It doesn't have to be that hard. A system that answers with a simple Turing test has eliminated all robocalls from our telephone. The system simply instructs the caller to push a predetermined number in order to make our phones ring for a real human to answer. No machine has made it through yet, and we get 8-10 of them every day according to the call logs.
Could you please tell us how you obtained or created this system? My standard answering machine sure isn't capable of executing this logic.
Rather than try to use technological stopgaps, this should be treated as a law enforcement issue...
You can say that all you want, but you're not going to change the fact that enforcing such laws is not feasible. Many countries (especially European ones) have strict laws against phone spam, but none of them have succeeded in eliminating this illegal activity. I'd be happy if they just made politician spam calls illegal (that's one law that could be enforced). I applaud the FTC for trying to obtain a technical solution to the problem, and I think that's the way to go. We won't be able to eliminate all spam calls, but we can certainly reduce the number that reach our ears with such technical solutions. It's the same with email spam: we're not going to get rid of it totally, but filtering techniques have reduced the amount of spam we actually see in our in-boxes significantly.
Why can I not do a black ( or white) list of callers on my cell phone?
Even if they charged for it, this would be useful.
Fricking ripoff cell phone providers.
On my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S2), there's an option to do just that (Options -> Call -> Call Rejection). I don't know if this has to be supported by your phone company or not, but it does work for me. Also, if I view the call log, I can select a number and pressing the menu key will give me the option to add that number to the reject list.
a good number of robocalls are from your elected representatives or those trying to get elected. why?
That's self correcting. Eventually they'll figure out it loses votes.
Nope. Both major parties make robocalls, therefore they are both equally annoying. As long as this equality is preserved, the annoyance factor is canceled out and has no effect on the vote. Except, perhaps to increase voter apathy...for all I know that's the real reason for the robocalls: to prevent people from caring enough to vote.
But if the government mandated that all research that is even partially funded by the federal government must be in open journals, those journals would become the prestigous ones overnight.
No, you just explained why they would NOT. As soon as the government is mandating that a journal publish "all research that is even partially funded by the federal government", then you make it a lower class medium. Sure, good articles from good researchers will appear there, but so will a plethora of junk from everyone who is fulfilling the government mandate. Respected journals are respected because they don't publish everything they get, they publish what passes peer review and contains content.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I infer from the article that the government mandate is to make all papers that result from government-subsidized research that are published in the existing professional journals publicly available—the mandate is not to publish everything that is submitted regardless of its quality, as you and the guy you're arguing with seem to think. In any case, Bennett Haselton's main concern is to change the way academic articles are published. He wants academics to move away from the traditional journals and publish via new journals (or their electronic equivalent) that allow free access to everything they publish.
It's a bit puzzling that this Haselton person apparently hasn't heard of the Open Access initiative, which has been enjoying some measure of success for a few years now. Open Access can be achieved either by authors of published articles "self-archiving" them, or by publishers making their own publications available on the web (usually after a time lag so that the people who pay for the journals won't feel too bad). I've frequently seen articles self-archived on XarXiv.org discussed on/., but Haselton doesn't mention that, either. (XarXiv is not peer-reviewed, it's just a way to make your paper publicly available. If you want prestige with that, you've got to publish in a "real" journal first.) This is a problem that is in the process of being solved. Let's try to reinforce what progress has been made; it's probably not necessary to come up with daring and brilliant solutions at this point. Nor is it necessary to publish yet another article on/. that seems to contain no news.
You clearly have a future as a surrealist writer in the tradition of Franz Kafka. Oh you mean this isn't supposed to be fiction? Never mind, most people won't know or care if this really happened or not. In fact, I'm not at all sure that this thread isn't itself an exercise in surrealist humor. The topic of your alleged talk is delightfully absurd, as are the reactions of those feminist Ada programmers. I wonder if I should go to one of these "hacker conferences"—they're clearly very literary. No, my life is itself surreal enough without such enhancement.
This/. submission surely sets a new record for incoherence. I could not understand a word of it. True, the words appear to be English, but they don't combine into any coherent statements. Why can't I use my moderation points to mod down/. submissions? And, I'd like an "incoherent" category, please.
