There are places for people to fly drones. A neighbor's property isn't one of them.
Why? What if the neighbor not only permits it, but encourages it? What if the neighbor has asked you to photograph her gutters or her chimney before she calls a roofing guy to come out and climb up for a look? What business is it of yours if your neighbor is just fine with it? Perhaps your neighbor doesn't think you should be allowed to go use your lawn mower to cut some OTHER person's lawn. Should they be able to stop you? No? I see.
So in other words you are too uninformed about the issues to name your preferred prospective Supreme Court nominees. This all starts to make more sense, now. You won't address any of these issues directly because you actually have no idea what's going on. See? Asked to name even one prospective jurist, you have to resort to more childish deflection in an attempt to avoid confirming your ignorance. So, now you've had a while to at least look up some names. Let's try again: who do you think should sit on the Supreme Court? How about just one name.
No, you're too much of a coward to even address the issue, as usual.
Here, let's break it down into the baby-sized bites you can't pretend you're unable to address:
Who would you like to see seated on the Supreme Court? Be specific. If you pretend you can't, we'll see you're just a craven BSer as usual. If you REALLY can't, then we'll see you shouldn't be voting regardless. So: name names.
One or the other, but it won't be because of my vote.
So your vote has no effect on the election, then? You're choosing to use your vote in a way that deliberately reduces its impact on SCOTUS nominees?
So which do you prefer: liberal or conservative SCOTUS judges? There are real, substantive differences between them. If you DO have a preference, why are you choosing to use your vote in a way that you claim will not express that preference? Or, do you live in a state where you know that by withholding your vote from a candidate that actually can win, you know that you're already supporting the viable candidate that will sit the judges you want? Address this issue in less of a cop-out, non-answer way than you already have.
See? Completely unable to acknowledge reality, or completely unwilling to admit it.
So: how will your choice in candidates influence the next Supreme Court nominees that are named? Be specific, if you have any sort of ability to talk about reality. If you can't answer the question, it's just another sign that your entire ongoing deflection on this topic is just you being an intellectual coward. So: which nominees will have a more likely chance of being seated, because of your vote?
Diversion? As usual, I address simple reality, and you go off on a hand-waving bender having zero relevance. See, you'll do it again right now.
One of the two main candidates will win the election. This is a fact. You don't like that fact, so you talk about guilt and prison yards.
Vacant Supreme Court seats will be filled by one of those two people. You are too timid to take the responsibility of influencing whether or not those seats are filled by liberal activist types or conservative/constructionist types. This is simple cowardice, but you will say that that you're somehow doing something noble by being sure that your vote goes to someone that cannot possibly influence this important process. But in doing so, depending on the state in which you live, you ARE choosing to lean your state's electoral votes to one of the two viable candidates. This is a simple fact. You don't like that fact, so you prefer to call reality a "diversion."
You will be unable to say anything on-topic in your response, because that would require you to either confront those realities, or lie. You don't want to do either in writing, so you'll of course say some sort of blathering nonsense about prison yards, guilt, and being hung with statistics or other childish attempts to evade the substance of the matter. Like you're about to do, right now.
It's funny how you're the only one who ever uses the word "guilt" when it comes to this subject. All I'm doing is pointing out that the third party candidates cannot win, and that using your vote to support one of those cannot-win candidates will not, for example, do things like change which supreme court nominees one of the actual viable candidate will, in real life, end up naming.
We're all going to live with the actions and policies and appointees of one of those two viable candidates. You're choosing to stamp your feet and throw your vote away rather than impacting the actual outcome in a meaningful way. That you feel the urge to use the word "guilt" when someone simply points out the facts is your thing, not anyone else's.
You can't hold us responsible for people we didn't vote for.
One of two candidates is going to win. When you choose to vote for a third party or not vote at all, you are making a choice that will impact one of only two outcomes. Wishing that away because you don't like it is just childish.
Stop acting like the only choice is to vote for someone you find slightly less abhorrent than someone else you find to be completely abhorrent. That only continues the problem.
