Haven't done much code breaking, eh? The poster didn't specify what direction the timestamps were in or indicate that said direction(s) were consistent, much less that the intervals to the next digit were of constant offset or sign. In fact, it's an unwarranted assumption to think that one knows the base, the number of bits involved, the interval between the bits, or any number (hah) of other things.
No. Civilizations that have moved far beyond radio for their own use will still understand that radio is an easily discovered, created, and maintained technology with great range and excellent economy. If such a civilization were to wish to keep track of emerging civilizations (a good idea, as the earlier it is done, the less dangerous they will be), they would keep radio reception going. Given our knowledge of physics, it seems that radio is as fast as anything can be - light speed - and so it would provide as quick a "heads-up" as anything else.
Radio transmission presumes they want to contact us. The only observation I can make here is that aside from a few, seriously underfunded and rather pitiful attempts, we're not trying to contact anyone else, though we certainly could be, technically speaking. Assuming that some other civilization wants us to find them... that may be the problem.
Of course, if a civilization is up to creating an optical telescope of multiple light years across using aperture synthesis... they can just watch us (time delayed), if they're close enough. Sounds impossible - and it is, for us at the moment - but any civilization that can start an automated process and has a few systems worth of raw material to draw upon should be able to do it, given time.
My lady has a macbook air. She thinks it's great. Light, etc.
I, however, have a 17" macbook pro. I think it's great. Powerful, etc.
We both take 'em everywhere we go out of town, and we're both happy. I'd say the market delivered for both of us. There is no one size fits all. On the other hand, some people think that anything that doesn't fit their preconceptions is no good, and those people, I am very comfortable saying, are wrong.
Running a business? Operating a counter? The person you're talking to across the counter is 100x more important than anyone who calls you and they were there first. If the phone rings, either someone else should answer it (preferably elsewhere), or your answer is: Hi, this is Leroy. I have a customer at the counter. You'll be on hold for a while, or you can call back, or come on down. [click]
Phone rings, caller id/number hidden: Don't answer. The caller is "That guy." Screw that guy.
Never answer the phone in public. Otherwise "You're that guy." Refuse incoming calls as quickly as possible.
Also, as a courtesy:
Don't call people when you're eating.
Don't call people when you're with friends.
Don't call people when you think they're likely to be eating.
Don't call people outside of normal waking hours, or, their waking hours.
Turn off the cellphone before the first kiss. Cellphones and intimacy are like ammonia and bleach.
And finally, for your own sanity:
Build a whitelist (most phones support groups.) Use a particular ringer for these people.
Everything else gets a different ringer. Or none at all, if your phone allows that.
Most importantly, be aware of this general rule: If the cellphone is interfering with your life, or with other people's lives, you're not using it very well, and you should modify your behavior (and likely, your cellphone's settings.)
Modern DSLR cameras have come a long way in the last three generations. Extremely high "pushed" ISOs, relatively low noise, combined with some really great lenses and just a little bit of software sophistication, and astro becomes very accessible.
If you add a tracking mount, which allows the camera to pivot on the tripod at the same rate the earth turns, keeping the camera pointed at the same subject for several minutes, you can use even lower-noise ISO ranges of the cameras and sharper f-stop ranges of the lenses. You can build yourself a "barn-door" mount for the cost of lumber, and a few bucks for screws and a clock drive (or a gear and a handle to turn it.) Or you can buy a premade tracking device like the Astrotrac I selected (because I'm too lazy to build a mount -- about a grand); or you can go nuts and buy a telescope mount that tracks (can cost ((up to many)) thousands.) Tracking really helps.
But, you don't have to go there. Just go outside, pop the camera on a tripod, use a lens you can set for f/2.8 or faster, crank the ISO up to 1600 or faster, and expose for 1...8 seconds (depending on how much magnification the lens provides... at 85mm, 4 seconds is good. At 400mm, about one second is all you can go before the starts begin to trail.) Personally, I like 85mm; it's enough mag where with a modern sensor (15mp for the 50D) you get a goodly amount of detail, but it's short enough that you get some exposure time.
So with this setup, shoot multiple shots, then align and "stack" them using pretty much any image processsing software that lets you rotate and translate, preferably to sub-pixel precision. The more images you stack, the better the result will be. The rule is, random noise reduces to the square root of the number of frames, so you can get a 4:1 noise reduction with only 16 shots. To get 10:1, you need a hundred. For impulse noise, like a satellite track, averaging gets you reduction of N:1 where N is the number of frames... BUT... if you use median instead of average, odds are excellent that impulse noise will disappear completely. I always try both, just to see which looks better.
