Losers beat kids, and you sir dumbass, is a loser.
Losers don't have any kids to beat. If you managed to reproduce, you are a winner, as far as evolution is concerned. Also, if you have kids, the chances are you got laid, which makes you a winner as far as life is concerned. So, by definition, the people who beat their kids are winners in at least two ways.
And no, I don't have kids, I'm a 28-year old virgin. That's a loser:(.
Respecting others also means accepting that your opinions and beliefs are no more valid than theirs. If you think that your beliefs are somehow better than another person's, then you do not respect that person.
So why are you contesting the grandparent posters's belief that his beliefs are more valid than other people's, you disrespectful clod ?-)
No, respecting people means - amongst other things - accepting that their beliefs may be different than yours. However, simply because I respect someone doesn't mean that I must consider whatever ridiculous crap they happen to believe in to be valid or correct, it simply means that I shouldn't treat it or them with condescension or ridicule; and yes, pretending that ridiculous crap is valid is condescending - but so are arguments from ridicule.
I'm guessing you have no valid arguments since you're resorting to ad hominem in the very first sentence of your reply.
Your logic is interesting, do you really think the rest of the world fears the US because a couple of you over there incorrectly paint the entire country as a single entity unique in the belief that the infantile rubbish you are parroting off is absolute truth.
A fine pointless rant, that, but questions should be ended with a question mark (?) instead of period (.). But at least you stayed consistent, in that you made no logical arguments and resorted to another ad hominem attack; and again you make a reference to age with the reference to "infantile rubbish". Do you have some issues with youth ?
Do some basic economics, you'll find that the US is propped up on the backs of a good many nations. It would only take one or two of the bigger ones to start grumbling and your house of cards could very easily come tumbling down.
You seem to think that I live in the USA. I don't; I am a citizen and resident of Finland, which is located in northern Europe.
To address your argument, it is true that other countries could harm US economy. However, doing so would cause more harm to the countries in question, at least in the short term, so it is very unlikely that they will do so, especially just to help another country.
Remove China from the big picture and what do you have?
Is China going to interfere at the behalf of any third party, when doing so risks their own economy ?
Slash oil production and where are you?
At war, judging by current events. Besides, the US is one of the biggest oil producers itself.
Understand the bigger picture, it has nothing to do with military power.
Then why did you bring up military power ? I said nothing about it.
Average rounded down to the nearest whole dollar. (Actually I spent the extra $1 on coffee when figuring out the average by hand.)
Statistics - especially average - already cause enough confusion without (incorrect) rounding. There is no reason to add to it, especially in a conversation about the various statistical methods.
My god, man, we're talking about pirates here! High seas battles, raped women and children, missing gold, plunder at the bottom of the sea, "arg matey" and worse!
Are you trying to say that being a pirate increases my chances of getting laid ? Arg Matey, load the torrents !
Wouldn't that be just digging the hole deeper - Antigua is a WTO member and as such the other nations would be violating their treaty obligations if they caved to such pressure.
Treaties only have meaning if their signatories either have sufficient personal honor to not violate them or are made to pay from any such violations by an external party. Since countries have no personal honor, on the account of not being persons or comparable entities, and since the US - the benefactory of the treaty violation in this case - is the strongest country on Earth, the treaty isn't worth the paper it is written on, since at least a clean piece of paper can be used to write something menaingful.
The US can violate any and all treaty with impunity for the simple reason that there is no one on this planet capable of punishing it for such violations. It's that simple. That's why the various governments making deals with the US are, frankly, idiots; they don't get anything, but almost certainly have to give up something.
Please not that this is by no means a problem with the US alone; international treaties in general depend on the goodwill and good faith of their participants, and both have historically been in very short supply.
Maybe I was a bit too surprised when a close relative of mine in Germany first nonchalantly said something like "oh, here everyone's slept with everybody" w.r.t. her school...
I guess that's one way of making the job of a teacher more appealing;).
