It serves the same purpose as telling your sleepless and scared toddler that their blanket is actually an anti-monster device. So that they'll shut up and go to bed.
I told my daughter that the monsters had nibbled on her while she was sleeping and reported to me that she didn't taste good. It worked about as well as you might imagine.
And herein lies the problem, each vendor has every incentive to lock customers in and no incentive to follow standards - a serious flaw of the market.
Not exactly. The dominant player has this motivation. Smaller players have the opposite -- make their stuff as much like the big dog so they can more easily poach customers.
Planet Oracle (yes, the one Larry purchased and colonized). It's actually a great place. Everything that possibly could be is basically stored procedures, PL/SQL, compiled and executed in the RDBMS. Performance is great, security is great (as long as you're not a total idiot, or abusing dynamic SQL), configuration management is great. The only stuff that isn't stored in the database is the front end presentation user interface layer. This is how great enterprise software is architected.
That was mean. I'm going to have nightmares about this now.
they go fuck themselves since the moon isn't America's
From TFA:
“The government would also have to submit the Apollo 11 lunar landing site to the United Nations for designation as a World Heritage site.”
I'd think they've got a legitimate case for that being accepted. Terminology gets a little interesting though, with "World" referring to the moon as well.
How about the UN go fuck itself because the moon isn't theirs, either.
In your view, does anyone have legal authority to dictate what happens on the moon? Is there a proper legal authority for this at all?
Not necessarily. It could be more like the difference between negligence and willful negligence.
You are arguing that "willful negligence" is not negligence at all.
Not thinking too hard about something necessarilyencompasses not caring about it enough to think about it. Which is not to say that not thinking about it equates with not caring about it. If you are going to split hairs for no good reason at least try to be correct.
You've misidentified the hairs I've split.
Let's look at it from the POV of a political candidate for office. I have two different speeches in front of me. One has broad appeal, but really won't motivate my base, and I'm fairly confident that even though I'm saying the right things I won't persuade many registered X voters to vote for me because I'm the Y party candidate. The other speech is a little irritating to the other side, but will get my base out of their houses and into the voting booths. Ultimately I've decided I don't care what effect I have on the 'other' guys, they're not voting for me anyway. So I don't care, but I still thought about it.
they go fuck themselves since the moon isn't America's
From TFA:
“The government would also have to submit the Apollo 11 lunar landing site to the United Nations for designation as a World Heritage site.”
I'd think they've got a legitimate case for that being accepted. Terminology gets a little interesting though, with "World" referring to the moon as well.
His analysis wasn't even serious. The 'you are racist' bit was a joke that went clean over my head at the time I made my comment.
But if we dismiss that for a moment and assume someone somewhere would say that and mean it, I still say they'd be wrong. The OP is expressing his inability to understand the thought process of another culture. He can't work out the context where the pilot's decisions make any sense. That isn't racist. It merely implies a limited ability to adapt alternate mindsets.
Do all the people replying here not realize that Gandhi_2 was joking? Let me spell it out. Gandhi_2 is making fun of our western tendency to be so hyper-sensitive to cultural issues that mentioning, or even noticing, that someone is from another culture or genetic group is likely to elicit a charge of racism from someone. The fact that that many people didn't even get it shows how accustomed we have become to hearing these charges.
I was one of the responders.
If he was joking, it went clean over my head. Still does, kind of. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I just don't read it that way, even after you've explained it. And my comment went to +4, insightful in about 15 minutes so I'm not the only one.
And yes, if you're wondering, I do understand that I'm reinforcing your last sentence with my comment.
This is (almost definitely) a completely incorrect method to calculate "the average age of a country". The statistic provided here is the average age of (a sample of) countries existing at present, not the average age of countries that have existed. The difference might seem pedantic, but it has an immense effect on the computed statistic, because it excludes countries which existed briefly, no matter how recently. Some geographical locations have been through many, many sovereignties during the 158.78 years quoted. (This could be called left-censored data, because everything is excluded if it is not current at the moment of observation).
A better statistic might be the mean duration of countries that have existed over the last few centuries, which will slightly underestimate due to countries that will continue to exist (which could be called right-censored data).
