When did the "dick attack" become a standard arguing point for the people with no argument?
Seriously, its like every time someone is losing an argument these days they're like "I know - I'll imply that they have small dicks. That always works!"
That's actually on a state-by-state basis (which is why I said "most states" in my original post). Here private sales don't have to go through any check, but as I said - the vast majority of sales at a gunshow are not doing between private parties. They're generally a dealer selling to the public, which has the same checks as anywhere else.
A gun is a tool to end life, it has no other purpose.
There is a huge target shooting crowd that use guns that are completely unsuited to ending life. As I've said in another post, I shoot over 10,000 rounds per year target shooting which has nothing to do with ending life.
Sorry, but they're not. I know it may shock you, but many people at the target range are simply there to practice target shooting. Heck many of the weapons used in target shooting are completely unsuited to any other purpose. They are no more training to kill than javelin throwers in the Olympics are.
In most states of the country PRIVATE CITIZENS can sell guns to another private citizen without government involvement. That's it. A few will take some guns to a gunshow to sell but the absolute vast majority of guns at a gunshow are being sold by DEALERS, and those dealers have to process a background check just as if they were selling the gun in a store.
It gets kinda embarrassing when nerds reinforce their own negative stereotypes to proclaim that anything that might actually relevant they're not interested in.
I love Firefly and Game of Thrones as much as the next nerd, but we're not helping our self image by throwing a temper tantrum every time "real" news shows up in the feed.
I haven't really noticed it, but then again I personally don't actually buy a whole lot of apps. I do the paid versions of Angry Birds to avoid advertising, but as to utility apps I think I paid $2-3 for a guitar tuner and about the same for a podcast client.
I love my smartphone, and I use it everyday, but I don't get how people have a use for the number of apps some use. About 99% of my smartphone time is split between Facebook, Twitter, the email app, the browser, music player, and podcast app. An icon for everything I ever use fits on my home screen.
Cell phones are great, but having a payphone option definitely comes in handy. I was at a large public event (a St Patrick's Day thing) a while back and had had a bit too much to drink and got separated from the group I was with. Had no idea where I was at and for some reason (I'm guessing just tower overload) my cell phone wasn't working. I kept trying to dial out for another hour or so but the battery eventually died. It was around 3am in the morning and virtually everything was closed.
Long story short, I was able to eventually find a payphone, call a cab, and get back to the hotel. Cell phones are great, but it doesn't even take a natural disaster to run into a scenario when you really need something else to fall back on.
Yep. I'm stuck on a Droid 1 right now to keep my unlimited data. Doing the math for my usage habits it would be another $40-50 per month higher over my existing plan to move to the "Share Everything plan" with enough bandwidth. Taking a subsidized phone isn't worth that, but there is a definite lack of any reasonably priced unsubsidized phones for Verizon. $299 for this phone I could handle, but seems every decent handset on Verizon (even the ones they're GIVING away subsidized) is over $500 without contract.
Angry Birds is a fun time killer, but realistically it's not all that innovative. Its basically the same game as Worms - which was in turn was much like many of the various Artillery-style games that have been available on home computers since the 70's.
I get that tablet games can be fun for some. I play them. Angry Birds (standard and Space), Where's my Water, Doodle-jump, etc. All have been good brief diversions, but none stuck for very long. Comparing them to a full length game is about like comparing a comic-strip to a classic novel.
Granted, I've gotten to where lately I play more and more games on my PC rather than the console, but the major driving factor there is basically online distribution and the extreme sales that are often ran on Steam and other services. After a game has been out more than a year as lnng as you can wait for a sale you can often get them for $5 or less. When you consider that a moderate gaming PC really isn't that much more expensive than a console (and most computer still want a PC around anyways - so you're really just looking at the price DIFFERENCE between a gaming-capable PC and one that's not), it really does make PC gaming pretty attractive again.
What's particularly good is that for FPS games you get the mouse and keyboard option, but for games that control better with a controller (Batman Arkham Asylum for example), you can plug a wired XBOX 360 controller into the PC and most modern games seem to pick it up and map the controls exactly as they would be on the console.
Don't know about the state, but the county level agencies still run a ton of OS/400 stuff written in COBOL. Suggestions to replace the aging codebase with something newer are quickly reigned in when they hear about the cost involved.
While that works, part of the problem in modern society is the cost involved in starting up a competitive business. Most of the tenants of capitalism were thought up when the largest companies around would qualify as a small business by modern standards. The industrial revolution saw the rise of megacorps and the problem has continued to rise into the digital age. It costs a fortune to start a telecom company to compete with an existing one - not quite the same as wholesaling your apples for less than the competing cart next door.