The only thing is that the pushers won't give up their lucrative trade willingly. They will market their drugs as "better" or "stronger" than the stuff you get at the government store. It will still sell for a lot.
An addict doesn't care if the stuff is "better" or "stronger", just as long as it gives him the high he craves. The only people who care about quality are the "high society" members who are getting drugs for their parties, and they won't be buying from street pushers, especially if the pushers start getting violent.
It's a bit like illegal refineries and underground bars pretty much went away once the Prohibition ended. Even if the stuff they sell would be stronger than the "official" stuff, the difference just isn't worth it.
And the addicted will still burgle and rob to get the money to buy it. The dangerous criminal element does not go away.
If the addicted burglar can relieve the withdrawal symptoms with official stuff, why wouldn't he ?
Think of it this way: for a drug addict, the drug is as neccessary (if not more so) than food; he just can't live without it. Now, when the people are out of bread, you see them committing crimes and even overthrowing governments to get it. But if they have all the bread they can eat, they aren't going to do these things just to get delicacies.
Why is it the government's job to make sure that kids are not harming their bodies? If a parent wants to buy smokes for their kids, that's their choice. I think it is a wrong choice, but that's for them to decide on their own.
This brings up a fascinating question: do the kids belong (as in property) to their parents, or do they have any protection under law ? Because it seems to me that a parent who is buying cigarettes to their kid is not only neglecting his duty to take care of the brat, but is actively and purposefully harming him.
If a kid belongs to her parents, then obviously they have a right to damage their property; however, this logically means that we must immediately repeal all laws criminalizing incest and killing ones children, since destroying ones property or using it for sexual gratification is also quite legal.
On the other hand, if the kid has protection under law, then there are things a parent can't do to him. Rape and murder are likely to be amongst those things, but there isn't any good reason why giving the kid cigarettes (which are quite likely to kill him, altought slowly) shouldn't also be. Furthermore, this means that the parent can't rise the kid in whatever way he wants; lack of social skills, for example, will very likely lead to a very miserable life, so keeping the kid in isolation would also be considered damaging and therefore forbidden.
Now, obviously the government shouldn't be the primary decision-maker in how the parents rise the kids; but simply allowing them to do anything they want is not acceptable either, since there are people who will end up abusing theirs, not to mention well-meaning morons who think that shielding the brats from all evil until they reach 18 and then dropping them to the real world is going to result in anything but a feeding frenzy for lifes predators.
So the government gets involved because the kids are human beings and as such deserve protection under law, even against their own parents if need be; and sadly, such need occasionally exists.
While I agree that the nude body is nothing to be ashamed of or censor, and I understand that you didn't say you think I should turn to a public channel and be able to see a gang-bang in progress, I think we must draw the line somewhere as a society.
No we don't. No television show, no matter how extreme, can actually harm anyone in a real, physical sense. Consequently we, the society, don't have to put any limits for them, like we do for actions (such as murder). The production of these shows may involve actions which cause someone harm (like a non-faked snuff film), but those actions are already forbidden by other laws.
So, in the end, you are trying to draw a line because you happen to find some things so offensive you don't want anyone to watch them. That's fine and good, but you do not have a right to force your morals on me or anyone else for that matter.
But unrestricted exposure to the kind of gratuitous violence present in the video game industry today is not healthy for anyone's psyche, *including* adults, and doesn't teach morally or even inform - it entertains, it pumps up people's violence-adrenaline as they perform very realistic mock frags and decapitations and disembowelments and shootings and knifings of human beings.
Realistic ? In what game, exactly speaking, is violence depicted even remotely realistically ? And AFAIK there isn't a single game where you can disembowel anyone.
In any case, is this a bad thing ? An adrenaline rush and overpowering response is not a bad reaction when encountering violence, and certainly much better than freezing up since you are not used to it. I used to think that being used to it is a bad thing, but now I'm slowly beginning to wonder if I was wrong. After all, they brats will encounter violence in their lives; should they be let without means to defend themselves just to make it less likely that they abuse that ability, or should they be conditioned to answer violence in as brutal a fashion as possible, makig it much harder to abuse them.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical as I get older, but... maybe, just maybe, we should make the kids used to and comfortable with violence, since not doing so just makes them lambs for the slaughter, which is great for the wolves but bad for the kids, and is therefore a betrayal of parent's duties. I don't know... comments, anyone ?
