Not saying that there might be some merit here, but this was hardly a scientific study. Someone simply looked at the number of downloads of a single album, by a single band and said "downloads == good." Sure, you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say, but this isn't even trying.
To be fair, this is economics, so actually providing some data to support the theory already makes this study one of the better ones;).
The problem here is that labels own the copyright and make their money from album sales. Merchandising and concert revenue, on the other hand, typically go into the bands' pockets. So of course there are bands out there that would love to use albums as a loss leader for their concerts. This kinda screws the labels though since the only reason so many people attend the concerts or buy the t-shirts is due to a heavy promotional investment by the labels.
So basically, not buying records will make the RIAA and its ilk go bankrupt. Good riddance. Now if only we could cut them off from the empty CD tax as well, to hasten their descend to the waiting flames they so richly deserve...
I guess traffic laws aren't about safety, but revenue.
Traffic laws are about safety, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be abused by being turned into revenue-generators instead.
To be more precise, traffic laws are about allowing drivers to predict what the other people will do well in advance, which in turn allows humans to drive at reasonable speeds. Our reflexes aren't fast enough, nor are cars maneuverable enough, to simply react to what others actually do; analyzing the situation, deciding what to do, and then doing it can easily take several seconds, especially if you weren't expecting the situation.
Anyway, to get back on topic, this kind of system would be excellent in the hands of trustworthy authority, for the exact job described, as well as catching people who have lost their license for whatever reason and still drive; however, authority being less than trustworthy, it will almost certainly be turned into yet another tool to keep track of everyone, everywhere, everywhen. Yet another power-up for the Lidless Eye...
Since I do run terabyte-sized databases, I'll contradict you - poor queries _can_ tank a server, even with small tables, if the query is poor enough. While it technically may be running, if nobody else can access it, then for practical purposes the server is down.
This sounds like the server is doing potentially unbound amount of I/O or processing with a lock held. Otherwise the other queries should still run, just slightly slower due to increased load in the server. A query, no matter how poor, shouldn't be able to monopolize resources; it should share them equally with all other running queries, and merely take its sweet time to return.
And then they would fix the fiscal budgetary issues and start to invest in translating this economy from carbon to hydrogen.
Does hydrogen economy actually make sense ? Apart from problems at supply, fossil fuels are actually far superior to hydrogen in almost every respect: they're safer (getting gas to even ignite, much less explode, takes quite specific conditions), have greater energy density, are easier to store (hydrogen has a tendency to leak through container walls, due to its small molecular structure) and are easier to handle (oils are liquid at room temperature, while hydrogen is a gas). And this is not even taking into account the existing infrastructure built around fossil fuels.
So, I wonder: would it be possible to extract carbon from the atmosphere (CO2) and hydrogen from water and use those to create carbohydrates (oil) rather than mess with pure hydrogen ? It would safe the initial and ongoing costs of a hydrogen economy, and as an added bonus would reduce atmospheric CO2 somewhat, due to some of that carbon being temporarily sequestered in your car's tank - and it would do a lot more good there than stored underground:).
To fight something like this is almost impossible. It'd require millions of people all over most Western countries to chose suffering for the higher good. And we know it'd never happen, unfortunately.
No. What it would require would be putting toll barriers in place to make Chinese imports cost more than domestic ones. This would quickly return manufacturing back to West, leaving dictatorial China to solve its mess without the massive influx of Western capital, and stop our economies from being sucked dry. It would also re-create all those lost manufacturing jobs, increasing prosperity and well-being in the West.
However, it would require that the top dogs would suffer - making a measly gadzillion rather than googleplex dollars - for the greater good and that is never going to happen. Yes, I'm bitter to our leaders and their idiotic lack of protection for domestic industries which led to the outsourcing trend and made us all slaves to malicious assholes like the Chinese government. It's bad enough that they're greedy swine, but of course they just have to also be short-sighted fools.
Granted, I probably should have been more verbose and stated: "Unless you really, really want to see the movie and you're not doing it because I have this dire need to be a part of the masses but because the movie interested you."
It could be argued that the guy who pays to satisfy his herd instincts has less issues than the guy who pays because he really, really wants to see another guy beat up other guys while dressed up as a bat.