It's essentially the printing head of a 3D printer that you can use to draw freehand with. The plastic coming out of the head cools very quickly, and is relatively strong compared to something like glue, so you can make all sorts of interesting shapes.
The "freehand" thing is what makes me think I'll never want one of these devices. I'm crappy at drawing things, and I expect that the best I could do with this fancy new tool is pretty much the same as I could do with a regular glue gun: make blobs, globs, and hardened plastic messes that I would quickly junk to hide my lack of coordination. For me, the attractive part of 3D printing is that I could use a computer to do it—I wouldn't have to depend on my hands, and my hand-eye-brain coordination, which all suck. Now if they would only make a 3D printer that I can afford...
Germany was less desirable than Gaul largely because the rivers ran in the wrong directions - large-scale trade pretty much required water routes (leading to Rome, if you were Roman), and the Germanies didn't have too much of that sort of thing.
Unlike, say, France and Spain, which had direct access to the Med and rivers flowing into same.
Thanks, that certainly makes sense (much more so than "hellhole"). I'd never considered this explanation. I believe the Romans held on to the Rhine and used it for military communications and, I must suppose, for trade; but it's the last North to South river for quite a while as you go eastward. So I can see that the German lands weren't worth the price the Romans would have to pay to take and hold them. Despite the uniquely talented beer-bearing women.
The Romans did NOT successfully defeat the Germans, of course. Teutoberger Wald wasn't actually a case of "asymmetric warfare", since it involved a large Roman Army and a larger German Army (and a stupid Roman General, which was the real cause of the Roman defeat).
But the Germans were not trained to face three Roman legions in a head-on battle. Their winning strategy—formulated by Hermann/Arminius, who was a German hostage raised as a Roman, and conversant with Roman tactics—was to engage the legions while they were strung out in marching order in wooded, marshy country. I would think that in terms of fighting power, this was an "asymmetric" battle, with the Germans being the weaker, and using tactics that negated the Roman's superior training and customary fighting doctrine. As for Varus being stupid...well, taking advantage of stupidity is one of the mainsprings of asymmetric warfare. Also, Varus thought Hermann was his buddy.
Of course the Romans never made a serious effort to conquer Germany. Why bother? The place was a worthless hellhole.
I beg your pardon. How was the region occupied by the Germans any less desirable than that of the Gauls? Or was it that the Roman did not appreciate women who can bring large numbers of beer steins at once? (Give me a ten stein girl any day!). I think I catch a whiff of sour grapes (or is it malt?) here.
Of course if such entities were any good they might be run by an entity different from that which appears to be running them.
You mean No Such Agency? They keep such a low profile that they might, for all I know, be the only competent government agency we have. I sure hope so. I don't want the Chinese to cut off my electricity—my UPS is only good for an hour.
Except that a popular but absolutely mediocre general like Douglas MacArthur pulled the trick of a lifetime with the Inchon landing...
That wasn't exactly a mediocre move, was it? Some people point out that he relied on some previous staff work, but staffs exist to plan for every possible contingency, and MacArthur found this solution and implemented it. I must grant, however, that even a mediocre general may display an occasional flash of brilliance. In addition, his success also contained the seed of eventual failure. Once the Inchon Landing succeeded and MacArthur kept on rolling, the Chinese saw a general coming toward their borders at the head of a powerful army who was on record calling for the Communist government's eradication (he frequently called for "unleashing" Chiang Kai-Shek) and who advocated the use of nuclear bombs against China. It was not at all clear to them (nor to me) that he would have stopped at the border. It's damn hard to stop a popular and victorious general—as one biographer points out, the man was effectively the U.S. viceroy in Asia. The Chinese reaction was pretty predictable.
My respect for MacArthur doesn't arise so much from his generalship (as you imply, he did much that can be faulted), but for his administration of Japan. I think he was probably a much better administrator than he was a strategist. It seems that he understood the Japanese well enough to grasp that leaving the emperor in power and positioning himself as a Shogun would play well with Japanese culture and practices. They were used to having a figurehead emperor and a military dictator. MacArthur provided both. And he did it so well that he was able to administer Japan with no resistance at all.
the actual US military issue magazines are fucking terrible, and cause a weapons jam if you load more than 28 rounds in a 30 round mag.