As long as you have more than one channel, audio processing can do exactly that sort of thing; the only problem is, that it would ruin the whole point of multiple channels.
No amount of audio processing will help you deliver sound from multiple sources into your ears simultaneously if you don't know where those ears are. I dunno about you, but I tend to move around a lot when using the computer. Not that that matters, since I also use headphones - having the habit of running the same song in a loop for two hours straight kinda neccessiates them:).
This might be practical for specialist number-crunching applications, but is not possible in general. Basically, whenever you need to manipulate any non-trivial data structure from multiple threads, you'll need to explicitly state how to do it.
The main difference between a dataflow language and imperative language is that in the dataflow language the programmer explicitly states which operation depends on which (not unlike "make"), instead of explicitly putting them in a specific order as in the imperative language. While this doesn't make every program automatically parallelizable, it does mean that a reasonably simple compiler can, from the same source code, produce a compiled program for 1, 10, or 100 cores.
Besides, from what I've understood, a large amount of the performance of a modern processor comes from having multiple execution pipelines and a capability to find from the binary program stream instructions which can be run in parallel, by analyzing their dependencies. A dataflow language simply makes it easy for the compiler to perform a similar function.
You're hoping they're doing something to make it easier to program, and I doubt they are. The choke point is rapidly becoming scheduling rather than number of cores.
The solution, of course, is to move away from the imperative programming model to dataflow or functional one. That way the compiler can automatically parallelize the task, instead of the programmer having to do so manually.
from my very limited understanding of TCP/IP, routing, and the internet itself, i have gathered that the internet was designed from a sort of "worst case scenario" point of view. it is meant to tolerate and work around slow, unreliable, and possibly hostile links first, and to deliver bits quickly second. what would it be like if we designed the internet today, but with a more "optimistic" approach?
Why, it would be easily censorable.
Internet succeeded precisely because it was never intended for ordinary people but for the army and officials. By the time the various powers-that-be realized that their worst nightmare - a means for people to communicate and share ideas and news effectively without any simple way to enforce censorship - had become reality, it was too late to start installing locks; the protocol was already set in stone.
If Internet were to be redesigned today, it would include an ability to censorship anything in a central fashion. All for the sake of children and national security, of course. China is actually refreshingly honest in admitting that their "Great Firewall" is meant to block political content, as opposed to countries like Finland where the police maintain lists of "child porn sites" the ISPs then block access to.
Internet succeeded because it managed to take the world by surprise. There will never be another one, and once effective means to control the spread of information through this one - AKA censorship - are discovered, this one will be gone too. Enjoy it while you can, for it won't last.
Fancy this: a madman holds a flight attendant with a ceramic knife to her throat. What good is your "separate fucking door for the flight deck" now?
Since the madman can't get to the cockpit even if the pilots are foolish enough to think that the madman wouldn't simply kill the attendant anyway, along with everyone else on the plane, I'd say that the door is just great. And since the madman has nothing to gain from getting the attendant as a hostage, he might not do it in the first place.
Anyway, there are two additional things you could do to solve this scenario:
Put armed guards to every flight. Give them weapons which can't penetrate the airplane hull, but can penetrate human skull, and plenty of sniper training. Then have them shoot the madman dead.
Accept that the plane personnel are quite likely to encounter violence, and give them appropriate self-defense training so they can break the arm of anyone who tries to take them hostage.
Even if you make something that all 6 billion people will buy, you're still not going to be able to maintain exponential growth very long before everybody is a customer.
How naive. At that point you do the RIAA and resell them the same thing in a slightly new form, again and again, over and over again ad nauseaum. And if the damn fools - er, customers - stop buying it, then you blame pirates and start using the legal system as a blackmail tool to extract money directly from random people.