There are dedicated programs out there than can stack and align for you, too. A little googling goes a long way.
The biggest challenge has little to do with the camera, and more to do with where you live. Light pollution, that is, the amount of light sourced from streetlights and so forth, competes with the dim deep space objects; so someone who lives east coast, say, NJ or in the metro area... not going to do very well. Where I live - rural Montana - it's not a problem at all. If you live in an urban area, it's the kind of thing you keep in mind for when you go cross country and have an opportunity to cross some desert (or most anywhere in Montana.:) Refer to a light pollution reference, watch the weather (which can really screw up your plans.... clouds.... I flipping despise clouds at night), and then it's all down to your timing.
Anyone who has a modern DSLR, I can't recommend this highly enough. It's fun.
I don't want you to go on for pages, but am I curious:
who are you to say 207 years of Supreme Court decisions are wrong?
I'm a cranky old guy with a copy of the constitution who has made trying to understand what it actually means a serious pursuit over many decades, while watching our laws, and our liberties, devolve. No more, no less.
You cannot sensibly sit there and try to tell me that every decision rendered by SCOTUS was constitutionally "right", either in the absolute moral sense, or even in a strict technical sense. Likewise, you cannot read article III and come up with a rationale for judicial amendment practices (which, btw, are authorized to other parties entirely via article V.) However, should you try, I will be perfectly happy to take your argument(s) apart into tiny, steaming little fragments for you.
Do you even know what an ex post facto law is? Give some recent examples to demonstrate that you do.
The definition of an ex post facto law is this:
Calder v Bull (3 US 386 [1798]), in the opinion of Justice Chase:
Every law that makes an action done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action.
Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed.
Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.
Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offense, in order to convict the offender.
Examples, as requested:
Law adding a restriction of owning firearms after the person restricted has been sentenced without such restriction
Law adding punishment those convicted of "sexual offenses" after sentencing, such as the punitive registration laws, to a person sentenced without registration years prior to the laws enactment.
Both of these are, to the letter, violations as defined in (3.) because they increase the punishment for a crime beyond the sentence, after the sentence has been handed down, as this unequivocally creates a formal division in time proving that the person committed the act prior to the increase in punishment.
These laws are common at the state level (states are explicitly forbidden ex post facto laws by the constitution just as the feds are) and have, in both cases, been to the supreme court, where the judges failed in most profound fashion to do the right thing, resulting in the continued existence of said laws.
And here I blame the congressmen for writing unconstitutional laws, then the president for signing them. And all the time I should be blaming the Supreme Court for invalidating them.
No, you should be blaming the supreme court for not invalidating them. SCOTUS has upheld all manner of blatantly unconstitutional law. I could go on for pages. I'll spare you.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't hold the others responsible. They all swear an oath to the constitution, and they have all broken those oaths unequivocally. They are liars, scoundrels, and traitors.
It's my life. It's none of your business whether or not I want to "play the odds".
No? It seems to be our business to see that you get educated, so that you're not an ignorant fuck, dragging down society with your inability to balance your own checkbook. So we force you to go to school. It seems to be our business to force you to pay taxes so that there are roads to transport food and goods to where you can buy it. It seems to be our business to tell you that you cannot put your neighbor at risk by building your house out of bricks of C4.
I draw the following conclusion: It should be our business to see to it that you're not a load on society because we allowed you to become unnecessarily crippled; it should be our business to see to it that you're not a source of plague or HIV or whatever horrible disease; it should be our business to see to it that should you take injury, we heal your ass up so you can go back to being a citizen in our society as soon, and as well, as possible, so that whatever potential you have is most likely to flourish.
This is a country that allows people to smoke tobacco, live off fast food, skydive, drink alcohol, bungee jump, BMX, blah, blah, blah. One could argue that every single one of those activities imposes indirect costs on society. Yet they remain legal.
And so they should. The fact that they are legal, and should be legal, only points more emphatically that we need to be ready to deal with medical issues, since our society allows behavior that is risky. Call it a cost of freedom. I think that's perfectly fair. I think it's also worth pointing out that as humans grow up, they generally gain a sense of their own mortality and the amount of risk taking declines. Older, for many people, is wiser. Best we see to it that they have a decent chance of getting older, while doing as little as possible to restrict their freedoms.
So your solution is to support legislation that requires us all to do business with them [insurance companies]?