For all the service members still in, if defense distributed could start making reliable working functioning products not by the lowest bidder, and somehow get them to the troops, it'd be a life saver.
just like miltec would give free militec-1 dry weapon lube to servicemembers
http://www.militec1.com/
You're selling something here? Because your comment about military magazines is pure B.S. I only buy military contract mags for my AR, and they work fine. I've been loading 30 rounds into 30 round mags for over 30 years, and have never had a problem with milspec mags. I've heard about loading the 20 round mags low, but I don't have enough experience with them to comment on that.
One man has no chance of taking a tank, twenty guys might though. They won't be taking anything though without arms. Same goes for commandeering the drone control facility. You don't seem to understand that the second amendment isn't about one mans ability to rise up against tyranny, it's about the militias. But if you take one mans weapons, you take the militias. Your arguments are tired, pathetic, and lack any depth to what the forefathers envisioned.
What militias? I think that's part of the problem: we have no local or (U.S.) State militias. I think it's time we reconstituted them. However, as I've said in another comment, I think militias must be legitimate. They must report to a public official, be it a county sheriff, city mayor, or state governor. Not just any bunch of guys with guns constitutes a militia.
As long as the government does not collapse or lose its legitimacy totally, only a fool would seriously consider shooting it out with them. (Besides, the history of armed revolts is not a good one—especially if the revolutionaries win.) If there is a collapse, then this advanced weaponry will no longer be at the central government's disposal. In addition, there may not be a national army any more; even if the central government can still field an army, getting soldiers to fire on their own people is always a risky thing to try.
To my mind, the purpose of the Second Amendment is to assure that there is a citizen militia. The purpose of the militia is to provide for collective security and, because it is a citizen militia, to resist tyranny. However, not any bunch of guys with guns are a militia. This is where a lot of people go wrong: a militia must be legitimate. That means it must be answerable to a government authority, be it a county sheriff or the government of one of the several States. I say it's high time we resurrected this concept, for I think we will soon be needing local militias to preserve the remnants of civilization left to us. (That's a historical "soon"—it could be 3 years or 30.) Why do I think this? Well, read Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. And consider the recent collapse of the Soviet Union. Do you really think that can't happen here?
One of the advantages of organizing a citizen militia at the local level is that it could be used to foster a sense of collective responsibility—if you want to own guns, then you should at least attend gun safety classes and some minimal drill with your local militia. You should be willing to be called out in case of an emergency (e.g. a search for a lost kid, or to deal with a larger disaster). Rights do imply responsibilities.
No, the Cong had to face B-52s, F-105s, F-4s, etc.
The only thing interesting about drones is that the pilots aren't sitting in a seat onboard. Contrary to popular rumour, they are NOT more lethal than, say, an F-105 with six tons of ordnance plus cannon. Or an F-4 with nine tons of ordnance (no cannon, though).
Another interesting thing about drones: I look forward to our new national sport: drone skeet shooting. I'll have to get one of those fancy Italian shotguns.
That's priceless. But as far as I can tell, he only made the receiver (the controlled part that is actually the gun as far as U.S. law goes), and had to buy the other parts. It's still hilarious, though.
I'd like to see a really simple design for a full-auto submachine gun that can be put together with a 3D printer and parts from a hardware store. For that, we need to fall back on simpler designs, like the Sten gun or maybe the MP 3008. I mean with a subgun, I figure rifling is optional. How accurately can you shoot one of these anyway? It's all about volume of fire.
Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.
I'm sure if the drive was useful in any meaningful way it would have been utilized. So this does not bode well for the practicality of the drive for real-world applications.
Or, it could have been turned into a "black" project. The new UFOs should start showing up over Nevada any time now...
As I said, there is substantial prejudice in the European Union against all genetically modified crops.
I wish the same could be said for America, but alas, the huge Agro-Business lobby and money squashes anything even close to dissent. Hell, states now have laws that make it a felony
I see that you are unclear about the meaning of "prejudice". And you want to more of it. This would be funny, but somehow I can't laugh anymore.
That's interesting. It would have been informative if you had cared to share what that meaning is, or what agency or regulatory body makes the relevant rules.
