Yeah, those kind of conspiracy theories are patented Slashdot material.
If we let them take that, pretty soon they'll be telling Soviet Russia jokes and then our whole geek counter-culture could be in jeopardy of being hijacked by coorporate marketing groups.
Eventually, we would have to listen trendy pop bands and participate in major sports and school dances just to maintain our anti-mainstream identity.
As a veritable connoisseur of things that should not be eaten, I vouch that Playdoh is pretty high up there for initial taste. It has a bit too much salt, however, and one can only eat so much of it before the after taste becomes perpetual. Most pastes suffer from this problem also. The big problem with pastes is texture: they are hard to chew and hard to get down.
What I recommend most is sillyputty. Granted, is not all that flavorful, but you can consistently eat much more of it than either playdoh or paste and it generally doesn't leave a bad aftertaste.
The new cornstarch based packing peanuts make an excellent side dish. You can wrap them in notebook paper to make a semi-palatable burrito. (Typing paper has bit too much chemical additives. And NEVER EVER EVER EVER eat receipt paper. It's just nasty.)
"Greedy corporate America" is on both sides of this issue.
Apple isn't looking out for you; Apple is looking out for Apple.
In fact, if it wasn't for the RIAA, Apple probably *would* be implementing a variable pricing scheme all on their own. Each song has its own unique demand curve and variable pricing would certainly allow Apple to optimize it's profit. (note that isn't necessarily bad for the consumer... many songs would be optimally priced at less than $0.99)
The only reason you see Apple on the other side of this issue is because RIAA is taking a peace of the pie. Apple also controls the ipod market which is complementary to the itunes market. But Apple gets 100% of the profit from the ipod market, and only part of the profit from itunes market (since they have to share with the RIAA). So they would naturally like to shift as much profit as possible to the ipod market, which means keeping lower prices in the itunes market.
In the end, if you're saving any money at all, it's only because Apple is every bit as cutthroat as anyone else. It's not because Steve Jobs is welling up tears because he thinks you might be overcharged for music from his company.
Grammatically, if it were an imperative it should be written as "God, bless America!"
I think it's probably a good rule that anything that any phrase commonly appearing on bumper stickers is an address to other humans (excepting "Vote for Pat Buchanan" of course).
That means previous court rulings on laws are considered the correct interpretation of laws, or, in this case, can effectively establish laws. Even constitutional ones.
Wow, you really don't understand the point of a constitution, do you? What point is there in having some special set of fundamental laws if they can be reinterpreted?
That makes them absolutely no different from a regular old federal law. The only distinction is that instead of having a general consensus of congress to establish the law now we are talking about having a general consensus of judges.
I think you ought to read the ratification clause of the constitution. It is designed to make changing constitutional law extremely difficult and contingent on supermajorities, not simply majority consensus. I would take it to be pretty freaking obvious that an agreement between 5 guys on SCOTUS was not meant to be given the same legal significance as a two-thirds ratification in each house of congress followed by a three-fourths ratification by the states themselves.
Irrelevant. No law supercedes the Constitution, which guarantees every citizen's right to privacy...
Hmm...
cat constitution.txt | grep -i "privacy"
It would appear that particular aspect of the document is missing.
I think that contemporary case law has been mistaken for a constitutional protection. But that is where you and I have the same problem, namely, government entities going and hazing things up with a delusionally enlarged sense of their own power.
It's unfortunate that this notion of privacy was introduced as it was: a blatantly contrived re-reading of the constitution. Now those who jumped on board that judicial advancement for our rights are finding that it is being circumvented in the executive and the legislative and is quite often being approved with a wink from the judiciary. The right way to have done this would have been to have kept a constructionist philosophy to the consitution while ratifying an amendment to guarantee our right to privacy--then it would not be at so much of a risk of being swallowed up by the uncertain maneuvering room the government presently enjoys.
Giving the government the power to redact the constitution in exchange for wonderful things like the right to privacy is exactly the same thing as giving the government sweeping augmentations of power in exchange for safety. It doesn't matter how shiny or seemingly good/humanitarian/beneficial the reward is, if you cede them any control in exchange, you are going to be losing much more in the end.
To clarify--since I didn't quite understand at first--you want to install the "slashdotter" firefox extension, download the slashdotter.jar file that is linked to, then find where it is in your extensions folder (.mozilla/profilefolder/extensions/{some gobbledy good}/slashdotter.jar) and replace the file.