OC-768 line cards (40gbps) cost $250,000 each. And the router they plug into costs millions. This stuff aint cheap
A good 100mbps card costs $100. To get 40gbps you need 400 of them running in parallel, costing $40,000 total. Still not cheap, but not in the hundreds of thousands.
Of course the real solution is to get rid of the backbone-centric net structure and use mesh routing, from one (consumer-owned) access point to the next. But if this was allowed, the Big Brother would have harder time to figure out who did what, and we can't have that, now can we ?
They don't really have a foot in the door, because any time Microsoft even tries to do anything even reasonably associated with open source, the OSS community shits itself and starts with all the Admiral Ackbar "it's a trap" crap. They don't even get a chance.
Microsoft has a well-earned reputation of foul play, and has been convicted of monopolistic practices in both US and European courts. As a result, all of their actions are assumed to be part of some nefarious plot, a position which has been correct time after again in their history. To assume them to break character and act in good faith would be foolish, especially since the results of such assumption could be catastrophic.
Microsoft is simply reaping what it has sown, namely Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
What she doesn't seem to get is that the CIA isn't some kid hanging from her drainpipe and fiddling with alligator clips. When they listen in on your phone, you don't know about it.
Unless, of course, they want her to know about it, in order to encourage self-censorship.
Same with Skype. If they were to install CALEA compliance software, it would certainly not result in two days of downtime. There would be no outside sign that it had ever happened.
Again, you're assuming that secrecy is desired. It isn't. If you make people think they are being watched at all times (which is simply impossible - there's no way to process that much data in any useful manner), they will soon start avoiding all behavior which, while legal, might be potentially embarassing or suspicious if brought to light. You don't need to remove all privacy, you just need to make people think that they have no privacy in order to reap the benefits.
Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice.
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So, what you're saying is that non-union shops give you less pay and more work ? Seems to me that unions are doing their job just fine :).
Losers don't have any kids to beat. If you managed to reproduce, you are a winner, as far as evolution is concerned. Also, if you have kids, the chances are you got laid, which makes you a winner as far as life is concerned. So, by definition, the people who beat their kids are winners in at least two ways.
And no, I don't have kids, I'm a 28-year old virgin. That's a loser :(.
So why are you contesting the grandparent posters's belief that his beliefs are more valid than other people's, you disrespectful clod ?-)
No, respecting people means - amongst other things - accepting that their beliefs may be different than yours. However, simply because I respect someone doesn't mean that I must consider whatever ridiculous crap they happen to believe in to be valid or correct, it simply means that I shouldn't treat it or them with condescension or ridicule; and yes, pretending that ridiculous crap is valid is condescending - but so are arguments from ridicule.
I'm guessing you have no valid arguments since you're resorting to ad hominem in the very first sentence of your reply.
A fine pointless rant, that, but questions should be ended with a question mark (?) instead of period (.). But at least you stayed consistent, in that you made no logical arguments and resorted to another ad hominem attack; and again you make a reference to age with the reference to "infantile rubbish". Do you have some issues with youth ?
You seem to think that I live in the USA. I don't; I am a citizen and resident of Finland, which is located in northern Europe.
To address your argument, it is true that other countries could harm US economy. However, doing so would cause more harm to the countries in question, at least in the short term, so it is very unlikely that they will do so, especially just to help another country.
Is China going to interfere at the behalf of any third party, when doing so risks their own economy ?
At war, judging by current events. Besides, the US is one of the biggest oil producers itself.
Then why did you bring up military power ? I said nothing about it.
Statistics - especially average - already cause enough confusion without (incorrect) rounding. There is no reason to add to it, especially in a conversation about the various statistical methods.
Are you trying to say that being a pirate increases my chances of getting laid ? Arg Matey, load the torrents !