I call BS. Do an experiment: Drive at 70 MPH in fourth gear, and drive at 70 MPH in 5th gear. Fuel comsumption decreases. Now if you are having to rev the nuts off your little engine to get enough power out of it for motorway speeds then suddenly it gets all inefficient.
If you have to rev the engine to move at highway speed, isn't that a problem with gear ratios, rather than the engine ? I've yet to drive a car where the highest speed wouldn't come with the combination of the highest gear and pedal to the metal...
Eh... yes, that's what they did in Russia in big cities like Moscow decades ago. And we still feel the result: they have to turn off hot water every year for a whooping MONTH to maintain the pipes. Maintaining hot water pipes is a huge problem and eats all benefits...
It's also what we've been doing here in Finland for decades, and we don't have such problems. I guess Moscow's district heating system was designed by the same guys who designed Chernobyl;).
We need less government interference and more competition, so that when Comcast pulls crap like like their traffic shaping customers can choose to take their dollars elsewhere.
Actually, you need more government interference; specifically, you need legislation which forces local providers to allow other providers to use their lines at a reasonable cost. This allows competition by lowering the barrier of entry in any particular area.
Driving on public streets is a privilege. Freely voicing your opinion is a right. In the context of governmental authority, Internet access is neither of these, nor should it be.
Internet access is quickly becoming a necessity for effectively excersizing your rights, or even living in a human society. As such it either needs or will soon need to be a right, in the same way as walking on public streets is. The longer it takes to recognize this fact, the more damage the Comcasts of this world have time to do.
I'm starting to think that Godwin's law should be updated to include child porn.
By viewing said pictures you not only create demand, but you're increasing the likelihood that you yourself (or someone eles who views said pictures) will cause direct harm to a child.
No, viewing pictures does not create demand. Searching for more pictures might, but only paying for them actually directly motivates anyone to produce them.
I fail to see how someone viewing pictures increases the likelihood of someone else doing or not doing anything. Is there a telepathic connection between them, perhaps ?
As for your last claim, I find it likely that a paedophile who regularly jerks off to child porn or fantasies concerning them - because, by definition, that's what gets him off - is less, not more, likely to do anything to a child he sees on the streets than one who is full of semen up to his eyeballs. Your needs don't go away just because you want to ignore them; if anything, they become more dominant.
Unlike something like, say, meth, where you're most likely to harm yourself through continued (escalated) use, with child porn, you'll be hurting a child when you get into "harder stuff".
No, you won't. There is no magical connection between a child and a picture of said child. Whatever action the picture depicts doesn't happen again every time someone looks at it.
Now I'm going to go puke.
And writing that shows to all of us that you find the very subject extremely distasteful. Which, of course, is the whole problem: it is politically incorrect - not to mention risky - to consider the subject of paedophilia or child pornography calmly and without emotional outbursts. A failure to demonstrate one's disgust about the subject risks being accused of being either an enabler or a perpetrator. This, of course, makes it impossible to discuss what would actually make children safer, and allow paedophiles to live as good a life as possible without harming said children. Hysteria is great for media and politicians; if it results in ruined lives, for both adults and the children they hurt when they finally snap, then that's just the price the benefiters are willing to pay.
That' is the truly disgusting thing here: some politicians and media moguls ride to riches and power on the backs of raped children, knowing full well that they're hurting innocent people in the process.
Yes, I've heard that theory, but it's a huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that forged packets are some sort of illegal impersonation.
Whether or not they are illegal I wouldn't know, not being versed in US law. However, that they are impersonation is beyond doubt. After all, Comcast sent them with the "sender" field set to a third-party participant in a particular exchange with the deliberate attempt to deceive the receiver of the packet to think that it came from said third party. Furthermore, this was made with the intention of disrupting an ongoing communication; in other words, sabotage.
So what Comcast did was impersonation with malicious intent and the motivation of profit, as well as fraud - selling "unlimited" access to its customers and then engaging in sabotage so they couldn't collect what they paid for. I find it hard to believe that Comcast hasn't run afoul of some law here...
its not exactly a major chunk of my marketing budget to post those 20 odd characters is it?