Oh. Well, that's a fun question. We were talking about reality. But if you want to know how I'd handle it, here ya go:
My solution, were it my option to implement, would be to allow exactly one year's medical debt on the part of the government. Once the year is over, the next year's taxes pay that debt in full. Rinse, repeat. Payments go from gov't to the medical industry. The medical insurance industry would be banned (because although I've little objection to gambling, I still don't think it is reasonable to gamble one's health. Too much else in society depends upon it.)
I would accompany this with pulling out of all military commitments elsewhere, withdrawing our troops and our offensive equipment back within our borders. I would stop all government sourced foreign aid (private aid is of course the option of the citizens), I would seek to amend the constitution to add teeth such that any law determined to be in violation would result in the hanging of those who made it and the instant release and clearing of records of anyone touched by said laws; I would make said amendment retroactive; and, if I could get that amendment passed, I would hang all 9 supreme court justices for violation, and probably most of the congress. I would shrink our federal government to a fraction of its current size, making it serve the following roles:
Defending our borders
Educating our people to a minimum standard higher than the current HS standard
Maintaining transport, utility, and communications infrastructure
Providing a stable, non-inflatable, non-deflatable reference for currency
Ensuring that interstate commerce is carried on over a level playing field
Ensuring that no state in any way violates the bill of rights or other constitutional restrictions
Wait, it's the Supreme Court's fault that Congress passed crap laws?
No. It's the supreme court's fault that they misuse article III as if it were article V, which it in no way resembles or implies; it's the supreme court's fault that they disobey the constitution on behalf of the entire government; it's the supreme court's fault that the government is operating far outside its constitutionally authorized bounds.
The supreme court set themselves up -- unauthorized by the people -- as those who could re-define the constitution. Then, on top of that, they worked, and are working, to destroy everything it stands for. That's why they're at the top of that list. They enable the congress to make, and keep in force, laws that are explicitly forbidden, or not authorized, by the constitution.
The constitution has one critical flaw: It has no teeth. Violating it, on the part of judges, legislators... there is no penalty. Because of this, they can do whatever they want. And they do. This is why we are suffering under the inversion of the commerce clause. This is why we have ex post facto laws. This is why eight of the ten amendments of the bill of rights have been turned into caricatures of themselves in currently extant law. And this is why copyright law no longer resembles anything even vaguely implied in Article I, section 8, paragraph 8.
Lots of blame to go around. The responsible parties, in order:
Supreme court
Congress
Lawyers
CBS
It's always painful to see culture, protected TEMPORARILY by the authorizing document (constitution) in order to encourage its creation for EVERYONE'S BENEFIT, destroyed by a government and its minions out of control.
That wasn't the point. The point was the cost of the healthcare exceeded the cost of the premiums rather significantly, contrary to the previous post's claim.
I would add that anyone who says "I don't need it" is naive. We don't know when, or why, we'll get sick. It might be an infection; it might be genetic; it might be consequent to an accident. When you need it, though, it's too late to say "Oh, hey, I'll buy insurance now." What you'll do "now" is go into debt, more than likely, or else hand the cost off to the rest of us indirectly.
The ONLY sensible path is to insure everyone, just as the only sensible path is to educate everyone -- we don't know who will get sick or remain healthy, and we don't know who will turn out to be a research scientist or a McDonald's employee. We don't know when a potential high performance person will cross with a health issue (Steven Hawking comes to mind, as do Stevie Wonder and Beethoven) either, until it has already happened.
That "we" includes you, whoever you may be. You don't know if your health will take a turn for the worse tomorrow. You can protest all you like, but you're doing nothing but playing the odds. The thing is that if you're wrong and you face something catastrophic, you're not likely to opt out of the medical services you need. And since you can't pay for them, everyone else will, in the form of (yet again) increased costs somewhere in the chain.
Pooling works because actuaries figure out the odds of people getting sick; most won't, but no one knows who will, and who won't. Usefully, though, the odds remain fairly constant. So you can figure out what the total cost will be, and then spread that cost thinly throughout a population. That thin cost is generally pretty affordable. The cost if you actually get seriously ill -- not so affordable.
The real problem we face here (aside from the naive) is that traditional insurance companies operate with a huge conflict of interest. They take premiums by selling the customer the idea that they'll be covered in case of health issues. But they serve corporate responsibilities that are best addressed by reducing the amount of services paid for. The less they pay out, the more money they make. Consequently, they are constantly looking for excuses not to pay.