Treaties only have meaning if their signatories either have sufficient personal honor to not violate them or are made to pay from any such violations by an external party. Since countries have no personal honor, on the account of not being persons or comparable entities, and since the US - the benefactory of the treaty violation in this case - is the strongest country on Earth, the treaty isn't worth the paper it is written on, since at least a clean piece of paper can be used to write something menaingful.
The US can violate any and all treaty with impunity for the simple reason that there is no one on this planet capable of punishing it for such violations. It's that simple. That's why the various governments making deals with the US are, frankly, idiots; they don't get anything, but almost certainly have to give up something.
Please not that this is by no means a problem with the US alone; international treaties in general depend on the goodwill and good faith of their participants, and both have historically been in very short supply.
I guess that's one way of making the job of a teacher more appealing ;).
I would, but I'd take a gun with me ;).
An addict doesn't care if the stuff is "better" or "stronger", just as long as it gives him the high he craves. The only people who care about quality are the "high society" members who are getting drugs for their parties, and they won't be buying from street pushers, especially if the pushers start getting violent.
It's a bit like illegal refineries and underground bars pretty much went away once the Prohibition ended. Even if the stuff they sell would be stronger than the "official" stuff, the difference just isn't worth it.
If the addicted burglar can relieve the withdrawal symptoms with official stuff, why wouldn't he ?
Think of it this way: for a drug addict, the drug is as neccessary (if not more so) than food; he just can't live without it. Now, when the people are out of bread, you see them committing crimes and even overthrowing governments to get it. But if they have all the bread they can eat, they aren't going to do these things just to get delicacies.
No, you both averaged 500,000 dollars 50 cents.
This brings up a fascinating question: do the kids belong (as in property) to their parents, or do they have any protection under law ? Because it seems to me that a parent who is buying cigarettes to their kid is not only neglecting his duty to take care of the brat, but is actively and purposefully harming him.
If a kid belongs to her parents, then obviously they have a right to damage their property; however, this logically means that we must immediately repeal all laws criminalizing incest and killing ones children, since destroying ones property or using it for sexual gratification is also quite legal.
On the other hand, if the kid has protection under law, then there are things a parent can't do to him. Rape and murder are likely to be amongst those things, but there isn't any good reason why giving the kid cigarettes (which are quite likely to kill him, altought slowly) shouldn't also be. Furthermore, this means that the parent can't rise the kid in whatever way he wants; lack of social skills, for example, will very likely lead to a very miserable life, so keeping the kid in isolation would also be considered damaging and therefore forbidden.
Now, obviously the government shouldn't be the primary decision-maker in how the parents rise the kids; but simply allowing them to do anything they want is not acceptable either, since there are people who will end up abusing theirs, not to mention well-meaning morons who think that shielding the brats from all evil until they reach 18 and then dropping them to the real world is going to result in anything but a feeding frenzy for lifes predators.
So the government gets involved because the kids are human beings and as such deserve protection under law, even against their own parents if need be; and sadly, such need occasionally exists.
No we don't. No television show, no matter how extreme, can actually harm anyone in a real, physical sense. Consequently we, the society, don't have to put any limits for them, like we do for actions (such as murder). The production of these shows may involve actions which cause someone harm (like a non-faked snuff film), but those actions are already forbidden by other laws.
So, in the end, you are trying to draw a line because you happen to find some things so offensive you don't want anyone to watch them. That's fine and good, but you do not have a right to force your morals on me or anyone else for that matter.
Realistic ? In what game, exactly speaking, is violence depicted even remotely realistically ? And AFAIK there isn't a single game where you can disembowel anyone.
In any case, is this a bad thing ? An adrenaline rush and overpowering response is not a bad reaction when encountering violence, and certainly much better than freezing up since you are not used to it. I used to think that being used to it is a bad thing, but now I'm slowly beginning to wonder if I was wrong. After all, they brats will encounter violence in their lives; should they be let without means to defend themselves just to make it less likely that they abuse that ability, or should they be conditioned to answer violence in as brutal a fashion as possible, makig it much harder to abuse them.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical as I get older, but... maybe, just maybe, we should make the kids used to and comfortable with violence, since not doing so just makes them lambs for the slaughter, which is great for the wolves but bad for the kids, and is therefore a betrayal of parent's duties. I don't know... comments, anyone ?