Seeing how you called traffick from Slashdot "undesirable", Slashdot better have paid you for posting those 20 characters. Otherwise you incur net losses with them.
Those people aren't customers, just bandwidth leechers. In commercial terms, irrelevant, and unwanted.
So why did you post a link to your site here ? I understand perfectly well that advertizing to people who end causing losses is unwise; I simply don't understand why you include Slashdot in this category and then advertize here anyway.
That doesn't mean piracy is not a problem for us. Piracy can be a BIG problem. Ask any software or game or music creator if all web traffic is worth the same for example. I know tons of game devs, and the consensus is that traffic from these sites:
slashdot
digg
boingboing
is virtually worthless. Or even undesirable, because you get bandwidth with no sales, due to the predominance of piracy amongst that crowd. In contrast getting general traffic from google, or from game review sites is WAY more attractive, because that audience is more supportive of IP, and happy to buy the product.
And yet you still put the address of your site in your signature. There seems to be a logical disconnect between that action and what you just said. Please explain ?
Even assuming some mafioso got fed up with junk mail enough to decide to call in a hit on someone who had ALREADY been sentenced to prison, killing an entire family including a 3 year old doesn't strike me as very 'professional'. Occam's razor says he did it himself.
Unless, of course, the mafioso wanted to send a message to all other spammers, in which case killing the entire family would be exactly the thing to do.
What he is saying is everything we do is driven from a selfish motivation. Firefighters derive a sense of satisfaction from protecting people and that is why they do it.
While this is true, it also stretches the definition of "selfish" so wide as to be useless, since it now covers every imaginable motive. So, we either limit the word "selfish" to its common meaning of approximately "done for personal gain, not including triggering the positive reinforcement mechanism of social instincts" or stop using it completely due to it being redundant. Defining selfishness so widely it covers every possible motive and then arguing that every action has selfish motives is pointless; of course it's true, since it is a tautology, for that definition of selfishness.
Wanting to skirt around some laws and send a bunch of e-mail to make money has nothing to do with killing people.
That's not what spammers do. They don't send out "a bunch of e-mails"; they hijack millions of machines to send out billions of messages, each and every one of which is likely to be an attempt at fraud. The sheer volume of this crap makes e-mail a less useful tool for everyone and causes not insignificant costs to those organizations who must use it.
To be a spammer requires being a self-centered psychopath. It requires not caring about the consequences of your actions to other people, just as long as you receive benefit from them. In other words, just the kind of guy who decides to take his family with him to his grave.
They are also used as a security feature, since you can feed an array of arguments without needing to sanitise them first.
Yes; and in fact I haven't found another safe way to feed parameters to a database in Java. There doesn't appear to be any kind "sanitize/escape" function nor paremetrized input for non-prepared statements in the JAVA SQL API, so either you write one yourself or stick to PreparedStatements.
BTW: PostgreSQL supports such out-of-band delivery of parameters even for non-prepared statements.
If you don't use prepared statements in your web application, you don't need to have them in your database server.
Seeing how prepared statements are meant to make repeated queries faster, by allowing reuse of the plan, I'd say that this was a stupid thing to remove. Not as stupid as views, though, since those are basically just stored and named queries and as such trivial to implement/maintain.
Real coders write code that you can take a ruler from any given close brace and draw a vertical line right up to the matching open brace, every time.
But you can only do that if they both fit on the screen at the same time. And they won't if you insert gratuitous line breaks everywhere.
Besides, I've always found it more logical that the first command of the if statement begin from the very next line. Empty or nearly empty lines are for grouping things within a block.
Everybody else gets fired.
You do realize that you could simply use an auto-formatting IDE ?
Lines are cheap. Time added trying to figure out an obfuscated code structure because somebody wanted to save lines (ie, put the open brace on the same line instead of doing the above) is expensive.
And the time wasted scrolling back and worth because you can't see the whole block at once, how expensive is that ?
How about the dead woman, and the other woman in critical condition in a hospital in Philadelphia because this asshat thought it was cool to drink and/or get high and then put the pedal to the metal on a public street?