This is why said companies should never be publicly traded companies, and never be allowed to provide rewards to employees based on payout amounts. Ideally, a minimum overhead system would be established with no company at all, simply the government as the payee, but we know that getting our government (US) to do things efficiently is problematic. Unfortunately, we also know that letting private insurance companies approach the problem freely results in people being unable to afford coverage, being denied coverage for health events, and outright being denied insurance.
The only sensible, socially responsible answer is to cover everyone and make certain that everyone is paying into the pool.
The homily goes, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Unfortunately, we don't have "good" yet, so perhaps there's still room to bitch a bit.
My IDE highlights "tis" with a red underscoring, regardless of the font used.
And if "ths" and "this" are both valid structures, with valid elements as named, but what you meant was to type "this" twice, what will your IDE do then? Nothing. But your eye has a better chance of catching it if you were using fixed width fonts, because your intent has the consequence of creating a visually aligned display, while your error does not. So when your pattern recognition flares up and says "hey, that's not prettily aligned", you catch it.
As a human, you have pattern recognition. It's a built-in feature of your design. If you elect to cripple it, that's almost certainly going to have consequences.
It's 2010. Wine still crashes trying to run fairly low requirement (in terms of system calls) applications written for Windows '98. That's why including Wine doesn't give you decent windows emulation/simulation/replacement. It's probably why this guy is heading off on his own, too. He's probably as tired as I am of trying Wine and watching it crash.
I'll tell you what, if there was an open-source, binary compatible with windows OS that worked... I would *totally* get behind it. Not that I'm anti-commercial, exactly the opposite -- I'm just tired of the supposed fix for a buggy OS being to upgrade to a new, less compatible, more DRM'd, have to "authorize", still buggy OS.
Holes in cards? What does that do? I just sit down with the memory card and clip the leads to the diodes I want to read back as a '1'. When I'm done programming, I plug the card in, clean all the relays, replace the tubes that test poorly, power up the computer, and once it's all warmed up, read the answer off the incandescent lamps on the font panel.
If your cards have holes in them, you should get a new deck. Otherwise your opponent will figure out which cards are the face cards.
The better example is simply missing the 'i', which is thin.
this->posy=0;
ths->ttl=40;
this->source="";
As compared to:
this->posy=0;
ths->ttl=40;
this->source="";
That's a pretty big visual difference.
There are other issues, like setting up tables and arrays, where not only do I use fixed width (always), but I use "replace" after the array is set up so I can waltz down the column of [ ]'s and fill in the appropriate things. There are many potential situations like this. Sometimes I have arrays of canned SQL selects, same kind of issues.
Totally on board with the idea that proportional fonts have no place whatsoever in my source editing.
Richard Reid comes from the middle east? Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab comes from the Middle East? Are either of them Arabs?
Neither of these people caused us to make war on Afghanistan, so they're off subject. I didn't say that superstitious middle easterners were the only people that deserved disdain; I was simply talking about the ones that were relevant to the discussion - which was about making war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am perfectly ready to say that Islam and Christianity both breed violence on a regular and dependable basis, because both explicitly encode both glorification and encouragement of it in their belief systems. I am perfectly ready to condemn any such act. But I don't think such acts are the proper basis for war between nations until or unless the nation itself makes war upon another nation. Or to put it another way, the only war I'll grant as justified is a defensive war against an invading nation. There are far better ways to interact with other nations over almost any level of disagreement than war.
If you want to demonstrate that the cause of terrorism is religion, you have not even come close.
I could go on all day and probably all night citing examples where religion led directly to specific acts of single and group violence, and to war. The point that I was making there is that religion - specifically Islam and Christianity - contains great violence, and instruction and incitement to violence, and as the whole thing (being religious) is the act of substituting canned, centuries old goat herder thinking for actually processing modern reality, this incitement to violence naturally leads some religious adherents to said, or similar, or what they perceive as equivalent or sufficient, violence. And again, I could cite example after example, certainly beginning with the current round of camel fuckery, but hardly limited to it, or to Islam. Religion is idiocy, and more to the point, it is dangerous idiocy.
Another thing. If you think that these explosive-underwear sporting clods would be so quick to off themselves if they hadn't been assured of a place in paradise, you're only fooling yourself. When the only life you have to live is understood to be the very one you are living, it takes a lot more than an abstract for any person to be willing to just give it up. Religion is directly complicit in cheapening human life in precisely this manner.
You forgot "masterminded by a guy hiding in Afghanistan".
