You know that the Gauls in Asterix are only afraid of the sky falling on their head. And their favorite exclamation is 'By Toutatis!'.
That's because Toutatis was a major
Celtic god . The naming of the asteroid happened in 1989 i.e. after the Asterix books had been using it for a while.
So the naming was presumably a deliberate reference to the Asterix books, or at the very least it used the same god as its basis.
The fact that a devastating impact didn't happen yesterday does not increase the odds that it will happen today
No, but the point is that the odds of a devestating impact not happening in the next X years are very low if there has been on average a devestating impact every X years in the past.
If I toss a coin, whether I got a head the last time has no influence on whether I get heads or tails on my next throw. But I can still say that the odds of my not getting a head in the next hundred throws are vanishingly small.
This fact still does not justify wasting your money on a lottery ticket.
It depends how much the lottery ticket costs. A couple of euros a week is no more silly than buying a couple of chocolate bars.
What is definitely not a good idea is spending 90% of your annual salary on lottery tickets, and impoverishing yourself on the remote chance of striking lucky.
It's a common use of the word avoid. Why would you even bring it up? Nothing implies the Earth did anything.
Because the common use of the word avoid implies it WAS going to collide, but then something changed and it did not. While mixing units is MUCH more commonly done, and not technically wrong just a pain to do the conversions.
Not really. If you say "the child ran out into the road without looking and narrowly avoided being run down by an eighteen wheel truck" it doesn't imply that the child or the truck did anything to avoid the collision, it was just lucky their paths didn't cross, as here with Earth and the asteroids.
I know writing headlines is hard, but this one seems to imply that earth took evasive action. The less exciting "earth does not collide with pair of asteroids" would be a touch less misleading.
Only if you're an absolutely literal type with no glimmer of subtlety or imagination in your response to the external world.
So, yes, I can see it would be a problem for a lot of slashdotters.
What's wrong with the Cenus anyway? Is it another example of paranoid libertarians hating something just because it's done by "the government"? Do they think "the government" are collecting this information so that it can be used to persecute you later? If being an atheist, Christian or Jedi ever becomes a matter that gets you brought to the attention of the Secret Service in the UK, we're beyond fucked already.
Please don't remind us that one must now associate Star Wars with Disney. It makes me feel funny.
Star Wars has always been on the same cultural level as Disney, i.e. very popular, sentimental, technically accomplished, childishly political, soulless trash.
The census is supposed to be an accurate snapshot of the state of Britain, if people lie on it, they should be prosecuted. You cannot be a Jedi as it is an entirely fictional belief system.
If you don't follow the laws and rules of a country, you have two choices: go to jail or fuck off and live somewhere else.
Regardless of your actual faith, why wouldn't you choose this option?
Because you're not a childish twat?
If you want to make a protest about being asked to choose a religion, do it properly. Just write atheist or agnostic, according to your view of things.
Saying "Jedi" is probably funny if you're a backward fourteen year old, but then you wouldn't be doing the census in the first place. I find it hard to believe that adults would do this sober.
High taxes don't stop people working hard. People either work hard because they have some interest in their work, and some form of professional pride, or they don't. A shitty job is a shitty job whatever it pays, and whether it's tax free or not. Most people are fine paying taxes that are used for useful things like schoools, roads, hospitals, social security or whatever.
If you're the sort of person who has to earn twice or ten times as much as everyone else in order to feel good about yourself, it really makes no difference whether some of that extra is taxed. You're still going to get your wish and be able to flaunt your expensive toys in their faces anyway.
Opposition to tax is largely a philosophical position held by those who feel they are entitled to keep all "their" money and contribute nothing back to the society that allowed them to make that money.
Newsflash, most normal people think that all work is boring ass shit that no one wants to do anyway. It's just a case of finding the least unpleasant way of wasting half your life.
However, the Art College thing is entirely his fault.
To be fair, he probably went to a lot more parties, took a lot more drugs and had sex with a lot more people than most STEM students. It depends on your priorities in life. In the battles of Fun versus Success, I know which one I've always gone for...
I wouldn't consider him for any academic or research-based job at all
Well, you'd need a PhD for that anyway, so whether you did a 2 year Associate degree leading to a Bachelor's degree, then a Master's then a PhD or just a Bachelor's, Master's, PhD is irrelevant.
Despite the flirtations of New Labour with sucking up to the rich, the Labour party is inherently anti-big business as it is on at least some level socialist.
There are much greater differences between UK (and European) political parties than in the US.
BS. I cannot reasonably expect that no person will look at me, but I can reasonably expect that I'm not being tracked everywhere I go by cameras. The differences between someone seeing you and a camera seeing you are astronomical.
It would be trivial to use some very basic counter-surveillance techniques if you wanted to avoid being monitored by CCTV cameras. For a start, despite what Americans seem to think, they don't cover most streets even in London, it's mainly busy junctions, and that's assuming you count all the privately owned CCTV cameras as part of the same hideous network.
If you don't think counter-surveillance is necessary (and for a normal person it isn't) then it just shows you have nothing to worry about in the first place.
Even if there was blanket CCTV coverage available live to the police, they would only be using it to find and convict criminals. And if you get caught and convicted of a crime, you get no sympathy from me (assuming you're guilty). I know people on slashdot like to think the government just makes up arbitrary laws to get undesirables thrown in jail, but in the real world, most people caught by CCTV are engaging in drunken fighting, not political protest.
If you're not guilty of anything, then society has a far worse problem than the physical means that are used to fit you up.
The overwhelming majority of CCTV cameras are privately owned (therefore they must be good in Slashdot groupthink) and not controlled by/accessible to the government/police/spooks... Even when they may have captured evidence of a crime it's non trivial for the authorities to get hold of the data and when they do, given the screenings shown on TV appeals*, the recordings are of such poor quality that it's debatable why they're there at all.
The private CCTV cameras are there for basically the same reasons that big padlocks are:
1. To deter amateur opportunists, and
2. To give evidence of a crime for insurance purposes.
The idea that all these cameras are linked into a central police command centre in order to provide live 24/7 blanket surveillance of Britain is risible.
The U.K. has been monitoring its citizens via a network of CCTV cameras for sometime and they appear to be especially prevalent in cities such as London where we have been lead to believe that your movements are recorded as soon as you step onto the street.
US posters are always saying things like this, as though the UK had installed BigBrother-style telescreens in everyone's home to monitor them.
In fact, CCTV only sees what is on public streets. If you get caught for committing a crime by CCTV evidence, so what? You don't have a right to privacy in the fucking High Street.
Opposition to the bill, at least in its original form, isn't just from crazy civil libertarian types, either; reader judgecorp points out that it even includes Deputy prime minister of Britain Nick Clegg.
So now, even on Slashdot, anyone who gives a damn about their privacy is "crazy"? The Ministry of Truth is doing a superb job.
No, because if you take slashdot posters as an example, a lot of libertarian types are crazy. However right they are about privacy and liberty issues, their extreme anti-government rhetoric tars the whole package with the same loony brush.
And the British electorate had the chance to get rid of FPTP voting in favor of an AV system, and they rejected that. So that tells me the voters like the kinds of Parliaments they get.
Oddly, there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm from the Tories (the senior partners in the government) for AV or anyother form of proportional reprsentation. The AV compromise presented to the public was unenthusiastically promoted, badly explained and never going to inspire anyone much.
Slashdot Mirror
You know that the Gauls in Asterix are only afraid of the sky falling on their head. And their favorite exclamation is 'By Toutatis!'.
That's because Toutatis was a major Celtic god . The naming of the asteroid happened in 1989 i.e. after the Asterix books had been using it for a while.
So the naming was presumably a deliberate reference to the Asterix books, or at the very least it used the same god as its basis.
Heck yes I would! I need to go pick up more ammo from academy.
Whatever your survivalist fantasies may be, if you can't breathe the air you're going to be in trouble.
The fact that a devastating impact didn't happen yesterday does not increase the odds that it will happen today
No, but the point is that the odds of a devestating impact not happening in the next X years are very low if there has been on average a devestating impact every X years in the past.
If I toss a coin, whether I got a head the last time has no influence on whether I get heads or tails on my next throw. But I can still say that the odds of my not getting a head in the next hundred throws are vanishingly small.
Ever heard about lottery? We could win!
This fact still does not justify wasting your money on a lottery ticket.
It depends how much the lottery ticket costs. A couple of euros a week is no more silly than buying a couple of chocolate bars.
What is definitely not a good idea is spending 90% of your annual salary on lottery tickets, and impoverishing yourself on the remote chance of striking lucky.
We are seating ducks
Not quite as good as "escape goat" but still amusing.
It's a common use of the word avoid. Why would you even bring it up? Nothing implies the Earth did anything.
Because the common use of the word avoid implies it WAS going to collide, but then something changed and it did not. While mixing units is MUCH more commonly done, and not technically wrong just a pain to do the conversions.
Not really. If you say "the child ran out into the road without looking and narrowly avoided being run down by an eighteen wheel truck" it doesn't imply that the child or the truck did anything to avoid the collision, it was just lucky their paths didn't cross, as here with Earth and the asteroids.
I know writing headlines is hard, but this one seems to imply that earth took evasive action. The less exciting "earth does not collide with pair of asteroids" would be a touch less misleading.
Only if you're an absolutely literal type with no glimmer of subtlety or imagination in your response to the external world.
So, yes, I can see it would be a problem for a lot of slashdotters.
What's wrong with the Cenus anyway? Is it another example of paranoid libertarians hating something just because it's done by "the government"? Do they think "the government" are collecting this information so that it can be used to persecute you later? If being an atheist, Christian or Jedi ever becomes a matter that gets you brought to the attention of the Secret Service in the UK, we're beyond fucked already.
I think the assumption is that people don't actually believe in the Jedi Faith.
Then why the fuck bother writing that you do? As a political gesture it's up there with drawing a funny moustache on a candidate's election poster.
It seems to me the sort of thing that only sounds funny when you're a very, very drunk student.
People should have the courage of their convictions and just write "atheist" or "none" or something.
In New Zealand, Jedi is the second most popular religion overall.
I hope this is merely proof of the Kiwis' odd sense of humour, and not of their national level of mental illness.
Please don't remind us that one must now associate Star Wars with Disney. It makes me feel funny.
Star Wars has always been on the same cultural level as Disney, i.e. very popular, sentimental, technically accomplished, childishly political, soulless trash.
I don't worry about the people who consider themselves Jedi.
Indeed, I suppose it's a testament to how liberal the UK is that we allow mentally ill people to complete the census too.
If you don't follow the laws and rules of a country, you have two choices: go to jail or fuck off and live somewhere else.
Regardless of your actual faith, why wouldn't you choose this option?
Because you're not a childish twat?
If you want to make a protest about being asked to choose a religion, do it properly. Just write atheist or agnostic, according to your view of things.
Saying "Jedi" is probably funny if you're a backward fourteen year old, but then you wouldn't be doing the census in the first place. I find it hard to believe that adults would do this sober.
If you're the sort of person who has to earn twice or ten times as much as everyone else in order to feel good about yourself, it really makes no difference whether some of that extra is taxed. You're still going to get your wish and be able to flaunt your expensive toys in their faces anyway.
Opposition to tax is largely a philosophical position held by those who feel they are entitled to keep all "their" money and contribute nothing back to the society that allowed them to make that money.
Newsflash, most normal people think that all work is boring ass shit that no one wants to do anyway. It's just a case of finding the least unpleasant way of wasting half your life.
However, the Art College thing is entirely his fault.
To be fair, he probably went to a lot more parties, took a lot more drugs and had sex with a lot more people than most STEM students. It depends on your priorities in life. In the battles of Fun versus Success, I know which one I've always gone for...
I wouldn't consider him for any academic or research-based job at all
Well, you'd need a PhD for that anyway, so whether you did a 2 year Associate degree leading to a Bachelor's degree, then a Master's then a PhD or just a Bachelor's, Master's, PhD is irrelevant.
There are much greater differences between UK (and European) political parties than in the US.
BS. I cannot reasonably expect that no person will look at me, but I can reasonably expect that I'm not being tracked everywhere I go by cameras. The differences between someone seeing you and a camera seeing you are astronomical.
It would be trivial to use some very basic counter-surveillance techniques if you wanted to avoid being monitored by CCTV cameras. For a start, despite what Americans seem to think, they don't cover most streets even in London, it's mainly busy junctions, and that's assuming you count all the privately owned CCTV cameras as part of the same hideous network.
If you don't think counter-surveillance is necessary (and for a normal person it isn't) then it just shows you have nothing to worry about in the first place.
If you're not guilty of anything, then society has a far worse problem than the physical means that are used to fit you up.
The overwhelming majority of CCTV cameras are privately owned (therefore they must be good in Slashdot groupthink) and not controlled by/accessible to the government/police/spooks... Even when they may have captured evidence of a crime it's non trivial for the authorities to get hold of the data and when they do, given the screenings shown on TV appeals*, the recordings are of such poor quality that it's debatable why they're there at all.
The private CCTV cameras are there for basically the same reasons that big padlocks are:
1. To deter amateur opportunists, and
2. To give evidence of a crime for insurance purposes.
The idea that all these cameras are linked into a central police command centre in order to provide live 24/7 blanket surveillance of Britain is risible.
The U.K. has been monitoring its citizens via a network of CCTV cameras for sometime and they appear to be especially prevalent in cities such as London where we have been lead to believe that your movements are recorded as soon as you step onto the street.
US posters are always saying things like this, as though the UK had installed BigBrother-style telescreens in everyone's home to monitor them.
In fact, CCTV only sees what is on public streets. If you get caught for committing a crime by CCTV evidence, so what? You don't have a right to privacy in the fucking High Street.
Opposition to the bill, at least in its original form, isn't just from crazy civil libertarian types, either; reader judgecorp points out that it even includes Deputy prime minister of Britain Nick Clegg.
So now, even on Slashdot, anyone who gives a damn about their privacy is "crazy"? The Ministry of Truth is doing a superb job.
No, because if you take slashdot posters as an example, a lot of libertarian types are crazy. However right they are about privacy and liberty issues, their extreme anti-government rhetoric tars the whole package with the same loony brush.
And the British electorate had the chance to get rid of FPTP voting in favor of an AV system, and they rejected that. So that tells me the voters like the kinds of Parliaments they get.
Oddly, there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm from the Tories (the senior partners in the government) for AV or anyother form of proportional reprsentation. The AV compromise presented to the public was unenthusiastically promoted, badly explained and never going to inspire anyone much.