From the link your provided: "charged with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence" and "Police have declined to detail what substance they believe Genovese had consumed."
In other words, we don't know if the guy was "high", drunk or whatever (he's only been charged, not convicted) and if he was, what he was high on. Speeding on public roads is, of course, a wrong thing to do; however, based on my observations, it is the norm rather than the exception. Of course it's possible that most drivers should be classified as colossal fuckups, but that's a discussion for another time.
The evidence supports a pattern of substance abuse and reckless driving that finally caught up with him.
No, the evidence supports that the suspect wanted to give an impression of substance abuse and general "bad boyness". It is insufficient to say whether said bragging actually has anything behind it.
Sorry, but all signs point to "colossal fuckup."
All signs point to a loudmouthed moron. In other words, a typical teen. There might also be a pattern of substance abuse etc., but a Myspace profile is not evidence of that.
The cops found his MySpace page, and it's apparently full of pics of him drinking and smoking pot, and the article even says he used a mugshot from a prior arrest as his default photo. The cops got wind of it and snagged his computer and other stuff from his house with a search warrant, and they'll probably use it to stave off any attempt at the "but he's a good boy who just made a mistake" defense.
After reading the article, I am completely disgusted... especially with his parents, under whose noses it seems much of his bad behavior has been going on. Call me old-fashioned, but I think parents should try to raise their kids to, you know, not be a colossal fuckup.
The best part, IMHO, is that for all his "I'm just Mr. Buster Badass" posturing on his MySpace page, he is apparently throwing up in jail because he's so scared (insert derisive Nelson Muntz laugh here).
In other words, the facts we know are:
He's 18.
He has a homepage saying he's tough, with some obviously false information ($250,000 a year at 18 ?), lots of hot air, and some photos which may or may not show him doing things which may or may not be illegal or immoral and may or may not be photomanipulated.
He's not though.
So I guess by "colossal fuckup" you mean "likes to brag to his peers while 18", since the evidence doesn't support anything else. Don't you think that's somewhat harsh, even by old-fashioned standards ?
And where did you get the "mugshot from prior arrest" bit ? The article makes no mention of any prior arrests; it simply says he used his mugshot as a profile pic. The fact that he's throwing up in his cell strongly suggests he's not used to being there, which in turn suggests there are no prior arrests.
Yes, sadly some people are stupid enough to get confused between a party that thinks government should wield unlimited power and a party that believes in the minimum possible government.
Stupid ? The total sum of all power in a country is constant. Weaken the government and private entities gain power; make the government stronger and private entities lose power. The Nazis wanted absolute power and chose to work through the government to get it; the libertarians want absolute power and have apparently chosen to set themselves up as plutocratic aristocracy to achieve it, and consequently want as little interference from the government as possible, since any such interference weakens their personal power.
As I - and, I'd imagine, US voters - see it it's a question of being ruled over by an elected government that's at least in theory responsible to me, or a plutocratic aristocracy which isn't.
If only there were a party that promised to make everyone work for the common good of the community instead of their own selfish ends.;)
Yeah, a party like that couldn't possibly take the collapsed ruin of a backwards agrarian nation like tsarist Russia and turn it into a superpower which made the US shake in its boots for half a century. Or a partly occupied and economically abused joke like imperial China, for that matter.
As far as I know, you can attempt to lock the single user mode out and stop people from gaining access but it is built into the kernel. And single user mode doesn't use passwords so it isn't like you can put a password in.
Which operating system are we talking about ? Because AFAIK at least the Linux kernel doesn't have any special "single user mode"; such mode is available through runlevel 1, which is handled through inittab. It also requires a password normally. Since runlevels were inherited from System V, I'd imagine that this true for most Unix-like systems.
Were you perhaps referring to the ability to run a program other than/sbin/init at bootup ? That ability is indeed built-in to the kernel, but requires access to its command line parameters, which in a sane bootloader requires a password.
Don't underestimate the ineptness of the average voter. When I told one guy the other day that I was a member of the Libertarian party he thought that was some terrorist or Nazi thing.