No sir, I did not. I simply consider the idea that attacking a nation because one man is hiding there an entirely ludicrous proposal, ethically and morally bankrupt. The province for this is political; request for extradition, etc. Coming over the border with violence is the act of a retarded child.
Yes, that's a good point. I'm not arguing that we should treat other countries any differently than we expect to be treated - I'm just pointing out that there is in fact a connection between 9/11 and our attack on Afghanistan.
Oh, there's a connection, sure. Heck, there's a connection to Iraq, too, which is, Iraq is full of Arabic looking people, and it was easy to stir up the US people at the time to go after anyone they'd been taught to dislike. "Connections" do not justify war, though. The only real justification for one nation warring against another is when one has to defend against attack from a nation. For instance, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, there was every justification to stomp them. Which we did, and I have zero problem with. no such justification exists with Afghanistan or Iraq, the reprise.
Afghanistan, the nation, did not attack us; they did not fund the attack; they were not the source of the nationals. This whittles down any possible justification to make war on them to grade school level bullying. And that's the problem here.
and Afghanistan, where someone who "ordered the act" was hiding out and being protected by the local government. Why do you insist on ignoring that objective fact?
I have not ignored it, I have addressed it repeatedly. Read the thread. It's not justification for war, a fact you should be glad of, considering the US has done this over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't done much code breaking, eh? The poster didn't specify what direction the timestamps were in or indicate that said direction(s) were consistent, much less that the intervals to the next digit were of constant offset or sign. In fact, it's an unwarranted assumption to think that one knows the base, the number of bits involved, the interval between the bits, or any number (hah) of other things.
No. Civilizations that have moved far beyond radio for their own use will still understand that radio is an easily discovered, created, and maintained technology with great range and excellent economy. If such a civilization were to wish to keep track of emerging civilizations (a good idea, as the earlier it is done, the less dangerous they will be), they would keep radio reception going. Given our knowledge of physics, it seems that radio is as fast as anything can be - light speed - and so it would provide as quick a "heads-up" as anything else.
Radio transmission presumes they want to contact us. The only observation I can make here is that aside from a few, seriously underfunded and rather pitiful attempts, we're not trying to contact anyone else, though we certainly could be, technically speaking. Assuming that some other civilization wants us to find them... that may be the problem.
Of course, if a civilization is up to creating an optical telescope of multiple light years across using aperture synthesis... they can just watch us (time delayed), if they're close enough. Sounds impossible - and it is, for us at the moment - but any civilization that can start an automated process and has a few systems worth of raw material to draw upon should be able to do it, given time.
And you believe that a digital readout contains no error, why???
You've just identified one of the key problems with representative government.
My lady has a macbook air. She thinks it's great. Light, etc.
I, however, have a 17" macbook pro. I think it's great. Powerful, etc.
We both take 'em everywhere we go out of town, and we're both happy. I'd say the market delivered for both of us. There is no one size fits all. On the other hand, some people think that anything that doesn't fit their preconceptions is no good, and those people, I am very comfortable saying, are wrong.
Running a business? Operating a counter? The person you're talking to across the counter is 100x more important than anyone who calls you and they were there first. If the phone rings, either someone else should answer it (preferably elsewhere), or your answer is: Hi, this is Leroy. I have a customer at the counter. You'll be on hold for a while, or you can call back, or come on down. [click]
You've got the right idea. Here's what I do:
Also, as a courtesy:
And finally, for your own sanity:
Most importantly, be aware of this general rule: If the cellphone is interfering with your life, or with other people's lives, you're not using it very well, and you should modify your behavior (and likely, your cellphone's settings.)
Modern DSLR cameras have come a long way in the last three generations. Extremely high "pushed" ISOs, relatively low noise, combined with some really great lenses and just a little bit of software sophistication, and astro becomes very accessible.
If you add a tracking mount, which allows the camera to pivot on the tripod at the same rate the earth turns, keeping the camera pointed at the same subject for several minutes, you can use even lower-noise ISO ranges of the cameras and sharper f-stop ranges of the lenses. You can build yourself a "barn-door" mount for the cost of lumber, and a few bucks for screws and a clock drive (or a gear and a handle to turn it.) Or you can buy a premade tracking device like the Astrotrac I selected (because I'm too lazy to build a mount -- about a grand); or you can go nuts and buy a telescope mount that tracks (can cost ((up to many)) thousands.) Tracking really helps.