Next you go to Tools-->Extensions-->Options and select "OMG! PONIES!."
Let's face it, anyone who finds themselves personally antagonized by Slashdot's non-serious antics is an addict. CmdrTaco could stomp on your toes and give you a wedgie and you'd still be coming back.
Those of us who do not take Slashdot so seriously, however, shall either be amused or indifferent, and very unlikely irked.
You suffer from the same problems of the Democratic/Republican bases--sure their leaders keep screwing them over, even they're the ones who put them in office, but their unwillingness to vote for someone else is precisely why the voting blocks will always be ignored by those they vote for.
Swallow a timed explosive charge, and then with the proper inclination of sleep you can experience all the effects of being in a zero-G and zero-pressure spacelike environment!
The difference is that today an "Alien and Sedition" act would be two-hundred pages long, mostly contain clauses about funding frivilous money projects in the congresscritters' home states, and the courts would rule that the "alien" bit regressively racist unconstitutional discrimination whilst they would rule the "sedition" bit totally compatible with the first amendment.
Your is the attitude that should have caused Euler to with-hold half his discoveries.
Rigor is very well for the rigorous mathematician. For the rest of us, and particularly for the purposes of talking to the layman (i.e. slashdot), it is a useless pedantry.
Anyone you might care to name who understands mathematics well enough to be able to understand a distinction of rigor most does not need anyone to tell the difference between what is "propper" and what is easy to say.
...or is "the missing link" found every couple of months?
(1) This is only one skull. Weigh in the likelihood that it could be just a deformity of something distinctly not a missing link. (2) Evolution occurs through generation and elimination of lines. Is there even the slightest evidence that this is not from one of the extinct lines? It's fully possible (and likely) that the species in question doesn't even have modern living descendants. (3) If it *looks* like a human.... (4) And for good measure, color me suspicious that the estimated age is on the same order of magnitude as the estimated error in that measurement.
Even North Korea can (theoretically) reach the United States... i.e, they can reach Hawaii.
Washington D.C. is quite a bit farther away.
The A10 you link to was actually the precursor to the modern ICBM. But keep in mind that the A10 itself was never built. Even sixty years later, it takes a lot of money and development time to produce a functional model of something like that, and there are a lot of extra-logistics involved in modern nuclear warfare.
At the moment, China can reach almost all of the United States. Soon they will be able to reach all of it. A decade or so ago, they could reach up to about the Mississipi.
With Congress, the ones who engineered this incomprehensible beast of a code which is volumes long and confusing enough that even a large tax-filing corporation can get caught by it.
Personally, I don't see how anyone can reasonably expect to avoid becoming a criminal with more laws on the books than can possibly be read in a human lifespan. I am completely unacquainted with 99% of the laws in this country, and for all I know I may have unwittingly violated a fair portion of those.
The law should be terse enough for Joe Schmoe to learn it all in a high school class or in a few weeks of diligent study. Anything more is just plain unreasonable.
As a physics major who has taken the time to look over the paper (read: barely skimmed--I am a lazy college student afterall), I would just like to offer my sincere opinion of "HUh?"
I hope that will be helpful to other Slashdotters outside the field.
A comment that disagrees with Slashdot group think and is still at +1! Enjoy the next few seconds.
On the bright side, at least the NSA might read your post.
Hey guys... does anybody else think it's a little strange that everybody at +5 seems to agree with each other? I'm no fan of wiretaps, but usually there is at least one very insightful individual with a different perspective... unless he's censored.
Do you really think the people suing over trademarks are the same people out getting medical aid to the third world?
Not remotely similar.
Big charities today tend to carry big burueacracies with them, and we all know how bureaucracies work. I seem to recall the Red Cross being the target of criticism a few times because money that was donated to help with such and such disaster never got there.
So, no, I don't see any problem with ridiculing the organization as much as it deserves it. The real people who matter, the actual "good guys" would be out there helping no matter what. They'd be doing the exact same stuff under a different name. And who knows, maybe they'd have more medicine/food/etc. to handout under a smaller organization less concerned with trademarks and more concerned with helping the needy.
For myself, I prefer to give to charities without hired employees, charities that help the local community, and in general charities where I have a reassurance that my money is going to feed people, not to hire secretaries, supervisors, and trademark lawyers.
While this information suggests that superbugs could arise from these bacteria, it also provides the opportunity for testing new techniques in drug development for the future.
Funny, the first thing that popped into my head when I thought about this was BIOWEAPON.