To be fair, the libertarian rants on Slashdot typically center around how the weak should be left to die as they are nothing but parasites on the strong, which is not all that dissimilar from the justification Nazis gave for the Holocaust and their other atrocities, so I can see why people might confuse these two.
"I'd rather see you all dead from hunger or disease than pay taxes" might be a honest political view, but it isn't going to win you any votes:).
Or you can be smart and realise that if you use a public site then the bots can use it too.;-)
Of course they can. However, it is a lot easier to search for pics of specific subjects than to try to find the subject to match the pic.
Anyway, I suggest a Slash-CAP: you are presented with a high-moderated post, and a number of high-moderated posts, some of which are responses for the post in question and some of which are pulled randomly from the same conversation, all recently posted so they aren't archived by Google yet; and you must choose which ones are responses to the message in question. You don't need to get them all right, just a statistically significant amount.
This will weed out both spammers and people who's comprehension skills are too low.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, this is economics, so actually providing some data to support the theory already makes this study one of the better ones ;).
So basically, not buying records will make the RIAA and its ilk go bankrupt. Good riddance. Now if only we could cut them off from the empty CD tax as well, to hasten their descend to the waiting flames they so richly deserve...
Traffic laws are about safety, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be abused by being turned into revenue-generators instead.
To be more precise, traffic laws are about allowing drivers to predict what the other people will do well in advance, which in turn allows humans to drive at reasonable speeds. Our reflexes aren't fast enough, nor are cars maneuverable enough, to simply react to what others actually do; analyzing the situation, deciding what to do, and then doing it can easily take several seconds, especially if you weren't expecting the situation.
Anyway, to get back on topic, this kind of system would be excellent in the hands of trustworthy authority, for the exact job described, as well as catching people who have lost their license for whatever reason and still drive; however, authority being less than trustworthy, it will almost certainly be turned into yet another tool to keep track of everyone, everywhere, everywhen. Yet another power-up for the Lidless Eye...
This sounds like the server is doing potentially unbound amount of I/O or processing with a lock held. Otherwise the other queries should still run, just slightly slower due to increased load in the server. A query, no matter how poor, shouldn't be able to monopolize resources; it should share them equally with all other running queries, and merely take its sweet time to return.
In other words, it sounds like a bug.
Does hydrogen economy actually make sense ? Apart from problems at supply, fossil fuels are actually far superior to hydrogen in almost every respect: they're safer (getting gas to even ignite, much less explode, takes quite specific conditions), have greater energy density, are easier to store (hydrogen has a tendency to leak through container walls, due to its small molecular structure) and are easier to handle (oils are liquid at room temperature, while hydrogen is a gas). And this is not even taking into account the existing infrastructure built around fossil fuels.
So, I wonder: would it be possible to extract carbon from the atmosphere (CO2) and hydrogen from water and use those to create carbohydrates (oil) rather than mess with pure hydrogen ? It would safe the initial and ongoing costs of a hydrogen economy, and as an added bonus would reduce atmospheric CO2 somewhat, due to some of that carbon being temporarily sequestered in your car's tank - and it would do a lot more good there than stored underground :).
No. What it would require would be putting toll barriers in place to make Chinese imports cost more than domestic ones. This would quickly return manufacturing back to West, leaving dictatorial China to solve its mess without the massive influx of Western capital, and stop our economies from being sucked dry. It would also re-create all those lost manufacturing jobs, increasing prosperity and well-being in the West.
However, it would require that the top dogs would suffer - making a measly gadzillion rather than googleplex dollars - for the greater good and that is never going to happen. Yes, I'm bitter to our leaders and their idiotic lack of protection for domestic industries which led to the outsourcing trend and made us all slaves to malicious assholes like the Chinese government. It's bad enough that they're greedy swine, but of course they just have to also be short-sighted fools.
It could be argued that the guy who pays to satisfy his herd instincts has less issues than the guy who pays because he really, really wants to see another guy beat up other guys while dressed up as a bat.
If you have to rev the engine to move at highway speed, isn't that a problem with gear ratios, rather than the engine ? I've yet to drive a car where the highest speed wouldn't come with the combination of the highest gear and pedal to the metal...