What the solution is I'm not sure, but I think it will eventually have to involve government ownership of some of the very core services or at a minimum some rather strict regulation. We already have that with some things - where I live the power generation is handled by a government entity (Santee Cooper - a SC state agency), as is water and sewer services. Ambulance/911, law enforcement, and military are already handled by the government. Its just a matter of deeming telecommunications a critical public service.
So you declined an interview to a qualified applicant because they partied in college?
I hate to break it to you, but almost all your other interviewee's did too. What we need to do - as a society - is recognize certain social norms. We already do to an extent, but its the silent code that its all ok until you get caught.
Having just read RA Salvatore's Homeland it reminds me of the Drow society - everyone attacking each other and scheming and its fine if you get away with it but if you get caught society punished you to the utmost.
Which would only affect people running that particular application while it was running. At that point it becomes a security issue with the game - not the library. They recompile and issue it along with their standard game patches.
Particularly when you boil the situation down to the most basic premise - people are still visiting their site. They're literally made at Google for making it too easy for people to find what they actually WANT from that site. They want the users to have to wade through their own poor interface for a given amount of time - seeing their ads - before they finally find the content.
Forcing your customers into a more difficult path for your own benefit with no incentive to them will not work well. Never has, never will.
Indeed. To a large degree I don't even CARE what site news comes from. I'm just looking for some general info. Google News lets me find that via a search and that's all that matters. No matter how many leave, there will likely always be enough to provide what I need. That's part of the problem with news agencies anyways - aside from very local news they're all repeating the same information. There's WAY too much redundancy there to maintain in this day and age.
Actually the kernel pretty much IS the OS. A lot of distributions throw their own software packages atop that OS but they're all Linux. Same binary format and you can pretty much expect that they're all running an x.org server for graphics.
Also - many programs already have binary Linux distributions that work on just about any target platform. You just use statically compiled libraries and for the most part you're good.
Even then, if you want something that even depends on some things within a distribution you can target Red Hat and Debian and cover 90% of the market. Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian all basically fall under the same structure and Redhat, Fedora, and CentOS all fall under the same structure. Outside of those main few the userbase drops considerably and for many on systems like Arch or Gentoo they're the types that will figure out how to make it work regardless.
All well an good, but none of those games are designed for Windows 3.1. If you'll remember - in the Windows 3.1 days virtually no "real" games depended on Windows. Aside from basic things like card games and a few tetris clones and the like, you mostly exited out of Windows to play a game then booted back into Windows afterwards.
It wasn't until Windows 95 came along that you had a significant number of games that actually required WIndows.
This whole concept is stupid. What they're essentially saying is that free speech can only be practiced as long as it doesn't offend anyone.
When in the hell did THAT type of speech ever need protection in the first place? The entire point of having a law in place protecting free speech is to make sure that people CAN say the things that are controversial. If we're just slapping each other on the ass saying how great everyone else is then any laws protecting it are redundant.
Indeed. As a matter of fact I'd say that most people who would commit sexual harassment probably can get laid without the cash.
Think of it like a shotgun approach - some women like jerks. Sad, but true, and realistically anyone who will commit sexual harassment isn't of the shy or quiet type. If you're a confident jerk that hits on a lot of women some percentage of them will fall for it. Doesn't mean most, but some will.
Now take the quiet guy who would never say such things to a woman, but he still has the same biological urges. For someone like that who is inept at the social scene the sheer simplicity of "Hand money over, get sex in return." is attractive.
Compare it to other things in life. I know plenty of people who whenever something happens to them - be it damage to a house or a broken down lawnmower or just needing a ride to the airport, they "know somebody". Their social nature has built up a network of people that they can call in favors from.
Others prefer to just call a professional and be done with it. I'm not going to call my cousin who knows plumbing to come fix that broken pipe - I'm going to call a plumber. Nor will I seek out that friend from work to fix the lawnmower - I'm taking it to a repair shop. I'm also not going to ask my neighbor to take me to the airport. I'm calling a taxi.
For almost all things in life its accepted that you can take a "social" or a monetary approach to solving your problems.
Sex however - due largely to our outdated and prudish moral code - is treated differently. Its ok for those who can to obtain it through social prowess, but despite there being perfectly willing buyers and sellers, society has deemed it illegal to obtain through financial means (at least not directly for money - countless women trade sex for chocolate and jewelry every Valentines day). Those who or unable or unwilling to play the social game are supposed to just do without. When you consider the level of hormonal urges involved, its no surprise that many just do so illegally.