As for continuing the problem: No. The only thing that makes third party candidates unviable is the third party candidates and politics themselves. The Greens are trotting out an anti-science doctor, and the Libertarians are presenting an isolationist guy who's banking on the recreational drug user vote. THAT is what "continues the problem."
our black and white thinking has made you incapable of even phrasing a question accurately, IMO.
But it's a black and white matter. Something you're wishing it weren't.
If you vote for Clinton or Trump, you're making a simple choice - support one or the other. If you have the ability to vote, and choose to either vote for someone that cannot win or choose not to vote at all, then depending on your local demographics, you are still - through that choice - supporting either Trump or Clinton. That you're pretending otherwise means you really need to re-evaluate your own understanding of what's at stake.
So you're trying mighty hard to ignore the repeated questions (about Clinton's statements) put to the director, asking if her statements were true. His repeated answers: "That was untrue."
I know, how about we let the FBI director explain to you that she lied repeatedly about her efforts to avoid public scrutiny of her public records and her casual mis-handling of extremely sensitive classified material? She's on the record lying about it from the day the coverage of that mess started, and she's still doing it today - though she's learned to spend eight months at a time without a single press conference in order to avoid digging that hole any deeper.
This is getting as bad as the birthers. Which Trump says Clinton started
Right, he should have been more specific. It was a Clinton campaign worker that started that, and was then thrown under the bus because it was done so publicly. Enter the usual Clinton stealth operative, Sidney Blumenthal, who talked it up behind the scenes where he normally performs his mercenarial tasks.
The Republicans have pissed me off so much with their brinkmanship over the last 8 years
Then why aren't you pissed at the Democrats, who ALSO refuse to get behind things they don't like? Why aren't you pissed at Obama for his own refusal to sign legislation that isn't changed until he likes it, or his own refusal to sign off and budgets and appropriations that don't check the boxes he wants checked? It's impossible for only one branch of the government to play "brinksmanship" - Obama is a 100% eager player that is just as unwilling to budge as the people you're saying you dislike. You're disingenuously cherry-picking so you can display some phony or low-information outrage.
I'm not religious, and derive my code of ethics from reason. But let's look at the list you're saying the people you don't like have forgotten:
Thou shalt not kill.
Which in the original language was "thou shalt no murder" (see the difference?)
Love thy neighbor.
Which you don't seem to be doing.
Turn the other cheek.
Meaning, man up. That's not the same as "let someone kill you."
Blessed are the meek.
How do YOU interpret that? That sounds like a religion throwing a metaphysical fantasy bone to those who've had bad luck or haven't made anything of themselves.
Blessed are the peace makers.
So, people who take the step necessary to shut down the violence-makers - those are peace makers, right? There's a reason that one of Samuel Colt's masterpieces was called The Peacemaker.
I get the nonsense that I'll be throwing my vote away but its insane to vote for someone you don't want.
Since you are 100% aware that your vote for Johnson WILL be thrown away, because he cannot possibly win, which of the two viable candidates are you hoping will actually benefit from your choice?
If there's more than one of you, you're part of a very quiet group.
Exactly. You have no idea how quiet most gun owners are on the subject. There are many millions of us - and oddly enough the overwhelming majority of us, essentially ALL of us, commit no crimes whatsoever. People who own cars are far more deadly. Why should law abiding gun owners be screechy or loud about it? When we feel the need for a strong push-back against legislative or executive over-reach, we pay a skilled representative organization to handle that for us.
I wonder if people who type that phrase in little sound-effect punctuation marks realize how much they sound like a priggish, effete twelve year old who got into the third-scale faux fraternity at his private New England boarding school because daddy also got sent there by his annoyed (and annoying) parents.
Why not?
I'm serious. This seems a little short sighted.
I notice that in countering my assertion with a "why not," you didn't even lightly touch on the mechanism by which a game developer would, in spending his time another way, change the world view of people living in a country where baked-in corruption at every level of society (from military leaders to vegetable merchants, postal workers to diplomats) and power is in the hands of medieval theocratic thuggery. When poor, rural third world countries go through the same Renaissance and move towards stable, enforced constitutionalism that western cultures went through centuries ago, you'll see the sort of changes that will fix the problem. A game developer who gives up his job for a pay cut while making power-point slides for hand-wringing NGOs that have their charitable goods and services stolen by the countries they're trying to help... won't help.