It's also what we've been doing here in Finland for decades, and we don't have such problems. I guess Moscow's district heating system was designed by the same guys who designed Chernobyl ;).
Actually, you need more government interference; specifically, you need legislation which forces local providers to allow other providers to use their lines at a reasonable cost. This allows competition by lowering the barrier of entry in any particular area.
Internet access is quickly becoming a necessity for effectively excersizing your rights, or even living in a human society. As such it either needs or will soon need to be a right, in the same way as walking on public streets is. The longer it takes to recognize this fact, the more damage the Comcasts of this world have time to do.
I'm starting to think that Godwin's law should be updated to include child porn.
No, viewing pictures does not create demand. Searching for more pictures might, but only paying for them actually directly motivates anyone to produce them.
I fail to see how someone viewing pictures increases the likelihood of someone else doing or not doing anything. Is there a telepathic connection between them, perhaps ?
As for your last claim, I find it likely that a paedophile who regularly jerks off to child porn or fantasies concerning them - because, by definition, that's what gets him off - is less, not more, likely to do anything to a child he sees on the streets than one who is full of semen up to his eyeballs. Your needs don't go away just because you want to ignore them; if anything, they become more dominant.
No, you won't. There is no magical connection between a child and a picture of said child. Whatever action the picture depicts doesn't happen again every time someone looks at it.
And writing that shows to all of us that you find the very subject extremely distasteful. Which, of course, is the whole problem: it is politically incorrect - not to mention risky - to consider the subject of paedophilia or child pornography calmly and without emotional outbursts. A failure to demonstrate one's disgust about the subject risks being accused of being either an enabler or a perpetrator. This, of course, makes it impossible to discuss what would actually make children safer, and allow paedophiles to live as good a life as possible without harming said children. Hysteria is great for media and politicians; if it results in ruined lives, for both adults and the children they hurt when they finally snap, then that's just the price the benefiters are willing to pay.
That' is the truly disgusting thing here: some politicians and media moguls ride to riches and power on the backs of raped children, knowing full well that they're hurting innocent people in the process.
Whether or not they are illegal I wouldn't know, not being versed in US law. However, that they are impersonation is beyond doubt. After all, Comcast sent them with the "sender" field set to a third-party participant in a particular exchange with the deliberate attempt to deceive the receiver of the packet to think that it came from said third party. Furthermore, this was made with the intention of disrupting an ongoing communication; in other words, sabotage.
So what Comcast did was impersonation with malicious intent and the motivation of profit, as well as fraud - selling "unlimited" access to its customers and then engaging in sabotage so they couldn't collect what they paid for. I find it hard to believe that Comcast hasn't run afoul of some law here...
Seeing how you called traffick from Slashdot "undesirable", Slashdot better have paid you for posting those 20 characters. Otherwise you incur net losses with them.
So why did you post a link to your site here ? I understand perfectly well that advertizing to people who end causing losses is unwise; I simply don't understand why you include Slashdot in this category and then advertize here anyway.
And yet you still put the address of your site in your signature. There seems to be a logical disconnect between that action and what you just said. Please explain ?
Unless, of course, the mafioso wanted to send a message to all other spammers, in which case killing the entire family would be exactly the thing to do.
While this is true, it also stretches the definition of "selfish" so wide as to be useless, since it now covers every imaginable motive. So, we either limit the word "selfish" to its common meaning of approximately "done for personal gain, not including triggering the positive reinforcement mechanism of social instincts" or stop using it completely due to it being redundant. Defining selfishness so widely it covers every possible motive and then arguing that every action has selfish motives is pointless; of course it's true, since it is a tautology, for that definition of selfishness.
That's not what spammers do. They don't send out "a bunch of e-mails"; they hijack millions of machines to send out billions of messages, each and every one of which is likely to be an attempt at fraud. The sheer volume of this crap makes e-mail a less useful tool for everyone and causes not insignificant costs to those organizations who must use it.
To be a spammer requires being a self-centered psychopath. It requires not caring about the consequences of your actions to other people, just as long as you receive benefit from them. In other words, just the kind of guy who decides to take his family with him to his grave.