A further improvement would be to take the median, because country life-spans are likely to have a strongly skewed distribution, perhaps approximating Pareto distribution, with a long, thin tail of a small number of very long lifespans.
The definition of a when a country was created is also hard to pin down.
Looking at what should be a simple answer is the United States. The easy answer is to count from July 4th 1776 when the political entity 'The United States of America' declared itself independent. But there are any number of problems with this approach:
1. The majority of the land that currently comprises USA was not part of it in 1776. 2. The revolutionaries originally considered themselves 13 independent entities, loosely related by a group of common interests. 3. The original government (The Articles of Confederation) was superseded by The Constitution. 4. You could make some noise about the US Civil War, but the North never acknowledged the South's independence, and the rest of the objections would probably be covered by #1 5. OTOH, if you find #3 compelling, you could possibly argue that amendments to the constitution are a new governing document. The problem there is that it's hard to argue that, say, the passage of the 27th amendment represents a fundamental change in the governance of the US, but you could definitely make a case for the Reconstruction Era amendments (13-15) being a fundamental change. So if you accept this, then you need to have some kind of test to determine whether or not an amendment represent enough change to be considered a new government.
And those are just some of the issues at hand for ONE country on the list. Multiply that by 200, and you've got a real mess.
Good thing we don't have those damn evil repubs in office anymore.
If this (or drone attacks, or more troops in Afghanistan, etc.) happened while GWB was in office, liberals would be going crazy, and screaming their heads off.
Because it Obummer in office, the so-called liberals will look the other way.
No we won't, idiot. If anything, we're even MORE pissed.
The sad part is that he's right. There are exceptions, but those of us who see as many problems with Bush as with Obama are few are and far between. There are things going on now that were happening 8 years ago and the US right didn't give a fuck because their guy was doing it, but now they bitch. These are the same things that got the US left all hot bothered back then and are quiet about now. There is a depressingly large amount of tribalism in US politics. That you, as a liberal, are upset about things Obama is doing unfortunately makes you the exception rather than the rule.
What if I were to threaten to build a moon based silo to fire ballistic puppies at the earth?
What would happen to the puppies during re-entry? Would there even be enough of them left to hit the ground? That question is what would determine the credibility of your threat for me.
I'm just a bit fascinated by the components of the word "meteotsunami".
And would a tsunami with seismic origins be a seismitsunami? Or maybe a geotsunami? Either way, it's not a megatsunami until we've had a million of them.
Light already travels instantly, provided you sit on the massless photon and check your massless watch (time dilation). It's only when you stand back and admire it passing that 'c' comes into play. And that's not a 'speed', it's a constant like 'pi'. Saying you can go faster than light is like saying you can be rounder than 'pi'.
'Faster' may be the wrong description. Moving in directions that light can't at relatively mundane speeds would accomplish the same thing. I don't claim to know how it could be done and I don't insist it CAN be done. But arriving somewhere earlier than light could from the same starting point does not necessarily mean C has been exceeded.
Look, it's not a religion, you were taught a set of beliefs and you refuse to question them. Why?
period.
I'd like to think that some day we'll figure out how to make things go faster than light. But we haven't done that yet, and it would be big news if we had. Describing it that way in the summary is simply wrong.
Yes, it was rape, unless you believe that consenting once to having protected sex means that you've automatically consented to having unprotected sex in the future.
Protected or unprotected is completely orthogonal to rape. If he forced himself on her, it's rape. If he didn't, it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
It serves the same purpose as telling your sleepless and scared toddler that their blanket is actually an anti-monster device. So that they'll shut up and go to bed.
I told my daughter that the monsters had nibbled on her while she was sleeping and reported to me that she didn't taste good. It worked about as well as you might imagine.
Nearly 3000 miles of travel, at up to 4000 mph, in 30 minutes?
It's a fast 4000 mph, not a normal 4000 mph.
And herein lies the problem, each vendor has every incentive to lock customers in and no incentive to follow standards - a serious flaw of the market.
Not exactly. The dominant player has this motivation. Smaller players have the opposite -- make their stuff as much like the big dog so they can more easily poach customers.