Those impoverished third world countries are only still where medieval Europe used to be (in terms of health and prosperity and cultural wealth) for cultural reasons. You can't reach in and "make" Somalia wealthy. You can't take game developers off of that task and turn their attention to some other technical project that will suddenly make those in power in Sudan less corrupt and turn that country into a place where businesses will no longer know for a fact that any investment there will be stolen by the thugs in power.
The people in places like that will have to go through the same sort of cultural Renaissance that Europeans 400 years ago, and then the self-discovery of constitutional governance that the modern west went through 200 years ago. That requires personal-level cultural change across entire populations, not fresh software.
pretty much all the things you listed are controversial to some segment of society
Exactly. That doesn't make me wrong, it just reflects how many people aren't willing to confront the cultural issues that drive the sorts of things I mentioned.
Getting developers to stop working on things like successful entertainment products or inventing a better company expense reporting mouse trap will NOT cause someone who thinks that women shouldn't be allowed to leave the house without a bag over their heads to suddenly take a different position. There isn't a different type of software development that a programmer could be doing that will cause someone in Africa to suddenly realize that a constitutional republic that embraces the rule of law is the foundation of a society that will encourage investment and prosperity and make it feel less necessary to have so many babies because that's what they've always done in their simple agrarian cultures. The OP's hope that somehow technology workers could re-focus their thoughts and magically the drive and motivation exhibited by someone with nothing coming to the US from Cameroon to work three jobs until his family is well situated would be transferred to a guy his own age who is born in the US who complains that nobody will make his life better for him.
Yes, stuff like that is controversial. Because there are large segments of the population who hate the idea that prosperity doesn't simply exist like oxygen. Who can't grasp that discipline and delayed gratification are central to the sort of financial comfort that others desire but also resent. And yet most of the problems in the world stem from failure to handle issues just like all of those. And that's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
Developers and other "geeks," as the OP calls them, aren't ever going to solve cultural problems. And that's where most of the world's problems come from.
Far too many people having too many babies in parts of the world that can't support those populations and thus the resulting strife and misery? Cultural problem.
Far too many parents being completely disengaged with their kids' education, or too dumb themselves to contribute to it? Cultural problem.
Sense of entitlement causing resentment instead of inspiring the creativity and productivity that comes without being raised in a state of feeling owed things? Cultural problem.
All sorts of ecological messes and resource shortages? Cultural - see first example. Persistent friction between modernity and retrograde medieval thinking, including blowing up pressure cooker bombs in NY (as we had again, tonight)? Cultural problem. There's plenty more in the way of examples. App developers suddenly deciding to stop trying to become financially stable and instead put their waking ours into... what, apps that teach people not to have so many babies? Apps that convince people that chopping down the rainforest so they can make ends meet on their poor rural farm this month? Apps that try to tell fishermen not to over-fish in sensitive areas because, really, do their customers really need that fish dinner after all?
What does the OP actually envision, here? Since that wasn't even alluded to, he sounds just like the over-serious girl from (was it Animal House?): "I don't know how anyone can have a party [or was it a dance?] when there are hungry people in the world!"
Yup, I was right. You're so afraid of addressing your own bullshit that you're even pretending you can't handle reading a paragraph or two. Anything to change the subject. But, obviously, that reading deficit aligns very well with your inability to differentiate between extremely complicated words like "these," "this," those," and "the." I know, it's complicated. What other word salad do you spit out, if you can't handle choosing between those words? Do people laugh at you? Maybe that explains why you're so scared of answering simple questions about your own words - that process points out that you can't even select words that reflect reality.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why, for centuries, people have been intelligently deploying ... curtains on their windows.
There are places for people to fly drones. A neighbor's property isn't one of them.