Yes; and in fact I haven't found another safe way to feed parameters to a database in Java. There doesn't appear to be any kind "sanitize/escape" function nor paremetrized input for non-prepared statements in the JAVA SQL API, so either you write one yourself or stick to PreparedStatements.
BTW: PostgreSQL supports such out-of-band delivery of parameters even for non-prepared statements.
Seeing how prepared statements are meant to make repeated queries faster, by allowing reuse of the plan, I'd say that this was a stupid thing to remove. Not as stupid as views, though, since those are basically just stored and named queries and as such trivial to implement/maintain.
But you can only do that if they both fit on the screen at the same time. And they won't if you insert gratuitous line breaks everywhere.
Besides, I've always found it more logical that the first command of the if statement begin from the very next line. Empty or nearly empty lines are for grouping things within a block.
You do realize that you could simply use an auto-formatting IDE ?
And the time wasted scrolling back and worth because you can't see the whole block at once, how expensive is that ?
From the link your provided: "charged with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence" and "Police have declined to detail what substance they believe Genovese had consumed."
In other words, we don't know if the guy was "high", drunk or whatever (he's only been charged, not convicted) and if he was, what he was high on. Speeding on public roads is, of course, a wrong thing to do; however, based on my observations, it is the norm rather than the exception. Of course it's possible that most drivers should be classified as colossal fuckups, but that's a discussion for another time.
No, the evidence supports that the suspect wanted to give an impression of substance abuse and general "bad boyness". It is insufficient to say whether said bragging actually has anything behind it.
All signs point to a loudmouthed moron. In other words, a typical teen. There might also be a pattern of substance abuse etc., but a Myspace profile is not evidence of that.
In other words, the facts we know are:
So I guess by "colossal fuckup" you mean "likes to brag to his peers while 18", since the evidence doesn't support anything else. Don't you think that's somewhat harsh, even by old-fashioned standards ?
And where did you get the "mugshot from prior arrest" bit ? The article makes no mention of any prior arrests; it simply says he used his mugshot as a profile pic. The fact that he's throwing up in his cell strongly suggests he's not used to being there, which in turn suggests there are no prior arrests.
Stupid ? The total sum of all power in a country is constant. Weaken the government and private entities gain power; make the government stronger and private entities lose power. The Nazis wanted absolute power and chose to work through the government to get it; the libertarians want absolute power and have apparently chosen to set themselves up as plutocratic aristocracy to achieve it, and consequently want as little interference from the government as possible, since any such interference weakens their personal power.
As I - and, I'd imagine, US voters - see it it's a question of being ruled over by an elected government that's at least in theory responsible to me, or a plutocratic aristocracy which isn't.
Yeah, a party like that couldn't possibly take the collapsed ruin of a backwards agrarian nation like tsarist Russia and turn it into a superpower which made the US shake in its boots for half a century. Or a partly occupied and economically abused joke like imperial China, for that matter.
Which operating system are we talking about ? Because AFAIK at least the Linux kernel doesn't have any special "single user mode"; such mode is available through runlevel 1, which is handled through inittab. It also requires a password normally. Since runlevels were inherited from System V, I'd imagine that this true for most Unix-like systems.
Were you perhaps referring to the ability to run a program other than /sbin/init at bootup ? That ability is indeed built-in to the kernel, but requires access to its command line parameters, which in a sane bootloader requires a password.
To be fair, the libertarian rants on Slashdot typically center around how the weak should be left to die as they are nothing but parasites on the strong, which is not all that dissimilar from the justification Nazis gave for the Holocaust and their other atrocities, so I can see why people might confuse these two.
"I'd rather see you all dead from hunger or disease than pay taxes" might be a honest political view, but it isn't going to win you any votes :).
Of course they can. However, it is a lot easier to search for pics of specific subjects than to try to find the subject to match the pic.
Anyway, I suggest a Slash-CAP: you are presented with a high-moderated post, and a number of high-moderated posts, some of which are responses for the post in question and some of which are pulled randomly from the same conversation, all recently posted so they aren't archived by Google yet; and you must choose which ones are responses to the message in question. You don't need to get them all right, just a statistically significant amount.
This will weed out both spammers and people who's comprehension skills are too low.