What do you think the first thought that pops into Kim Jong Il's head is going to be? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The DoE? Gotta be pre-emptive, ya know....
Slashdot Mirror
If we let them take that, pretty soon they'll be telling Soviet Russia jokes and then our whole geek counter-culture could be in jeopardy of being hijacked by coorporate marketing groups.
Eventually, we would have to listen trendy pop bands and participate in major sports and school dances just to maintain our anti-mainstream identity.
Personally, I think I prefer ritualistic suicide.
What I recommend most is sillyputty. Granted, is not all that flavorful, but you can consistently eat much more of it than either playdoh or paste and it generally doesn't leave a bad aftertaste.
The new cornstarch based packing peanuts make an excellent side dish. You can wrap them in notebook paper to make a semi-palatable burrito. (Typing paper has bit too much chemical additives. And NEVER EVER EVER EVER eat receipt paper. It's just nasty.)
Apple isn't looking out for you; Apple is looking out for Apple.
In fact, if it wasn't for the RIAA, Apple probably *would* be implementing a variable pricing scheme all on their own. Each song has its own unique demand curve and variable pricing would certainly allow Apple to optimize it's profit. (note that isn't necessarily bad for the consumer... many songs would be optimally priced at less than $0.99)
The only reason you see Apple on the other side of this issue is because RIAA is taking a peace of the pie. Apple also controls the ipod market which is complementary to the itunes market. But Apple gets 100% of the profit from the ipod market, and only part of the profit from itunes market (since they have to share with the RIAA). So they would naturally like to shift as much profit as possible to the ipod market, which means keeping lower prices in the itunes market.
In the end, if you're saving any money at all, it's only because Apple is every bit as cutthroat as anyone else. It's not because Steve Jobs is welling up tears because he thinks you might be overcharged for music from his company.
Grammatically, if it were an imperative it should be written as "God, bless America!"
I think it's probably a good rule that anything that any phrase commonly appearing on bumper stickers is an address to other humans (excepting "Vote for Pat Buchanan" of course).
Wow, you really don't understand the point of a constitution, do you? What point is there in having some special set of fundamental laws if they can be reinterpreted?
That makes them absolutely no different from a regular old federal law. The only distinction is that instead of having a general consensus of congress to establish the law now we are talking about having a general consensus of judges.
I think you ought to read the ratification clause of the constitution. It is designed to make changing constitutional law extremely difficult and contingent on supermajorities, not simply majority consensus. I would take it to be pretty freaking obvious that an agreement between 5 guys on SCOTUS was not meant to be given the same legal significance as a two-thirds ratification in each house of congress followed by a three-fourths ratification by the states themselves.
Hmm...
cat constitution.txt | grep -i "privacy"
It would appear that particular aspect of the document is missing.
I think that contemporary case law has been mistaken for a constitutional protection. But that is where you and I have the same problem, namely, government entities going and hazing things up with a delusionally enlarged sense of their own power.
It's unfortunate that this notion of privacy was introduced as it was: a blatantly contrived re-reading of the constitution. Now those who jumped on board that judicial advancement for our rights are finding that it is being circumvented in the executive and the legislative and is quite often being approved with a wink from the judiciary. The right way to have done this would have been to have kept a constructionist philosophy to the consitution while ratifying an amendment to guarantee our right to privacy--then it would not be at so much of a risk of being swallowed up by the uncertain maneuvering room the government presently enjoys.
Giving the government the power to redact the constitution in exchange for wonderful things like the right to privacy is exactly the same thing as giving the government sweeping augmentations of power in exchange for safety. It doesn't matter how shiny or seemingly good/humanitarian/beneficial the reward is, if you cede them any control in exchange, you are going to be losing much more in the end.
I recall a certain knight... a black one... who expressed similar optimism in the face of suffering personal maladies.
To clarify--since I didn't quite understand at first--you want to install the "slashdotter" firefox extension, download the slashdotter.jar file that is linked to, then find where it is in your extensions folder (.mozilla/profilefolder/extensions/{some gobbledy good}/slashdotter.jar) and replace the file.
Next you go to Tools-->Extensions-->Options and select "OMG! PONIES!."
I suggest sucking it up. At least this way the tag system remains useful. Unpredictability == useless.
Would slashdot also be interested in posting my own confirmations that light has a finite speed?
Let's face it, anyone who finds themselves personally antagonized by Slashdot's non-serious antics is an addict. CmdrTaco could stomp on your toes and give you a wedgie and you'd still be coming back.
