems to be the obvious outcome of libertarian ideology: the rich prosper, the rest face the choice between slavery or death.
The way to reduce all crime, including knife crime, is to leave behind barbaric bullshit like Death Penalty. Not even the Roman Empire, which it's habit of crucifying criminals or throwing them to lions if they were feeling nice, managed to stop people from being criminals. "No mercy" simply means that the criminals will respond in kind, and make sure to leave no witnesses; it won't make them stop them being criminals, or others from becoming criminals. It will just turn a life of crime into an outright war, with all the collateral damage that implies.
Besides, all rights are dependant on the right to life. If the state has a right to suppress that just to make you feel safer from knife crime, why wouldn't it have the right to suspend any other right to make anyone else feel safer from the criminals/terrorists too ? And, if Death Penalty is an option, how much effort do you think it would take the government to frame a political dissident and have him executed ?
You can't stop knife crime no matter what you do, and getting "though on crime" will simply make the criminals though on you and cause lots of unnecessary grief for no gain. Just like the War on Drugs, or any other similar campaign. It makes for a nice election speech, but is quite a brain-dead policy to actually implement.
No, it won't. If you're performing a crime of passion, you will likely strike at full force. Human flesh isn't very strong; even a butter knife will do serious damage, simply because it is a thin object.
A sharp knife allows you to cut meat with precision, since you don't need as much force for it. A dull one will still cut meat, but you lose that precision and need to use more force, thus increasing the chances that the knife will slip and the damage it does if it will. Thus this kind of idiocy is likely to cost, not save, lives.
I'm pretty sure you can kill a human with a meat tenderizer. It's a spiked steel mallet, after all, and usually stored near sharp meat-cutting knives.
Police do not have the authority to make this decision, thought. And even if they did, how does taking pictures of trains endanger anyone's safety ? Do you perhaps think that the photographer is going to use voodoo magic on the picture to make the train crash ?
Then most things are publicly-funded. Do the profits and control also go to the public ? If not, then what you have is a system which combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Either embrace socialism, which means nationalizing everything which has gotten public subsidies, or embrace capitalism, which means forcing everyone and everything which has gotten subsidies to pay back every last cent and never again get anything, but the current "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor"-system has to go.
Lastly, what the heck is "Amtrak police" - some kind of private rent-a-thug organization trying to legitimize itself by calling itself police ?
By that logic, it doesn't pay to search anyone. People willing to die just to take a few hundred strangers with them aren't exactly common.