Why? What if the neighbor not only permits it, but encourages it? What if the neighbor has asked you to photograph her gutters or her chimney before she calls a roofing guy to come out and climb up for a look? What business is it of yours if your neighbor is just fine with it? Perhaps your neighbor doesn't think you should be allowed to go use your lawn mower to cut some OTHER person's lawn. Should they be able to stop you? No? I see.
So in other words you are too uninformed about the issues to name your preferred prospective Supreme Court nominees. This all starts to make more sense, now. You won't address any of these issues directly because you actually have no idea what's going on. See? Asked to name even one prospective jurist, you have to resort to more childish deflection in an attempt to avoid confirming your ignorance. So, now you've had a while to at least look up some names. Let's try again: who do you think should sit on the Supreme Court? How about just one name.
No, you're too much of a coward to even address the issue, as usual.
Here, let's break it down into the baby-sized bites you can't pretend you're unable to address:
Who would you like to see seated on the Supreme Court? Be specific. If you pretend you can't, we'll see you're just a craven BSer as usual. If you REALLY can't, then we'll see you shouldn't be voting regardless. So: name names.
One or the other, but it won't be because of my vote.
So your vote has no effect on the election, then? You're choosing to use your vote in a way that deliberately reduces its impact on SCOTUS nominees?
So which do you prefer: liberal or conservative SCOTUS judges? There are real, substantive differences between them. If you DO have a preference, why are you choosing to use your vote in a way that you claim will not express that preference? Or, do you live in a state where you know that by withholding your vote from a candidate that actually can win, you know that you're already supporting the viable candidate that will sit the judges you want? Address this issue in less of a cop-out, non-answer way than you already have.
See? Completely unable to acknowledge reality, or completely unwilling to admit it.
So: how will your choice in candidates influence the next Supreme Court nominees that are named? Be specific, if you have any sort of ability to talk about reality. If you can't answer the question, it's just another sign that your entire ongoing deflection on this topic is just you being an intellectual coward. So: which nominees will have a more likely chance of being seated, because of your vote?
Diversion? As usual, I address simple reality, and you go off on a hand-waving bender having zero relevance. See, you'll do it again right now.
One of the two main candidates will win the election. This is a fact. You don't like that fact, so you talk about guilt and prison yards.
Vacant Supreme Court seats will be filled by one of those two people. You are too timid to take the responsibility of influencing whether or not those seats are filled by liberal activist types or conservative/constructionist types. This is simple cowardice, but you will say that that you're somehow doing something noble by being sure that your vote goes to someone that cannot possibly influence this important process. But in doing so, depending on the state in which you live, you ARE choosing to lean your state's electoral votes to one of the two viable candidates. This is a simple fact. You don't like that fact, so you prefer to call reality a "diversion."
You will be unable to say anything on-topic in your response, because that would require you to either confront those realities, or lie. You don't want to do either in writing, so you'll of course say some sort of blathering nonsense about prison yards, guilt, and being hung with statistics or other childish attempts to evade the substance of the matter. Like you're about to do, right now.
Not interested in prison yard bullshit.
Prison yard. I see. Replacement meds haven't arrived in the mail yet, today? Check the tracking number, maybe they're out for delivery.
It's funny how you're the only one who ever uses the word "guilt" when it comes to this subject. All I'm doing is pointing out that the third party candidates cannot win, and that using your vote to support one of those cannot-win candidates will not, for example, do things like change which supreme court nominees one of the actual viable candidate will, in real life, end up naming.
We're all going to live with the actions and policies and appointees of one of those two viable candidates. You're choosing to stamp your feet and throw your vote away rather than impacting the actual outcome in a meaningful way. That you feel the urge to use the word "guilt" when someone simply points out the facts is your thing, not anyone else's.
You can't hold us responsible for people we didn't vote for.
One of two candidates is going to win. When you choose to vote for a third party or not vote at all, you are making a choice that will impact one of only two outcomes. Wishing that away because you don't like it is just childish.
Stop acting like the only choice is to vote for someone you find slightly less abhorrent than someone else you find to be completely abhorrent. That only continues the problem.