I trust that your pseudonym—Giftmacher("poison maker") is not too accurate, that you aren't actually engaged in the manufacture of poisons, eh? Visions of chemical warfare arise in my brain...
Quite, though I'm not convinced by the first link's suggestion that this could be a human health issue. As a scientist I've got to say it's not a great article, there's a rather obvious attempt to shoe horn a health scare into the analysis, to say nothing of smearing a regulatory body. (The latter in spite of a full public disclosure.)
Though the issues are not always the same, European scientists are susceptible to the same pressures as those in the U.S.—pressures brought to bear by political and economic interests. In this case the authors of the original article—Podevin and du Jardin—are, respectively, Italian and Belgian; both are employees of publicly funded institutions.
As for the source of the first cited article—Independent Science News—it must be said that though they may be "independent" in some sense, they do have an agenda. Other articles linked to on the same page include "Feds grant $500k to genetically engineered livestock research: Terminator for Animals?", "Insecticide 'unacceptable' danger to bees, report finds", "New links between pesticides & Parkinson's", "Obama Administration Snubs Risks, Moves Forward With GE Salmon Approval" and so forth. These may all be unprejudiced articles containing nothing but true statements, but they do show a certain direction of interest.
As I said, there is substantial prejudice in the European Union against all genetically modified crops. This prejudice is fueled by economic interests that want to discourage the import of cheap produce from the United States, and are reinforced by draconian regulations of the European Union and the various National Governments, as well as media propaganda.
I am personally only familiar with Germany (where I was born and still have relatives that I visit regularly), but the people here have been brought to believe that any genetically engineered plant is pretty much the same thing as poison. Germans are willing to spend extra money for food labeled as "Bio", which could be translated as something like "organic". However, the "Bio" label actually means something in the EU, unlike "organic" in the United States. Produce marked as "Bio" must conform to strict government regulations (e.g. you can raise only 12 pigs per (some unit of land I can't remember). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it shows that the entire attitude to food consumption and agricultural regulation in the EU is substantially different from that in the US.
What's unfortunate is the destructive effect of popular attitudes and governmental policies on scientific research. I doubt that it would be possible for any European scientists to publish a positive finding in regard to genetically modified crops and continue to receive any kind of public or private funds. The same is, of course, true of other "hot" buttons—such as "climate change" (Klimawechsel). The news media constantly push this issue not only as established fact, but as an imminent threat. The effectiveness of the propaganda was brought home to me when, during a conversation with a stranger—an elderly woman—at a bus stop, I chanced to remark on how much colder it is in Munich in January than in Texas. I was instantly subjected to a diatribe about Klimawechsel, and how the presence of a mere 2 cm of snow in January was a dire symptom of this threat. I did not dare disagree. It's snowed a good 12 centimeters since then; I hope she's happy. I had to shovel the snow out of my aunt's driveway...so I am somewhat less than happy.
I lament the global decline of science, though it is only one symptom of the decline of the West. Yeah, Spengler was right.
If women were really doing better then more of them would be in CS. It's improving, but their is still a huge gap. If they represent 60% of all Degrees but only represent 12% of CS Degrees then what Degrees are they being over represented in? They could easily be going into more fluff degrees which would make their quantity meaningless. Figure out why they avoid Math and Science before you go off saying they are doing better compared to Men. Until they do the same things that the Men are doing it's like comparing apples and oranges.
You seem to be assuming that CS is a wise career choice. Do you mean true computer science (as in going for that Ph.D.), or do you mean getting the paper to get a job as an IT drone? I would not recommend IT as a career path to anyone today. There you have it: more proof that girls are smarter than boys.
I hope this is true because it means more hot young girls with great tits and a nice ass on the market for me. I certainly find intelligence desirable in a mate but that is a completely separate topic from attraction. I think you'll find that no matter how they respond in a survey attraction for men is visual and physical and not so much cerebral.
Attraction, definitely. However, it's the conversation over breakfast that determines the future of a relationship—at least for me. I'd much rather wake up to a good conversation over coffee than find I've slept with a girl who thinks the space between Mars and Jupiter is occupied by the "aneroid belt".