But, you don't have to go there. Just go outside, pop the camera on a tripod, use a lens you can set for f/2.8 or faster, crank the ISO up to 1600 or faster, and expose for 1...8 seconds (depending on how much magnification the lens provides... at 85mm, 4 seconds is good. At 400mm, about one second is all you can go before the starts begin to trail.) Personally, I like 85mm; it's enough mag where with a modern sensor (15mp for the 50D) you get a goodly amount of detail, but it's short enough that you get some exposure time.
So with this setup, shoot multiple shots, then align and "stack" them using pretty much any image processsing software that lets you rotate and translate, preferably to sub-pixel precision. The more images you stack, the better the result will be. The rule is, random noise reduces to the square root of the number of frames, so you can get a 4:1 noise reduction with only 16 shots. To get 10:1, you need a hundred. For impulse noise, like a satellite track, averaging gets you reduction of N:1 where N is the number of frames... BUT... if you use median instead of average, odds are excellent that impulse noise will disappear completely. I always try both, just to see which looks better.
There are dedicated programs out there than can stack and align for you, too. A little googling goes a long way.
The biggest challenge has little to do with the camera, and more to do with where you live. Light pollution, that is, the amount of light sourced from streetlights and so forth, competes with the dim deep space objects; so someone who lives east coast, say, NJ or in the metro area... not going to do very well. Where I live - rural Montana - it's not a problem at all. If you live in an urban area, it's the kind of thing you keep in mind for when you go cross country and have an opportunity to cross some desert (or most anywhere in Montana. :) Refer to a light pollution reference, watch the weather (which can really screw up your plans.... clouds.... I flipping despise clouds at night), and then it's all down to your timing.
Anyone who has a modern DSLR, I can't recommend this highly enough. It's fun.
You can click on all sizes above any image to see larger versions:
My tracked astro photos
My untracked astro photos
I'm a cranky old guy with a copy of the constitution who has made trying to understand what it actually means a serious pursuit over many decades, while watching our laws, and our liberties, devolve. No more, no less.
You cannot sensibly sit there and try to tell me that every decision rendered by SCOTUS was constitutionally "right", either in the absolute moral sense, or even in a strict technical sense. Likewise, you cannot read article III and come up with a rationale for judicial amendment practices (which, btw, are authorized to other parties entirely via article V.) However, should you try, I will be perfectly happy to take your argument(s) apart into tiny, steaming little fragments for you.
Ok?
The definition of an ex post facto law is this:
Examples, as requested:
Both of these are, to the letter, violations as defined in (3.) because they increase the punishment for a crime beyond the sentence, after the sentence has been handed down, as this unequivocally creates a formal division in time proving that the person committed the act prior to the increase in punishment.
These laws are common at the state level (states are explicitly forbidden ex post facto laws by the constitution just as the feds are) and have, in both cases, been to the supreme court, where the judges failed in most profound fashion to do the right thing, resulting in the continued existence of said laws.
Any questions?
No, you should be blaming the supreme court for not invalidating them. SCOTUS has upheld all manner of blatantly unconstitutional law. I could go on for pages. I'll spare you.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't hold the others responsible. They all swear an oath to the constitution, and they have all broken those oaths unequivocally. They are liars, scoundrels, and traitors.
No? It seems to be our business to see that you get educated, so that you're not an ignorant fuck, dragging down society with your inability to balance your own checkbook. So we force you to go to school. It seems to be our business to force you to pay taxes so that there are roads to transport food and goods to where you can buy it. It seems to be our business to tell you that you cannot put your neighbor at risk by building your house out of bricks of C4.
I draw the following conclusion: It should be our business to see to it that you're not a load on society because we allowed you to become unnecessarily crippled; it should be our business to see to it that you're not a source of plague or HIV or whatever horrible disease; it should be our business to see to it that should you take injury, we heal your ass up so you can go back to being a citizen in our society as soon, and as well, as possible, so that whatever potential you have is most likely to flourish.
And so they should. The fact that they are legal, and should be legal, only points more emphatically that we need to be ready to deal with medical issues, since our society allows behavior that is risky. Call it a cost of freedom. I think that's perfectly fair. I think it's also worth pointing out that as humans grow up, they generally gain a sense of their own mortality and the amount of risk taking declines. Older, for many people, is wiser. Best we see to it that they have a decent chance of getting older, while doing as little as possible to restrict their freedoms.
Oh. Well, that's a fun question. We were talking about reality. But if you want to know how I'd handle it, here ya go:
My solution, were it my option to implement, would be to allow exactly one year's medical debt on the part of the government. Once the year is over, the next year's taxes pay that debt in full. Rinse, repeat. Payments go from gov't to the medical industry. The medical insurance industry would be banned (because although I've little objection to gambling, I still don't think it is reasonable to gamble one's health. Too much else in society depends upon it.)