Planet Oracle (yes, the one Larry purchased and colonized). It's actually a great place.
Everything that possibly could be is basically stored procedures, PL/SQL, compiled and executed in the RDBMS. Performance is great, security is great (as long as you're not a total idiot, or abusing dynamic SQL), configuration management is great.
The only stuff that isn't stored in the database is the front end presentation user interface layer.
This is how great enterprise software is architected.
That was mean. I'm going to have nightmares about this now.
How about the UN go fuck itself because the moon isn't theirs, either.
In your view, does anyone have legal authority to dictate what happens on the moon? Is there a proper legal authority for this at all?
Not necessarily. It could be more like the difference between negligence and willful negligence.
You are arguing that "willful negligence" is not negligence at all.
Not thinking too hard about something necessarily encompasses not caring about it enough to think about it. Which is not to say that not thinking about it equates with not caring about it. If you are going to split hairs for no good reason at least try to be correct.
You've misidentified the hairs I've split.
Let's look at it from the POV of a political candidate for office. I have two different speeches in front of me. One has broad appeal, but really won't motivate my base, and I'm fairly confident that even though I'm saying the right things I won't persuade many registered X voters to vote for me because I'm the Y party candidate.
The other speech is a little irritating to the other side, but will get my base out of their houses and into the voting booths. Ultimately I've decided I don't care what effect I have on the 'other' guys, they're not voting for me anyway. So I don't care, but I still thought about it.
Maybe they didn't care how that would be read outside the US.
That's kinda encompassed in not thinking to hard about it, yeah.
Not necessarily. It could be more like the difference between negligence and willful negligence.
they go fuck themselves since the moon isn't America's
From TFA:
“The government would also have to submit the Apollo 11 lunar landing site to the United Nations for designation as a World Heritage site.”
I'd think they've got a legitimate case for that being accepted. Terminology gets a little interesting though, with "World" referring to the moon as well.
His analysis wasn't even serious. The 'you are racist' bit was a joke that went clean over my head at the time I made my comment.
But if we dismiss that for a moment and assume someone somewhere would say that and mean it, I still say they'd be wrong. The OP is expressing his inability to understand the thought process of another culture. He can't work out the context where the pilot's decisions make any sense. That isn't racist. It merely implies a limited ability to adapt alternate mindsets.
Do all the people replying here not realize that Gandhi_2 was joking? Let me spell it out. Gandhi_2 is making fun of our western tendency to be so hyper-sensitive to cultural issues that mentioning, or even noticing, that someone is from another culture or genetic group is likely to elicit a charge of racism from someone. The fact that that many people didn't even get it shows how accustomed we have become to hearing these charges.
I was one of the responders.
If he was joking, it went clean over my head. Still does, kind of. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I just don't read it that way, even after you've explained it. And my comment went to +4, insightful in about 15 minutes so I'm not the only one.
And yes, if you're wondering, I do understand that I'm reinforcing your last sentence with my comment.
That's because you are racist.
Generally this sort of statement tells me a lot more about you than it does about the person you're replying to.
This is (almost definitely) a completely incorrect method to calculate "the average age of a country". The statistic provided here is the average age of (a sample of) countries existing at present, not the average age of countries that have existed. The difference might seem pedantic, but it has an immense effect on the computed statistic, because it excludes countries which existed briefly, no matter how recently. Some geographical locations have been through many, many sovereignties during the 158.78 years quoted. (This could be called left-censored data, because everything is excluded if it is not current at the moment of observation).
A better statistic might be the mean duration of countries that have existed over the last few centuries, which will slightly underestimate due to countries that will continue to exist (which could be called right-censored data).
A further improvement would be to take the median, because country life-spans are likely to have a strongly skewed distribution, perhaps approximating Pareto distribution, with a long, thin tail of a small number of very long lifespans.
The definition of a when a country was created is also hard to pin down.
Looking at what should be a simple answer is the United States. The easy answer is to count from July 4th 1776 when the political entity 'The United States of America' declared itself independent. But there are any number of problems with this approach:
1. The majority of the land that currently comprises USA was not part of it in 1776.
2. The revolutionaries originally considered themselves 13 independent entities, loosely related by a group of common interests.