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't have to be that hard. A system that answers with a simple Turing test has eliminated all robocalls from our telephone. The system simply instructs the caller to push a predetermined number in order to make our phones ring for a real human to answer. No machine has made it through yet, and we get 8-10 of them every day according to the call logs.
Could you please tell us how you obtained or created this system? My standard answering machine sure isn't capable of executing this logic.
Rather than try to use technological stopgaps, this should be treated as a law enforcement issue...
You can say that all you want, but you're not going to change the fact that enforcing such laws is not feasible. Many countries (especially European ones) have strict laws against phone spam, but none of them have succeeded in eliminating this illegal activity. I'd be happy if they just made politician spam calls illegal (that's one law that could be enforced). I applaud the FTC for trying to obtain a technical solution to the problem, and I think that's the way to go. We won't be able to eliminate all spam calls, but we can certainly reduce the number that reach our ears with such technical solutions. It's the same with email spam: we're not going to get rid of it totally, but filtering techniques have reduced the amount of spam we actually see in our in-boxes significantly.
Why can I not do a black ( or white) list of callers on my cell phone? Even if they charged for it, this would be useful. Fricking ripoff cell phone providers.
On my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S2), there's an option to do just that (Options -> Call -> Call Rejection). I don't know if this has to be supported by your phone company or not, but it does work for me. Also, if I view the call log, I can select a number and pressing the menu key will give me the option to add that number to the reject list.
Your candor is impressive. Most people who attract the loathing of virtually everybody for a living are a trifle more reticient about it.
I think it's even more impressive that the devil has a Facebook presence.
a good number of robocalls are from your elected representatives or those trying to get elected. why?
That's self correcting. Eventually they'll figure out it loses votes.
Nope. Both major parties make robocalls, therefore they are both equally annoying. As long as this equality is preserved, the annoyance factor is canceled out and has no effect on the vote. Except, perhaps to increase voter apathy...for all I know that's the real reason for the robocalls: to prevent people from caring enough to vote.
But if the government mandated that all research that is even partially funded by the federal government must be in open journals, those journals would become the prestigous ones overnight.
No, you just explained why they would NOT. As soon as the government is mandating that a journal publish "all research that is even partially funded by the federal government", then you make it a lower class medium. Sure, good articles from good researchers will appear there, but so will a plethora of junk from everyone who is fulfilling the government mandate. Respected journals are respected because they don't publish everything they get, they publish what passes peer review and contains content.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I infer from the article that the government mandate is to make all papers that result from government-subsidized research that are published in the existing professional journals publicly available—the mandate is not to publish everything that is submitted regardless of its quality, as you and the guy you're arguing with seem to think. In any case, Bennett Haselton's main concern is to change the way academic articles are published. He wants academics to move away from the traditional journals and publish via new journals (or their electronic equivalent) that allow free access to everything they publish.
It's a bit puzzling that this Haselton person apparently hasn't heard of the Open Access initiative, which has been enjoying some measure of success for a few years now. Open Access can be achieved either by authors of published articles "self-archiving" them, or by publishers making their own publications available on the web (usually after a time lag so that the people who pay for the journals won't feel too bad). I've frequently seen articles self-archived on XarXiv.org discussed on /., but Haselton doesn't mention that, either. (XarXiv is not peer-reviewed, it's just a way to make your paper publicly available. If you want prestige with that, you've got to publish in a "real" journal first.) This is a problem that is in the process of being solved. Let's try to reinforce what progress has been made; it's probably not necessary to come up with daring and brilliant solutions at this point. Nor is it necessary to publish yet another article on /. that seems to contain no news.
You clearly have a future as a surrealist writer in the tradition of Franz Kafka. Oh you mean this isn't supposed to be fiction? Never mind, most people won't know or care if this really happened or not. In fact, I'm not at all sure that this thread isn't itself an exercise in surrealist humor. The topic of your alleged talk is delightfully absurd, as are the reactions of those feminist Ada programmers. I wonder if I should go to one of these "hacker conferences"—they're clearly very literary. No, my life is itself surreal enough without such enhancement.
This /. submission surely sets a new record for incoherence. I could not understand a word of it. True, the words appear to be English, but they don't combine into any coherent statements. Why can't I use my moderation points to mod down /. submissions? And, I'd like an "incoherent" category, please.