Those of us who do not take Slashdot so seriously, however, shall either be amused or indifferent, and very unlikely irked.
You suffer from the same problems of the Democratic/Republican bases--sure their leaders keep screwing them over, even they're the ones who put them in office, but their unwillingness to vote for someone else is precisely why the voting blocks will always be ignored by those they vote for.
Ratio of people who visit slashdot to people who take slashdot seriously?
Who's got my grant money?
The difference is that today an "Alien and Sedition" act would be two-hundred pages long, mostly contain clauses about funding frivilous money projects in the congresscritters' home states, and the courts would rule that the "alien" bit regressively racist unconstitutional discrimination whilst they would rule the "sedition" bit totally compatible with the first amendment.
Not natively, but there's a firefox extension that adds it.
And gmail gives you pop3, so you could always set up enigmail in thunderbird or such.
Rigor is very well for the rigorous mathematician. For the rest of us, and particularly for the purposes of talking to the layman (i.e. slashdot), it is a useless pedantry.
Anyone you might care to name who understands mathematics well enough to be able to understand a distinction of rigor most does not need anyone to tell the difference between what is "propper" and what is easy to say.
...or is "the missing link" found every couple of months?
(1) This is only one skull. Weigh in the likelihood that it could be just a deformity of something distinctly not a missing link.
(2) Evolution occurs through generation and elimination of lines. Is there even the slightest evidence that this is not from one of the extinct lines? It's fully possible (and likely) that the species in question doesn't even have modern living descendants.
(3) If it *looks* like a human....
(4) And for good measure, color me suspicious that the estimated age is on the same order of magnitude as the estimated error in that measurement.
Even North Korea can (theoretically) reach the United States... i.e, they can reach Hawaii. Washington D.C. is quite a bit farther away. The A10 you link to was actually the precursor to the modern ICBM. But keep in mind that the A10 itself was never built. Even sixty years later, it takes a lot of money and development time to produce a functional model of something like that, and there are a lot of extra-logistics involved in modern nuclear warfare. At the moment, China can reach almost all of the United States. Soon they will be able to reach all of it. A decade or so ago, they could reach up to about the Mississipi.
Ever hear of a place called China?
There's a reason they've been working on extending the range of their nukes, and it's not so they can hit farther into Canada. . . .
With Congress, the ones who engineered this incomprehensible beast of a code which is volumes long and confusing enough that even a large tax-filing corporation can get caught by it.
Personally, I don't see how anyone can reasonably expect to avoid becoming a criminal with more laws on the books than can possibly be read in a human lifespan. I am completely unacquainted with 99% of the laws in this country, and for all I know I may have unwittingly violated a fair portion of those.
The law should be terse enough for Joe Schmoe to learn it all in a high school class or in a few weeks of diligent study. Anything more is just plain unreasonable.
As a physics major who has taken the time to look over the paper (read: barely skimmed--I am a lazy college student afterall), I would just like to offer my sincere opinion of "HUh?"
I hope that will be helpful to other Slashdotters outside the field.
A comment that disagrees with Slashdot group think and is still at +1! Enjoy the next few seconds.
On the bright side, at least the NSA might read your post.
Hey guys... does anybody else think it's a little strange that everybody at +5 seems to agree with each other? I'm no fan of wiretaps, but usually there is at least one very insightful individual with a different perspective... unless he's censored.
Do you really think the people suing over trademarks are the same people out getting medical aid to the third world?
Not remotely similar.
Big charities today tend to carry big burueacracies with them, and we all know how bureaucracies work. I seem to recall the Red Cross being the target of criticism a few times because money that was donated to help with such and such disaster never got there.
So, no, I don't see any problem with ridiculing the organization as much as it deserves it. The real people who matter, the actual "good guys" would be out there helping no matter what. They'd be doing the exact same stuff under a different name. And who knows, maybe they'd have more medicine/food/etc. to handout under a smaller organization less concerned with trademarks and more concerned with helping the needy.
For myself, I prefer to give to charities without hired employees, charities that help the local community, and in general charities where I have a reassurance that my money is going to feed people, not to hire secretaries, supervisors, and trademark lawyers.
Funny, the first thing that popped into my head when I thought about this was BIOWEAPON.
What do you think the first thought that pops into Kim Jong Il's head is going to be? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The DoE? Gotta be pre-emptive, ya know....
Asking your wife to hold your beer in an underground gas mine so that you can light a match to check if she looks fat.