As for continuing the problem: No. The only thing that makes third party candidates unviable is the third party candidates and politics themselves. The Greens are trotting out an anti-science doctor, and the Libertarians are presenting an isolationist guy who's banking on the recreational drug user vote. THAT is what "continues the problem."
our black and white thinking has made you incapable of even phrasing a question accurately, IMO.
But it's a black and white matter. Something you're wishing it weren't.
If you vote for Clinton or Trump, you're making a simple choice - support one or the other. If you have the ability to vote, and choose to either vote for someone that cannot win or choose not to vote at all, then depending on your local demographics, you are still - through that choice - supporting either Trump or Clinton. That you're pretending otherwise means you really need to re-evaluate your own understanding of what's at stake.
So you're trying mighty hard to ignore the repeated questions (about Clinton's statements) put to the director, asking if her statements were true. His repeated answers: "That was untrue."
I know, how about we let the FBI director explain to you that she lied repeatedly about her efforts to avoid public scrutiny of her public records and her casual mis-handling of extremely sensitive classified material? She's on the record lying about it from the day the coverage of that mess started, and she's still doing it today - though she's learned to spend eight months at a time without a single press conference in order to avoid digging that hole any deeper.
This is getting as bad as the birthers. Which Trump says Clinton started
Right, he should have been more specific. It was a Clinton campaign worker that started that, and was then thrown under the bus because it was done so publicly. Enter the usual Clinton stealth operative, Sidney Blumenthal, who talked it up behind the scenes where he normally performs his mercenarial tasks.
The Republicans have pissed me off so much with their brinkmanship over the last 8 years
Then why aren't you pissed at the Democrats, who ALSO refuse to get behind things they don't like? Why aren't you pissed at Obama for his own refusal to sign legislation that isn't changed until he likes it, or his own refusal to sign off and budgets and appropriations that don't check the boxes he wants checked? It's impossible for only one branch of the government to play "brinksmanship" - Obama is a 100% eager player that is just as unwilling to budge as the people you're saying you dislike. You're disingenuously cherry-picking so you can display some phony or low-information outrage.
I'm not religious, and derive my code of ethics from reason. But let's look at the list you're saying the people you don't like have forgotten:
Thou shalt not kill.
Which in the original language was "thou shalt no murder" (see the difference?)
Love thy neighbor.
Which you don't seem to be doing.
Turn the other cheek.
Meaning, man up. That's not the same as "let someone kill you."
Blessed are the meek.
How do YOU interpret that? That sounds like a religion throwing a metaphysical fantasy bone to those who've had bad luck or haven't made anything of themselves.
Blessed are the peace makers.
So, people who take the step necessary to shut down the violence-makers - those are peace makers, right? There's a reason that one of Samuel Colt's masterpieces was called The Peacemaker.
Even if I am going to end up with it, I prefer not choosing it too.
So, which candidate do you hope (or expect) will be helped by you not making a choice?
I get the nonsense that I'll be throwing my vote away but its insane to vote for someone you don't want.
Since you are 100% aware that your vote for Johnson WILL be thrown away, because he cannot possibly win, which of the two viable candidates are you hoping will actually benefit from your choice?
If there's more than one of you, you're part of a very quiet group.
Exactly. You have no idea how quiet most gun owners are on the subject. There are many millions of us - and oddly enough the overwhelming majority of us, essentially ALL of us, commit no crimes whatsoever. People who own cars are far more deadly. Why should law abiding gun owners be screechy or loud about it? When we feel the need for a strong push-back against legislative or executive over-reach, we pay a skilled representative organization to handle that for us.
*snicker*
I wonder if people who type that phrase in little sound-effect punctuation marks realize how much they sound like a priggish, effete twelve year old who got into the third-scale faux fraternity at his private New England boarding school because daddy also got sent there by his annoyed (and annoying) parents.
Why not?
I'm serious. This seems a little short sighted.