I would accompany this with pulling out of all military commitments elsewhere, withdrawing our troops and our offensive equipment back within our borders. I would stop all government sourced foreign aid (private aid is of course the option of the citizens), I would seek to amend the constitution to add teeth such that any law determined to be in violation would result in the hanging of those who made it and the instant release and clearing of records of anyone touched by said laws; I would make said amendment retroactive; and, if I could get that amendment passed, I would hang all 9 supreme court justices for violation, and probably most of the congress. I would shrink our federal government to a fraction of its current size, making it serve the following roles:
No. It's the supreme court's fault that they misuse article III as if it were article V, which it in no way resembles or implies; it's the supreme court's fault that they disobey the constitution on behalf of the entire government; it's the supreme court's fault that the government is operating far outside its constitutionally authorized bounds.
The supreme court set themselves up -- unauthorized by the people -- as those who could re-define the constitution. Then, on top of that, they worked, and are working, to destroy everything it stands for. That's why they're at the top of that list. They enable the congress to make, and keep in force, laws that are explicitly forbidden, or not authorized, by the constitution.
The constitution has one critical flaw: It has no teeth. Violating it, on the part of judges, legislators... there is no penalty. Because of this, they can do whatever they want. And they do. This is why we are suffering under the inversion of the commerce clause. This is why we have ex post facto laws. This is why eight of the ten amendments of the bill of rights have been turned into caricatures of themselves in currently extant law. And this is why copyright law no longer resembles anything even vaguely implied in Article I, section 8, paragraph 8.
Lots of blame to go around. The responsible parties, in order:
It's always painful to see culture, protected TEMPORARILY by the authorizing document (constitution) in order to encourage its creation for EVERYONE'S BENEFIT, destroyed by a government and its minions out of control.
That wasn't the point. The point was the cost of the healthcare exceeded the cost of the premiums rather significantly, contrary to the previous post's claim.
I would add that anyone who says "I don't need it" is naive. We don't know when, or why, we'll get sick. It might be an infection; it might be genetic; it might be consequent to an accident. When you need it, though, it's too late to say "Oh, hey, I'll buy insurance now." What you'll do "now" is go into debt, more than likely, or else hand the cost off to the rest of us indirectly.
The ONLY sensible path is to insure everyone, just as the only sensible path is to educate everyone -- we don't know who will get sick or remain healthy, and we don't know who will turn out to be a research scientist or a McDonald's employee. We don't know when a potential high performance person will cross with a health issue (Steven Hawking comes to mind, as do Stevie Wonder and Beethoven) either, until it has already happened.
That "we" includes you, whoever you may be. You don't know if your health will take a turn for the worse tomorrow. You can protest all you like, but you're doing nothing but playing the odds. The thing is that if you're wrong and you face something catastrophic, you're not likely to opt out of the medical services you need. And since you can't pay for them, everyone else will, in the form of (yet again) increased costs somewhere in the chain.
Pooling works because actuaries figure out the odds of people getting sick; most won't, but no one knows who will, and who won't. Usefully, though, the odds remain fairly constant. So you can figure out what the total cost will be, and then spread that cost thinly throughout a population. That thin cost is generally pretty affordable. The cost if you actually get seriously ill -- not so affordable.
The real problem we face here (aside from the naive) is that traditional insurance companies operate with a huge conflict of interest. They take premiums by selling the customer the idea that they'll be covered in case of health issues. But they serve corporate responsibilities that are best addressed by reducing the amount of services paid for. The less they pay out, the more money they make. Consequently, they are constantly looking for excuses not to pay.
This is why said companies should never be publicly traded companies, and never be allowed to provide rewards to employees based on payout amounts. Ideally, a minimum overhead system would be established with no company at all, simply the government as the payee, but we know that getting our government (US) to do things efficiently is problematic. Unfortunately, we also know that letting private insurance companies approach the problem freely results in people being unable to afford coverage, being denied coverage for health events, and outright being denied insurance.
The only sensible, socially responsible answer is to cover everyone and make certain that everyone is paying into the pool.
The homily goes, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Unfortunately, we don't have "good" yet, so perhaps there's still room to bitch a bit.
And if "ths" and "this" are both valid structures, with valid elements as named, but what you meant was to type "this" twice, what will your IDE do then? Nothing. But your eye has a better chance of catching it if you were using fixed width fonts, because your intent has the consequence of creating a visually aligned display, while your error does not. So when your pattern recognition flares up and says "hey, that's not prettily aligned", you catch it.