No amount of audio processing will help you deliver sound from multiple sources into your ears simultaneously if you don't know where those ears are. I dunno about you, but I tend to move around a lot when using the computer. Not that that matters, since I also use headphones - having the habit of running the same song in a loop for two hours straight kinda neccessiates them :).
The main difference between a dataflow language and imperative language is that in the dataflow language the programmer explicitly states which operation depends on which (not unlike "make"), instead of explicitly putting them in a specific order as in the imperative language. While this doesn't make every program automatically parallelizable, it does mean that a reasonably simple compiler can, from the same source code, produce a compiled program for 1, 10, or 100 cores.
Besides, from what I've understood, a large amount of the performance of a modern processor comes from having multiple execution pipelines and a capability to find from the binary program stream instructions which can be run in parallel, by analyzing their dependencies. A dataflow language simply makes it easy for the compiler to perform a similar function.
The solution, of course, is to move away from the imperative programming model to dataflow or functional one. That way the compiler can automatically parallelize the task, instead of the programmer having to do so manually.
Why, it would be easily censorable.
Internet succeeded precisely because it was never intended for ordinary people but for the army and officials. By the time the various powers-that-be realized that their worst nightmare - a means for people to communicate and share ideas and news effectively without any simple way to enforce censorship - had become reality, it was too late to start installing locks; the protocol was already set in stone.
If Internet were to be redesigned today, it would include an ability to censorship anything in a central fashion. All for the sake of children and national security, of course. China is actually refreshingly honest in admitting that their "Great Firewall" is meant to block political content, as opposed to countries like Finland where the police maintain lists of "child porn sites" the ISPs then block access to.
Internet succeeded because it managed to take the world by surprise. There will never be another one, and once effective means to control the spread of information through this one - AKA censorship - are discovered, this one will be gone too. Enjoy it while you can, for it won't last.
Since the madman can't get to the cockpit even if the pilots are foolish enough to think that the madman wouldn't simply kill the attendant anyway, along with everyone else on the plane, I'd say that the door is just great. And since the madman has nothing to gain from getting the attendant as a hostage, he might not do it in the first place.
Anyway, there are two additional things you could do to solve this scenario:
How naive. At that point you do the RIAA and resell them the same thing in a slightly new form, again and again, over and over again ad nauseaum. And if the damn fools - er, customers - stop buying it, then you blame pirates and start using the legal system as a blackmail tool to extract money directly from random people.
A good 100mbps card costs $100. To get 40gbps you need 400 of them running in parallel, costing $40,000 total. Still not cheap, but not in the hundreds of thousands.
Of course the real solution is to get rid of the backbone-centric net structure and use mesh routing, from one (consumer-owned) access point to the next. But if this was allowed, the Big Brother would have harder time to figure out who did what, and we can't have that, now can we ?
what the Army does differently in this case
They don't pay for their fuel, you do. Therefore they can afford to use any damn silly system they want.
I thought that the US Army is paying for fuel in blood in Iraq right now.
Microsoft has a well-earned reputation of foul play, and has been convicted of monopolistic practices in both US and European courts. As a result, all of their actions are assumed to be part of some nefarious plot, a position which has been correct time after again in their history. To assume them to break character and act in good faith would be foolish, especially since the results of such assumption could be catastrophic.
Microsoft is simply reaping what it has sown, namely Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Unless, of course, they want her to know about it, in order to encourage self-censorship.
Again, you're assuming that secrecy is desired. It isn't. If you make people think they are being watched at all times (which is simply impossible - there's no way to process that much data in any useful manner), they will soon start avoiding all behavior which, while legal, might be potentially embarassing or suspicious if brought to light. You don't need to remove all privacy, you just need to make people think that they have no privacy in order to reap the benefits.
Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice.