> Libertarianism is the cancer that is killing Slashdot.
Oh, no doubt. If Slashdot loses you, the site will surely die. I'll tell you what. I propose an experiment: You go away, whinging about evidence of libertarianism, perhaps to hang around Huffington Post with the other like-minded types, and the rest of us will see if the site dies. How's that? Brilliant, what? Innit?
No, I'm not quoting. I'm simply speaking my mind. I'm not claiming to be the first to think so, however.
In my case, violence is generally on my side. Been training in martial arts for forty years now; the very few times violence has been offered to me, I responded in kind and the attacker did not prevail. The bit about my lady's favors was not a hypothetical. She didn't fight back - but I did. The details shall remain fuzzy as I don't subscribe to the "only offer as much force as is offered you" social idiocy; suffice it to say that it would be impossible for that event to repeat itself in the same fashion with the same characters.
The people who claim violence is never appropriate are never very sophisticated individuals. I don't hold it against them. They're entitled to their opinions, even though they are quite obviously wrong.
Why was this moderated TROLL?
Jeez, people, learn to fucking spell.
On slashdot, editors are not average people. Editors are specifically selected for their ability to misconstrue TFA; for the ability to write, or pass on, a very poor summary without going anywhere near a spelling checker, and failing that, they must be backed up by zero knowledge of how to form proper sentences in English; they are checked for a complete lack of knowledge as to how to detect a dupe, a commercial troll, or blog-spam; and lastly, but not least, they are given infinite mod points so that they can, without limit, mod your ass down if you complain. So sit down, shut up, and and smile. Before you find yourself modded into obliteration.
sig: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Violence is also the best, by which I mean safest and most effective, response of the unjustly attacked. Now, when and if you can cobble up a world when thugs won't put a knife to the throat of my lady for her purse or her favors, you might have a point. Otherwise, you're just babbling.
I have two monitors; one is portrait, and one is landscape. When I turned the portrait one (an HP 2207, it came in landscape configuration), OS X knew it had been turned, rotated the portion of the desktop accordingly, and the only thing left for me to do was choose how I wanted the portrait space to sit adjoining the landscape space.
If I need to work on a page, I usually use the portrait space. If I need to work in landscape (I'm a photographer, it's common), I use the landscape space.
I think this problem has been solved, and solved very well, for quite some time. You can use one monitor like my HP that is aware of its orientation, or you can use more than one and have one or more of each. Of course, this does assume that the OS is competent to deal with it, but I know that at least, OS X is.
You mean, there's a paper somewhere that makes such claims, and therefore, society sometimes, with various levels of enthusiasm, supports those ideas.
The fact is, you have no innate rights at all. These things are just social constructs; ephemeral, arbitrary, and often silly. Counting on them can bring very nasty surprises, especially in the USA.
You have the right to any land you can take and hold by force. That's the way the US government did it, and still does it, and that's the only way that works. Since you can't hold your land against the USG (you have absolutely no chance of overcoming the force they can and will bring to bear), and since they can, and will, and do, take and land at all, whenever they want to take it, guess who ultimately has the right your land? Clue: it's not you.
If you don't like it -- too bad. That's the way it is.
There are lots of ways to know whether there was a human in the house.
You think? Little neighbor kid slipped in to visit Johnny. Overcome by smoke on the back stairs. Doesn't make it to Johnny's room, Johnny doesn't know he's even there. House is burning, neighbor kid is insensate on the steps. Everyone else is out. And before you say "can't happen", I used to go see a friend just this way almost every day. It can happen.
So how, exactly (in other words, not "lots of ways"), does anyone know neighbor kid is collapsed on the back stairs? You know of a "human detector" the firemen had and could employ? Explain, please.
In rural America, the types of places where we don't already have fire departments; house aren't next to each other. They are often miles apart.
Yeah. And so we shouldn't have postal service to them. Oh, wait. Or roads. Oh, wait. Or defense. Oh, wait.
The fire department had no trouble protecting the paying customer from the spread of the fire. He wasn't placed in danger by his neighbor's decision not to pay.
Of course he was. The FD handled the particular version of danger that cropped up this time; but there are times they don't, and the neighbor loses everything. This chance is exacerbated by letting a fire get fully involved.
This guy didn't want to pay for optional fire coverage; so he didn't. I support his right to do that. It didn't hurt anyone but himself.
Yes, it did. It killed the pets. And, as I explained above and you ignored, there are circumstances where people are in the house you're not aware of. The risk is substantially greater than just to the owner. This is why it shouldn't be a matter of personal choice.
Eating Vegetables is good too. Should I be forced to pay taxes so that the government can provide free vegetables to myself and my neighbors? What about working out? why not let me decide if I want to do it?
No. These substantially affect only you. A fire isn't comparable to "eat your veggies" or "maintain your body" and you're being disingenuous (or worse) when you try to draw the comparison. Yes, you should be able to decide what you do with you body. No, you should not be able to decide not to take fire safety measures with property that is physically connected to other people's properties and/or resources (water, roads, power and/or gas and/or communications lines, etc.) and where under your roof, you EVER allow another living being to visit.
I'm 100% libertarian when you can demonstrate that your choice only substantially puts yourself and lives classed as consenting, informed adults at risk; but as it is utterly impossible to do this in the case of a house or property fire, which by their very nature can spread uncontrollably, and are likely to if not fought without quarter, this is not an area where your liberties can reasonably trump another's liberties.
You want to eat poorly and not exercise? You want to take drugs? You want to frequent prostitutes, or be one? I'm all for your choice. 100%.
Personal liberties only have a rational meaning when they can be demonstrated to have a scope that you can limit to yourself by your own actions. As soon as you think it means you can make any choice you like just because it's your choice, you've entirely perverted the entire concept.
Ah. But it isn't basic human decency that controls; it is stupidity. This is because half the people are biologically stupid, and a good number of the remaining are fucntionally stupid as a consequence of not being possessed of critical thinking skills, adequate data, or a combination of both. That's why democracy is effectively a mechanism where any two idiots can outvote an expert, in an environment where experts are rare. It's doomed to make the wrong decisions in many cases, just as we see here. The obvious path here is to tax the property owners for fire services. But it's only obvious if you can think. That whole sticky mass of smegma about everyone being equal? Yeah, not so much.
Come on. Think. This shouldn't be an income tax. It should be a property tax. The owner of the property - not a renter, or the kid who lives there and works a job, should be responsible for such a payment. If you're renting, you include the cost in the rent. If you can't afford your property taxes, the government takes your property. Problem solved, and fairly, too.
Why should idiots be protected? So they can reproduce more idiots?
Because it's not just about the idiot, that's why. There's no way to know if there were others in the house until it advances to the stage of sifting the ashes. Also, fires don't respect boundaries. The best approach to any fire is fight it as hard as possible until it is definitively out.
if you can't swing $75 a year for fire insurance, how the hell are you supposed to pay $75 a year in extra property tax?
If you can't pay for fire protection, perhaps you are too poor to own a house. How about that? That's how we treat people who can't pay property taxes, and any number of other costs. We just take the house. And the land, for that matter.
I'm in the camp of those with the idea that the country should be collecting that $75 per person and channeling it to the FD, and the FD's job be limited to putting out fires, rather than deciding whose pets get to live or die, whose homes get no protection, who takes the risk of being an unknown person in a building when it burns.
First of all, the firefighters would have saved any humans in the house.
There's no way to know if there were humans in the house. A neighbor kid could have slipped in to visit little Johnny. A tramp may have been sleeping under the porch. The local religionist may have been upstairs, in the toilet, as part of his visit to make magical incantations over sick aunt Sally. A burglar could have been in an upstairs bedroom. Etc.
Bottom line, that kind of rationalization is idiotic.
In this example, the two dogs and cat might disagree. Could just as easily have been a handful of children, or a cherished spouse. Or the homeowner. So apparently there is a reason. These decisions can directly affect other people -- so they really don't fall into the zone of a single person's natural freedoms. Others should be considered.
It makes much more sense for some things to be covered by the solvent population, via taxes. Education, healthcare, fire, water, sewage, roads, canals, police, justice, defense... these are areas where "socialist" banding together makes for considerably better mechanisms for dealing with the associated problems.
Would you pay 5-8 bucks more for a ticket where there is no advertising?
Sorry, I quit going when the tickets hit $8.00 per person. Now, with a nice home theater, there's nothing they can do to lure me back.
Seriously, consider what you get for your ticket. You get screaming babies. The opportunity to catch the flu and any number of other unpleasantries from your fellow theater-goers. You get uncomfortable seats. Climbed over by people you don't know (and usually wouldn't want to know.) Incredibly overpriced food, often with crushed palm tree juice in lieu of butter. You can't yell "fire." You get commercials, and the most awful slideshows ever conceived (surely there is a special hell for those people.) You get really bad pop music, and really lame "quizzes" about the songs and the artists, if I may abuse the term.
At home, for the cost of a DVD or a Bluray (a lot less than a pair of tickets), you own the show and can watch it as many times as you like. You can pause it. You can lend it out. You can watch it with your friends and family. You can have exactly the snacks you want, with actual butter if you like, or a four-course dinner if that's your bent. You can have way better sound, eliminate cellphones and landlines, enjoy comfortable furniture, a cat in your lap and your sweetheart right next to you, and control the showtime instead of letting the showtime control you. Once you wait through the new release cycle once, you're on your own new release cycle, same rate as everyone else, just a few months delayed. And you've saved a *lot* of money, which you can use to improve your life, instead of the theater owner's life. Plus you have awesome A/V equipment, which improves your life in many ways. You can have a drink, or flame up, or grope someone without fear of arrest, too. No children. No babies. No old folks trying to cough their lungs out on the theater floor. No teenagers texting, tweeting, or babbling. No slipping on the ice on the sidewalk; no standing in line.
Movie theaters are dead to me. Like credit cards, you just have to learn to look at them clearly and see what they're doing to your bottom line, and how you could do that better, and you'll never go back to being a sucker.
The thing is, frying the 6809 is something outside its ken. It is a form of death, if you like - an event only meaningful outside its universe, because should it happen, there is no more 6809. So it really doesn't matter if the 6809 can detect it or not. What matters is, what the 6809 perceives of the reality it *can* access. And that's ALL that matters. To the 6809 -- in the same position as you would be inside a "universe program" -- all is well and normal.
It doesn't *matter* if there is a larger universe, if the only universe you know is the one that is made available to you.
The universe we know could indeed be just a program, and you and I just a portion of that program.
The ideas of == and === mean entirely different things to the 6809, and the programmer of the emulator. There may be an absolute === at some outer level, or not, but there are certainly multiple shells of it from our perspective, at least.
And there may be many more as AI comes into its own, something that has either not happened yet in our context, or at least not even a hint of which has been made public. If we can make an AI, then by definition, we can stick it into its own universe, limited entirely to that which we decide it may experience. Rather intriguing.
Slashdot Mirror
> Libertarianism is the cancer that is killing Slashdot.
Oh, no doubt. If Slashdot loses you, the site will surely die. I'll tell you what. I propose an experiment: You go away, whinging about evidence of libertarianism, perhaps to hang around Huffington Post with the other like-minded types, and the rest of us will see if the site dies. How's that? Brilliant, what? Innit?
No, I'm not quoting. I'm simply speaking my mind. I'm not claiming to be the first to think so, however.
In my case, violence is generally on my side. Been training in martial arts for forty years now; the very few times violence has been offered to me, I responded in kind and the attacker did not prevail. The bit about my lady's favors was not a hypothetical. She didn't fight back - but I did. The details shall remain fuzzy as I don't subscribe to the "only offer as much force as is offered you" social idiocy; suffice it to say that it would be impossible for that event to repeat itself in the same fashion with the same characters.
The people who claim violence is never appropriate are never very sophisticated individuals. I don't hold it against them. They're entitled to their opinions, even though they are quite obviously wrong.
On slashdot, editors are not average people. Editors are specifically selected for their ability to misconstrue TFA; for the ability to write, or pass on, a very poor summary without going anywhere near a spelling checker, and failing that, they must be backed up by zero knowledge of how to form proper sentences in English; they are checked for a complete lack of knowledge as to how to detect a dupe, a commercial troll, or blog-spam; and lastly, but not least, they are given infinite mod points so that they can, without limit, mod your ass down if you complain. So sit down, shut up, and and smile. Before you find yourself modded into obliteration.
Violence is also the best, by which I mean safest and most effective, response of the unjustly attacked. Now, when and if you can cobble up a world when thugs won't put a knife to the throat of my lady for her purse or her favors, you might have a point. Otherwise, you're just babbling.
I have two monitors; one is portrait, and one is landscape. When I turned the portrait one (an HP 2207, it came in landscape configuration), OS X knew it had been turned, rotated the portion of the desktop accordingly, and the only thing left for me to do was choose how I wanted the portrait space to sit adjoining the landscape space.
If I need to work on a page, I usually use the portrait space. If I need to work in landscape (I'm a photographer, it's common), I use the landscape space.
I think this problem has been solved, and solved very well, for quite some time. You can use one monitor like my HP that is aware of its orientation, or you can use more than one and have one or more of each. Of course, this does assume that the OS is competent to deal with it, but I know that at least, OS X is.
You mean, there's a paper somewhere that makes such claims, and therefore, society sometimes, with various levels of enthusiasm, supports those ideas.
The fact is, you have no innate rights at all. These things are just social constructs; ephemeral, arbitrary, and often silly. Counting on them can bring very nasty surprises, especially in the USA.
You have the right to any land you can take and hold by force. That's the way the US government did it, and still does it, and that's the only way that works. Since you can't hold your land against the USG (you have absolutely no chance of overcoming the force they can and will bring to bear), and since they can, and will, and do, take and land at all, whenever they want to take it, guess who ultimately has the right your land? Clue: it's not you.
If you don't like it -- too bad. That's the way it is.
You think? Little neighbor kid slipped in to visit Johnny. Overcome by smoke on the back stairs. Doesn't make it to Johnny's room, Johnny doesn't know he's even there. House is burning, neighbor kid is insensate on the steps. Everyone else is out. And before you say "can't happen", I used to go see a friend just this way almost every day. It can happen.
So how, exactly (in other words, not "lots of ways"), does anyone know neighbor kid is collapsed on the back stairs? You know of a "human detector" the firemen had and could employ? Explain, please.
Yeah. And so we shouldn't have postal service to them. Oh, wait. Or roads. Oh, wait. Or defense. Oh, wait.
Of course he was. The FD handled the particular version of danger that cropped up this time; but there are times they don't, and the neighbor loses everything. This chance is exacerbated by letting a fire get fully involved.
Yes, it did. It killed the pets. And, as I explained above and you ignored, there are circumstances where people are in the house you're not aware of. The risk is substantially greater than just to the owner. This is why it shouldn't be a matter of personal choice.
No. These substantially affect only you. A fire isn't comparable to "eat your veggies" or "maintain your body" and you're being disingenuous (or worse) when you try to draw the comparison. Yes, you should be able to decide what you do with you body. No, you should not be able to decide not to take fire safety measures with property that is physically connected to other people's properties and/or resources (water, roads, power and/or gas and/or communications lines, etc.) and where under your roof, you EVER allow another living being to visit.
I'm 100% libertarian when you can demonstrate that your choice only substantially puts yourself and lives classed as consenting, informed adults at risk; but as it is utterly impossible to do this in the case of a house or property fire, which by their very nature can spread uncontrollably, and are likely to if not fought without quarter, this is not an area where your liberties can reasonably trump another's liberties.
You want to eat poorly and not exercise? You want to take drugs? You want to frequent prostitutes, or be one? I'm all for your choice. 100%.
Personal liberties only have a rational meaning when they can be demonstrated to have a scope that you can limit to yourself by your own actions. As soon as you think it means you can make any choice you like just because it's your choice, you've entirely perverted the entire concept.
Ah. But it isn't basic human decency that controls; it is stupidity. This is because half the people are biologically stupid, and a good number of the remaining are fucntionally stupid as a consequence of not being possessed of critical thinking skills, adequate data, or a combination of both. That's why democracy is effectively a mechanism where any two idiots can outvote an expert, in an environment where experts are rare. It's doomed to make the wrong decisions in many cases, just as we see here. The obvious path here is to tax the property owners for fire services. But it's only obvious if you can think. That whole sticky mass of smegma about everyone being equal? Yeah, not so much.
Come on. Think. This shouldn't be an income tax. It should be a property tax. The owner of the property - not a renter, or the kid who lives there and works a job, should be responsible for such a payment. If you're renting, you include the cost in the rent. If you can't afford your property taxes, the government takes your property. Problem solved, and fairly, too.
"Whinge" is English for "please put up more cameras to watch us."
Only when those choices can be demonstrated to significantly affect only themselves. In the case of a fire, that can't be done. So, no.
Because it's not just about the idiot, that's why. There's no way to know if there were others in the house until it advances to the stage of sifting the ashes. Also, fires don't respect boundaries. The best approach to any fire is fight it as hard as possible until it is definitively out.
The county does, though. And they should have been collecting that $75.
It's also an example of stupidity; of failure; of a poor system that produces cluetards and then lets them vote.
Democracy: where any two idiots can outvote an expert on any subject;
Tennessee: where there are very few experts.
They're a very bad idea anyway. That's why universal healthcare should be put into place.
If you can't pay for fire protection, perhaps you are too poor to own a house. How about that? That's how we treat people who can't pay property taxes, and any number of other costs. We just take the house. And the land, for that matter.
I'm in the camp of those with the idea that the country should be collecting that $75 per person and channeling it to the FD, and the FD's job be limited to putting out fires, rather than deciding whose pets get to live or die, whose homes get no protection, who takes the risk of being an unknown person in a building when it burns.
Thanks. :)
There's no way to know if there were humans in the house. A neighbor kid could have slipped in to visit little Johnny. A tramp may have been sleeping under the porch. The local religionist may have been upstairs, in the toilet, as part of his visit to make magical incantations over sick aunt Sally. A burglar could have been in an upstairs bedroom. Etc.
Bottom line, that kind of rationalization is idiotic.
In this example, the two dogs and cat might disagree. Could just as easily have been a handful of children, or a cherished spouse. Or the homeowner. So apparently there is a reason. These decisions can directly affect other people -- so they really don't fall into the zone of a single person's natural freedoms. Others should be considered.
It makes much more sense for some things to be covered by the solvent population, via taxes. Education, healthcare, fire, water, sewage, roads, canals, police, justice, defense... these are areas where "socialist" banding together makes for considerably better mechanisms for dealing with the associated problems.
This story is a tragedy brought on by idiocy.
That'd really suck if that window broke or blew out as a result of the fire prior to the arrival of the FD, wouldn't it?
If that is so, however, then you are also totally meaningless and can be ignored. :)
Sorry, I quit going when the tickets hit $8.00 per person. Now, with a nice home theater, there's nothing they can do to lure me back.
Seriously, consider what you get for your ticket. You get screaming babies. The opportunity to catch the flu and any number of other unpleasantries from your fellow theater-goers. You get uncomfortable seats. Climbed over by people you don't know (and usually wouldn't want to know.) Incredibly overpriced food, often with crushed palm tree juice in lieu of butter. You can't yell "fire." You get commercials, and the most awful slideshows ever conceived (surely there is a special hell for those people.) You get really bad pop music, and really lame "quizzes" about the songs and the artists, if I may abuse the term.
At home, for the cost of a DVD or a Bluray (a lot less than a pair of tickets), you own the show and can watch it as many times as you like. You can pause it. You can lend it out. You can watch it with your friends and family. You can have exactly the snacks you want, with actual butter if you like, or a four-course dinner if that's your bent. You can have way better sound, eliminate cellphones and landlines, enjoy comfortable furniture, a cat in your lap and your sweetheart right next to you, and control the showtime instead of letting the showtime control you. Once you wait through the new release cycle once, you're on your own new release cycle, same rate as everyone else, just a few months delayed. And you've saved a *lot* of money, which you can use to improve your life, instead of the theater owner's life. Plus you have awesome A/V equipment, which improves your life in many ways. You can have a drink, or flame up, or grope someone without fear of arrest, too. No children. No babies. No old folks trying to cough their lungs out on the theater floor. No teenagers texting, tweeting, or babbling. No slipping on the ice on the sidewalk; no standing in line.
Movie theaters are dead to me. Like credit cards, you just have to learn to look at them clearly and see what they're doing to your bottom line, and how you could do that better, and you'll never go back to being a sucker.
The thing is, frying the 6809 is something outside its ken. It is a form of death, if you like - an event only meaningful outside its universe, because should it happen, there is no more 6809. So it really doesn't matter if the 6809 can detect it or not. What matters is, what the 6809 perceives of the reality it *can* access. And that's ALL that matters. To the 6809 -- in the same position as you would be inside a "universe program" -- all is well and normal.
It doesn't *matter* if there is a larger universe, if the only universe you know is the one that is made available to you.
The universe we know could indeed be just a program, and you and I just a portion of that program.
The ideas of == and === mean entirely different things to the 6809, and the programmer of the emulator. There may be an absolute === at some outer level, or not, but there are certainly multiple shells of it from our perspective, at least.
And there may be many more as AI comes into its own, something that has either not happened yet in our context, or at least not even a hint of which has been made public. If we can make an AI, then by definition, we can stick it into its own universe, limited entirely to that which we decide it may experience. Rather intriguing.