I notice that in countering my assertion with a "why not," you didn't even lightly touch on the mechanism by which a game developer would, in spending his time another way, change the world view of people living in a country where baked-in corruption at every level of society (from military leaders to vegetable merchants, postal workers to diplomats) and power is in the hands of medieval theocratic thuggery. When poor, rural third world countries go through the same Renaissance and move towards stable, enforced constitutionalism that western cultures went through centuries ago, you'll see the sort of changes that will fix the problem. A game developer who gives up his job for a pay cut while making power-point slides for hand-wringing NGOs that have their charitable goods and services stolen by the countries they're trying to help ... won't help.
Make the society wealthier
Those impoverished third world countries are only still where medieval Europe used to be (in terms of health and prosperity and cultural wealth) for cultural reasons. You can't reach in and "make" Somalia wealthy. You can't take game developers off of that task and turn their attention to some other technical project that will suddenly make those in power in Sudan less corrupt and turn that country into a place where businesses will no longer know for a fact that any investment there will be stolen by the thugs in power.
The people in places like that will have to go through the same sort of cultural Renaissance that Europeans 400 years ago, and then the self-discovery of constitutional governance that the modern west went through 200 years ago. That requires personal-level cultural change across entire populations, not fresh software.
pretty much all the things you listed are controversial to some segment of society
Exactly. That doesn't make me wrong, it just reflects how many people aren't willing to confront the cultural issues that drive the sorts of things I mentioned.
Getting developers to stop working on things like successful entertainment products or inventing a better company expense reporting mouse trap will NOT cause someone who thinks that women shouldn't be allowed to leave the house without a bag over their heads to suddenly take a different position. There isn't a different type of software development that a programmer could be doing that will cause someone in Africa to suddenly realize that a constitutional republic that embraces the rule of law is the foundation of a society that will encourage investment and prosperity and make it feel less necessary to have so many babies because that's what they've always done in their simple agrarian cultures. The OP's hope that somehow technology workers could re-focus their thoughts and magically the drive and motivation exhibited by someone with nothing coming to the US from Cameroon to work three jobs until his family is well situated would be transferred to a guy his own age who is born in the US who complains that nobody will make his life better for him.
Yes, stuff like that is controversial. Because there are large segments of the population who hate the idea that prosperity doesn't simply exist like oxygen. Who can't grasp that discipline and delayed gratification are central to the sort of financial comfort that others desire but also resent. And yet most of the problems in the world stem from failure to handle issues just like all of those. And that's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
Developers and other "geeks," as the OP calls them, aren't ever going to solve cultural problems. And that's where most of the world's problems come from.
... what, apps that teach people not to have so many babies? Apps that convince people that chopping down the rainforest so they can make ends meet on their poor rural farm this month? Apps that try to tell fishermen not to over-fish in sensitive areas because, really, do their customers really need that fish dinner after all?
Far too many people having too many babies in parts of the world that can't support those populations and thus the resulting strife and misery? Cultural problem.
Far too many parents being completely disengaged with their kids' education, or too dumb themselves to contribute to it? Cultural problem.
Sense of entitlement causing resentment instead of inspiring the creativity and productivity that comes without being raised in a state of feeling owed things? Cultural problem.
All sorts of ecological messes and resource shortages? Cultural - see first example. Persistent friction between modernity and retrograde medieval thinking, including blowing up pressure cooker bombs in NY (as we had again, tonight)? Cultural problem. There's plenty more in the way of examples. App developers suddenly deciding to stop trying to become financially stable and instead put their waking ours into
What does the OP actually envision, here? Since that wasn't even alluded to, he sounds just like the over-serious girl from (was it Animal House?): "I don't know how anyone can have a party [or was it a dance?] when there are hungry people in the world!"
Yup, I was right. You're so afraid of addressing your own bullshit that you're even pretending you can't handle reading a paragraph or two. Anything to change the subject. But, obviously, that reading deficit aligns very well with your inability to differentiate between extremely complicated words like "these," "this," those," and "the." I know, it's complicated. What other word salad do you spit out, if you can't handle choosing between those words? Do people laugh at you? Maybe that explains why you're so scared of answering simple questions about your own words - that process points out that you can't even select words that reflect reality.