As a human, you have pattern recognition. It's a built-in feature of your design. If you elect to cripple it, that's almost certainly going to have consequences.
It's 2010. Wine still crashes trying to run fairly low requirement (in terms of system calls) applications written for Windows '98. That's why including Wine doesn't give you decent windows emulation/simulation/replacement. It's probably why this guy is heading off on his own, too. He's probably as tired as I am of trying Wine and watching it crash.
I'll tell you what, if there was an open-source, binary compatible with windows OS that worked... I would *totally* get behind it. Not that I'm anti-commercial, exactly the opposite -- I'm just tired of the supposed fix for a buggy OS being to upgrade to a new, less compatible, more DRM'd, have to "authorize", still buggy OS.
Holes in cards? What does that do? I just sit down with the memory card and clip the leads to the diodes I want to read back as a '1'. When I'm done programming, I plug the card in, clean all the relays, replace the tubes that test poorly, power up the computer, and once it's all warmed up, read the answer off the incandescent lamps on the font panel.
If your cards have holes in them, you should get a new deck. Otherwise your opponent will figure out which cards are the face cards.
The better example is simply missing the 'i', which is thin.
this->posy=0;
ths->ttl=40;
this->source="";
As compared to:
this->posy=0;
ths->ttl=40;
this->source="";
That's a pretty big visual difference.
There are other issues, like setting up tables and arrays, where not only do I use fixed width (always), but I use "replace" after the array is set up so I can waltz down the column of [ ]'s and fill in the appropriate things. There are many potential situations like this. Sometimes I have arrays of canned SQL selects, same kind of issues.
Totally on board with the idea that proportional fonts have no place whatsoever in my source editing.
Neither of these people caused us to make war on Afghanistan, so they're off subject. I didn't say that superstitious middle easterners were the only people that deserved disdain; I was simply talking about the ones that were relevant to the discussion - which was about making war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am perfectly ready to say that Islam and Christianity both breed violence on a regular and dependable basis, because both explicitly encode both glorification and encouragement of it in their belief systems. I am perfectly ready to condemn any such act. But I don't think such acts are the proper basis for war between nations until or unless the nation itself makes war upon another nation. Or to put it another way, the only war I'll grant as justified is a defensive war against an invading nation. There are far better ways to interact with other nations over almost any level of disagreement than war.
I could go on all day and probably all night citing examples where religion led directly to specific acts of single and group violence, and to war. The point that I was making there is that religion - specifically Islam and Christianity - contains great violence, and instruction and incitement to violence, and as the whole thing (being religious) is the act of substituting canned, centuries old goat herder thinking for actually processing modern reality, this incitement to violence naturally leads some religious adherents to said, or similar, or what they perceive as equivalent or sufficient, violence. And again, I could cite example after example, certainly beginning with the current round of camel fuckery, but hardly limited to it, or to Islam. Religion is idiocy, and more to the point, it is dangerous idiocy.
Another thing. If you think that these explosive-underwear sporting clods would be so quick to off themselves if they hadn't been assured of a place in paradise, you're only fooling yourself. When the only life you have to live is understood to be the very one you are living, it takes a lot more than an abstract for any person to be willing to just give it up. Religion is directly complicit in cheapening human life in precisely this manner.
Sure I have. Here's how they work:
MIC, in case you don't get it, is "Military Industrial Complex"
No sir, I did not. I simply consider the idea that attacking a nation because one man is hiding there an entirely ludicrous proposal, ethically and morally bankrupt. The province for this is political; request for extradition, etc. Coming over the border with violence is the act of a retarded child.
Oh, there's a connection, sure. Heck, there's a connection to Iraq, too, which is, Iraq is full of Arabic looking people, and it was easy to stir up the US people at the time to go after anyone they'd been taught to dislike. "Connections" do not justify war, though. The only real justification for one nation warring against another is when one has to defend against attack from a nation. For instance, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, there was every justification to stomp them. Which we did, and I have zero problem with. no such justification exists with Afghanistan or Iraq, the reprise.
Afghanistan, the nation, did not attack us; they did not fund the attack; they were not the source of the nationals. This whittles down any possible justification to make war on them to grade school level bullying. And that's the problem here.
I have not ignored it, I have addressed it repeatedly. Read the thread. It's not justification for war, a fact you should be glad of, considering the US has done this over and over again.