It's essentially the printing head of a 3D printer that you can use to draw freehand with. The plastic coming out of the head cools very quickly, and is relatively strong compared to something like glue, so you can make all sorts of interesting shapes.
The "freehand" thing is what makes me think I'll never want one of these devices. I'm crappy at drawing things, and I expect that the best I could do with this fancy new tool is pretty much the same as I could do with a regular glue gun: make blobs, globs, and hardened plastic messes that I would quickly junk to hide my lack of coordination. For me, the attractive part of 3D printing is that I could use a computer to do it—I wouldn't have to depend on my hands, and my hand-eye-brain coordination, which all suck. Now if they would only make a 3D printer that I can afford...
Germany was less desirable than Gaul largely because the rivers ran in the wrong directions - large-scale trade pretty much required water routes (leading to Rome, if you were Roman), and the Germanies didn't have too much of that sort of thing.
Unlike, say, France and Spain, which had direct access to the Med and rivers flowing into same.
Thanks, that certainly makes sense (much more so than "hellhole"). I'd never considered this explanation. I believe the Romans held on to the Rhine and used it for military communications and, I must suppose, for trade; but it's the last North to South river for quite a while as you go eastward. So I can see that the German lands weren't worth the price the Romans would have to pay to take and hold them. Despite the uniquely talented beer-bearing women.
The Romans did NOT successfully defeat the Germans, of course. Teutoberger Wald wasn't actually a case of "asymmetric warfare", since it involved a large Roman Army and a larger German Army (and a stupid Roman General, which was the real cause of the Roman defeat).
But the Germans were not trained to face three Roman legions in a head-on battle. Their winning strategy—formulated by Hermann/Arminius, who was a German hostage raised as a Roman, and conversant with Roman tactics—was to engage the legions while they were strung out in marching order in wooded, marshy country. I would think that in terms of fighting power, this was an "asymmetric" battle, with the Germans being the weaker, and using tactics that negated the Roman's superior training and customary fighting doctrine. As for Varus being stupid...well, taking advantage of stupidity is one of the mainsprings of asymmetric warfare. Also, Varus thought Hermann was his buddy.
Of course the Romans never made a serious effort to conquer Germany. Why bother? The place was a worthless hellhole.
I beg your pardon. How was the region occupied by the Germans any less desirable than that of the Gauls? Or was it that the Roman did not appreciate women who can bring large numbers of beer steins at once? (Give me a ten stein girl any day!). I think I catch a whiff of sour grapes (or is it malt?) here.
Of course if such entities were any good they might be run by an entity different from that which appears to be running them.
You mean No Such Agency? They keep such a low profile that they might, for all I know, be the only competent government agency we have. I sure hope so. I don't want the Chinese to cut off my electricity—my UPS is only good for an hour.
Except that a popular but absolutely mediocre general like Douglas MacArthur pulled the trick of a lifetime with the Inchon landing...
That wasn't exactly a mediocre move, was it? Some people point out that he relied on some previous staff work, but staffs exist to plan for every possible contingency, and MacArthur found this solution and implemented it. I must grant, however, that even a mediocre general may display an occasional flash of brilliance. In addition, his success also contained the seed of eventual failure. Once the Inchon Landing succeeded and MacArthur kept on rolling, the Chinese saw a general coming toward their borders at the head of a powerful army who was on record calling for the Communist government's eradication (he frequently called for "unleashing" Chiang Kai-Shek) and who advocated the use of nuclear bombs against China. It was not at all clear to them (nor to me) that he would have stopped at the border. It's damn hard to stop a popular and victorious general—as one biographer points out, the man was effectively the U.S. viceroy in Asia. The Chinese reaction was pretty predictable.