3. The original government (The Articles of Confederation) was superseded by The Constitution.
4. You could make some noise about the US Civil War, but the North never acknowledged the South's independence, and the rest of the objections would probably be covered by #1
5. OTOH, if you find #3 compelling, you could possibly argue that amendments to the constitution are a new governing document. The problem there is that it's hard to argue that, say, the passage of the 27th amendment represents a fundamental change in the governance of the US, but you could definitely make a case for the Reconstruction Era amendments (13-15) being a fundamental change. So if you accept this, then you need to have some kind of test to determine whether or not an amendment represent enough change to be considered a new government.
And those are just some of the issues at hand for ONE country on the list. Multiply that by 200, and you've got a real mess.
Agreed. First thought on reading the headline was "Figured that out on your own, did you?"
But from reading the comments here, it's apparently not as obvious as I had believed.
A friend recently linked me to an article about this very thing. For a change this is not Godwin's Law; this is actually relevant.
Godwin's law does not preclude relevancy.
Good thing we don't have those damn evil repubs in office anymore.
If this (or drone attacks, or more troops in Afghanistan, etc.) happened while GWB was in office, liberals would be going crazy, and screaming their heads off.
Because it Obummer in office, the so-called liberals will look the other way.
No we won't, idiot. If anything, we're even MORE pissed.
The sad part is that he's right. There are exceptions, but those of us who see as many problems with Bush as with Obama are few are and far between. There are things going on now that were happening 8 years ago and the US right didn't give a fuck because their guy was doing it, but now they bitch. These are the same things that got the US left all hot bothered back then and are quiet about now. There is a depressingly large amount of tribalism in US politics. That you, as a liberal, are upset about things Obama is doing unfortunately makes you the exception rather than the rule.
That's over 9500 people a year.
that's your number for drunk driving deaths.
the total number of gun-related homicides in the US (not counting suicides and accidents) tends to hover around 10,000 per year
the grand parent number on firearm homicides.
The death rate is about the same number
close enough, I'll call those numbers the same for a moment.
but the number of drivers is less than the number of guns, so you're more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than you are to be shot to death.
And now you completely lost me.
What if I were to threaten to build a moon based silo to fire ballistic puppies at the earth?
What would happen to the puppies during re-entry? Would there even be enough of them left to hit the ground? That question is what would determine the credibility of your threat for me.
I'm just a bit fascinated by the components of the word "meteotsunami".
And would a tsunami with seismic origins be a seismitsunami? Or maybe a geotsunami? Either way, it's not a megatsunami until we've had a million of them.
Light already travels instantly, provided you sit on the massless photon and check your massless watch (time dilation). It's only when you stand back and admire it passing that 'c' comes into play. And that's not a 'speed', it's a constant like 'pi'. Saying you can go faster than light is like saying you can be rounder than 'pi'.
'Faster' may be the wrong description. Moving in directions that light can't at relatively mundane speeds would accomplish the same thing. I don't claim to know how it could be done and I don't insist it CAN be done. But arriving somewhere earlier than light could from the same starting point does not necessarily mean C has been exceeded.
Look, it's not a religion, you were taught a set of beliefs and you refuse to question them. Why?
period.
I'd like to think that some day we'll figure out how to make things go faster than light. But we haven't done that yet, and it would be big news if we had. Describing it that way in the summary is simply wrong.
Neither was the SLEEPING WOMAN.
So you're saying it doesn't matter whether he wore a condom or not?
It changes things if her consent was conditional on the use of protection.
It also changes things if her consent was conditional on him holding a wooden spoon with his teeth during sex.
I don't care what conditions she put on consent, just whether or not she gave it.
It changes everything. Do you even understand the concept of consent?
Likely better than you judging by your post.
So if he started having sex with a sleeping woman but wore a condom, it's all good?
Again, not sure why you're bothering to mention the use or lack of a condom. How exactly does it change anything?
Yes, it was rape, unless you believe that consenting once to having protected sex means that you've automatically consented to having unprotected sex in the future.
Protected or unprotected is completely orthogonal to rape. If he forced himself on her, it's rape. If he didn't, it's not.