My respect for MacArthur doesn't arise so much from his generalship (as you imply, he did much that can be faulted), but for his administration of Japan. I think he was probably a much better administrator than he was a strategist. It seems that he understood the Japanese well enough to grasp that leaving the emperor in power and positioning himself as a Shogun would play well with Japanese culture and practices. They were used to having a figurehead emperor and a military dictator. MacArthur provided both. And he did it so well that he was able to administer Japan with no resistance at all.
the actual US military issue magazines are fucking terrible, and cause a weapons jam if you load more than 28 rounds in a 30 round mag. For all the service members still in, if defense distributed could start making reliable working functioning products not by the lowest bidder, and somehow get them to the troops, it'd be a life saver. just like miltec would give free militec-1 dry weapon lube to servicemembers http://www.militec1.com/
You're selling something here? Because your comment about military magazines is pure B.S. I only buy military contract mags for my AR, and they work fine. I've been loading 30 rounds into 30 round mags for over 30 years, and have never had a problem with milspec mags. I've heard about loading the 20 round mags low, but I don't have enough experience with them to comment on that.
One man has no chance of taking a tank, twenty guys might though. They won't be taking anything though without arms. Same goes for commandeering the drone control facility. You don't seem to understand that the second amendment isn't about one mans ability to rise up against tyranny, it's about the militias. But if you take one mans weapons, you take the militias. Your arguments are tired, pathetic, and lack any depth to what the forefathers envisioned.
What militias? I think that's part of the problem: we have no local or (U.S.) State militias. I think it's time we reconstituted them. However, as I've said in another comment, I think militias must be legitimate. They must report to a public official, be it a county sheriff, city mayor, or state governor. Not just any bunch of guys with guns constitutes a militia.
As long as the government does not collapse or lose its legitimacy totally, only a fool would seriously consider shooting it out with them. (Besides, the history of armed revolts is not a good one—especially if the revolutionaries win.) If there is a collapse, then this advanced weaponry will no longer be at the central government's disposal. In addition, there may not be a national army any more; even if the central government can still field an army, getting soldiers to fire on their own people is always a risky thing to try.
To my mind, the purpose of the Second Amendment is to assure that there is a citizen militia. The purpose of the militia is to provide for collective security and, because it is a citizen militia, to resist tyranny. However, not any bunch of guys with guns are a militia. This is where a lot of people go wrong: a militia must be legitimate. That means it must be answerable to a government authority, be it a county sheriff or the government of one of the several States. I say it's high time we resurrected this concept, for I think we will soon be needing local militias to preserve the remnants of civilization left to us. (That's a historical "soon"—it could be 3 years or 30.) Why do I think this? Well, read Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. And consider the recent collapse of the Soviet Union. Do you really think that can't happen here?
One of the advantages of organizing a citizen militia at the local level is that it could be used to foster a sense of collective responsibility—if you want to own guns, then you should at least attend gun safety classes and some minimal drill with your local militia. You should be willing to be called out in case of an emergency (e.g. a search for a lost kid, or to deal with a larger disaster). Rights do imply responsibilities.
No, the Cong had to face B-52s, F-105s, F-4s, etc.
The only thing interesting about drones is that the pilots aren't sitting in a seat onboard. Contrary to popular rumour, they are NOT more lethal than, say, an F-105 with six tons of ordnance plus cannon. Or an F-4 with nine tons of ordnance (no cannon, though).
Another interesting thing about drones: I look forward to our new national sport: drone skeet shooting. I'll have to get one of those fancy Italian shotguns.
An AK47 made from a shovel. ...
That's priceless. But as far as I can tell, he only made the receiver (the controlled part that is actually the gun as far as U.S. law goes), and had to buy the other parts. It's still hilarious, though.
I'd like to see a really simple design for a full-auto submachine gun that can be put together with a 3D printer and parts from a hardware store. For that, we need to fall back on simpler designs, like the Sten gun or maybe the MP 3008. I mean with a subgun, I figure rifling is optional. How accurately can you shoot one of these anyway? It's all about volume of fire.
Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.
I'm sure if the drive was useful in any meaningful way it would have been utilized. So this does not bode well for the practicality of the drive for real-world applications.
Or, it could have been turned into a "black" project. The new UFOs should start showing up over Nevada any time now...
I wish the same could be said for America, but alas, the huge Agro-Business lobby and money squashes anything even close to dissent. Hell, states now have laws that make it a felony
I see that you are unclear about the meaning of "prejudice". And you want to more of it. This would be funny, but somehow I can't laugh anymore.
That's interesting. It would have been informative if you had cared to share what that meaning is, or what agency or regulatory body makes the relevant rules.
I trust that your pseudonym—Giftmacher("poison maker") is not too accurate, that you aren't actually engaged in the manufacture of poisons, eh? Visions of chemical warfare arise in my brain...
Quite, though I'm not convinced by the first link's suggestion that this could be a human health issue. As a scientist I've got to say it's not a great article, there's a rather obvious attempt to shoe horn a health scare into the analysis, to say nothing of smearing a regulatory body. (The latter in spite of a full public disclosure.)
Though the issues are not always the same, European scientists are susceptible to the same pressures as those in the U.S.—pressures brought to bear by political and economic interests. In this case the authors of the original article—Podevin and du Jardin—are, respectively, Italian and Belgian; both are employees of publicly funded institutions. As for the source of the first cited article—Independent Science News—it must be said that though they may be "independent" in some sense, they do have an agenda. Other articles linked to on the same page include "Feds grant $500k to genetically engineered livestock research: Terminator for Animals?", "Insecticide 'unacceptable' danger to bees, report finds", "New links between pesticides & Parkinson's", "Obama Administration Snubs Risks, Moves Forward With GE Salmon Approval" and so forth. These may all be unprejudiced articles containing nothing but true statements, but they do show a certain direction of interest.
As I said, there is substantial prejudice in the European Union against all genetically modified crops. This prejudice is fueled by economic interests that want to discourage the import of cheap produce from the United States, and are reinforced by draconian regulations of the European Union and the various National Governments, as well as media propaganda.
I am personally only familiar with Germany (where I was born and still have relatives that I visit regularly), but the people here have been brought to believe that any genetically engineered plant is pretty much the same thing as poison. Germans are willing to spend extra money for food labeled as "Bio", which could be translated as something like "organic". However, the "Bio" label actually means something in the EU, unlike "organic" in the United States. Produce marked as "Bio" must conform to strict government regulations (e.g. you can raise only 12 pigs per (some unit of land I can't remember). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it shows that the entire attitude to food consumption and agricultural regulation in the EU is substantially different from that in the US.
What's unfortunate is the destructive effect of popular attitudes and governmental policies on scientific research. I doubt that it would be possible for any European scientists to publish a positive finding in regard to genetically modified crops and continue to receive any kind of public or private funds. The same is, of course, true of other "hot" buttons—such as "climate change" (Klimawechsel). The news media constantly push this issue not only as established fact, but as an imminent threat. The effectiveness of the propaganda was brought home to me when, during a conversation with a stranger—an elderly woman—at a bus stop, I chanced to remark on how much colder it is in Munich in January than in Texas. I was instantly subjected to a diatribe about Klimawechsel, and how the presence of a mere 2 cm of snow in January was a dire symptom of this threat. I did not dare disagree. It's snowed a good 12 centimeters since then; I hope she's happy. I had to shovel the snow out of my aunt's driveway...so I am somewhat less than happy.
I lament the global decline of science, though it is only one symptom of the decline of the West. Yeah, Spengler was right.
If women were really doing better then more of them would be in CS. It's improving, but their is still a huge gap. If they represent 60% of all Degrees but only represent 12% of CS Degrees then what Degrees are they being over represented in? They could easily be going into more fluff degrees which would make their quantity meaningless. Figure out why they avoid Math and Science before you go off saying they are doing better compared to Men. Until they do the same things that the Men are doing it's like comparing apples and oranges.
You seem to be assuming that CS is a wise career choice. Do you mean true computer science (as in going for that Ph.D.), or do you mean getting the paper to get a job as an IT drone? I would not recommend IT as a career path to anyone today. There you have it: more proof that girls are smarter than boys.
I hope this is true because it means more hot young girls with great tits and a nice ass on the market for me. I certainly find intelligence desirable in a mate but that is a completely separate topic from attraction. I think you'll find that no matter how they respond in a survey attraction for men is visual and physical and not so much cerebral.
Attraction, definitely. However, it's the conversation over breakfast that determines the future of a relationship—at least for me. I'd much rather wake up to a good conversation over coffee than find I've slept with a girl who thinks the space between Mars and Jupiter is occupied by the "aneroid belt".