If that was the motive then they'd do a lot better outlawing random hookups at a bar. Its not as if outlawing prostitution is ushering in a new wave of monogamy.
I find it truly strange that its perfectly legal to GIVE AWAY something but if charged for it it instantly becomes a societal taboo with both parties worthy of shame. It'd be as if they outlawed restaurants (but not home meals or public cookouts) on the basis that since you don't really know the cook they might poison you.
Indeed. I remember one down the street back then called "Advanced Data Computers". I always wondered what was so advanced about their data compared to everyone else.
In particular I loved the owner's response to if you asked if he had any particular item. It was invariably "No - but I can order it!". No thanks buddy. Even back then I could at least order it out of Computer Shopper myself if I felt like waiting.
TFA serves as a springboard for discussion, and to a large degree the discussion thread AROUND this article has become about abortion, not rape-related abortion specifically.
To many in the pro-life realm using "what-ifs" to say why general abortion should be legal seems senseless. Instead, common sense exceptions are more palatable.
IE, instead of giving rape or incest or life of the mother as reasons why abortion should be legal, I think you'd gain a lot more support from pro-lifers by a propsal that abortion is completely legal (and provided by the state at no cost even) in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is significantly in danger. With that exception though, comes that UNDER NO OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES is an abortion legal.
That's my position. And it's not a religious position (if you knew me you'd know I'm anything but). To me that life begins at conception is pretty scientifically sound. The insistence that life doesn't begin until some unquantifiable point until the child has a brain and looks cute is very akin to the religious idea of a soul. The reality is that humans are humans based on our DNA, and the instant a self-replicating group of cells that match human DNA comes into existence then that is a life and that life is human.
That applies in cases of rape just fine. It's less cut and dry in cases of voluntary intercourse. The reality is that sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy. You can do some things to lessen the chances of it happening (birth control and the like), but nothing is fool-proof, and any time you have sexual intercourse there is a chance of pregnancy. That's a risk that in voluntary intercourse is being willingly accepted.
To crudely append it to your analogy, lets assume that the fatal kidney ailment mentioned was caused by you. Every now and then you like to toss an infected syringe out of you window. You usually put a rubber tip on the needle so that even if it hits them it can't poke and infect someone, but whadda ya know - that last one the tip came off and infected this guy.
Does the story change a bit when the person keeping the other alive CAUSED their condition in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
When did the "dick attack" become a standard arguing point for the people with no argument?
Seriously, its like every time someone is losing an argument these days they're like "I know - I'll imply that they have small dicks. That always works!"
That's actually on a state-by-state basis (which is why I said "most states" in my original post). Here private sales don't have to go through any check, but as I said - the vast majority of sales at a gunshow are not doing between private parties. They're generally a dealer selling to the public, which has the same checks as anywhere else.
A gun is a tool to end life, it has no other purpose.
There is a huge target shooting crowd that use guns that are completely unsuited to ending life. As I've said in another post, I shoot over 10,000 rounds per year target shooting which has nothing to do with ending life.
Sorry, but they're not. I know it may shock you, but many people at the target range are simply there to practice target shooting. Heck many of the weapons used in target shooting are completely unsuited to any other purpose. They are no more training to kill than javelin throwers in the Olympics are.
There are plenty of handgun sports that have nothing to do with killing:
http://www.uspsa.org/
http://www.ipsc.org/
http://www.idpa.com/
http://steelchallenge.com/
I shoot around 10,000 rounds of handgun ammunition per year in such events and have never killed a thing with them.
The is no "gunshow loophole". That's a myth.
In most states of the country PRIVATE CITIZENS can sell guns to another private citizen without government involvement. That's it. A few will take some guns to a gunshow to sell but the absolute vast majority of guns at a gunshow are being sold by DEALERS, and those dealers have to process a background check just as if they were selling the gun in a store.
It gets kinda embarrassing when nerds reinforce their own negative stereotypes to proclaim that anything that might actually relevant they're not interested in.
I love Firefly and Game of Thrones as much as the next nerd, but we're not helping our self image by throwing a temper tantrum every time "real" news shows up in the feed.
I haven't really noticed it, but then again I personally don't actually buy a whole lot of apps. I do the paid versions of Angry Birds to avoid advertising, but as to utility apps I think I paid $2-3 for a guitar tuner and about the same for a podcast client.
I love my smartphone, and I use it everyday, but I don't get how people have a use for the number of apps some use. About 99% of my smartphone time is split between Facebook, Twitter, the email app, the browser, music player, and podcast app. An icon for everything I ever use fits on my home screen.
Maybe I'm just getting old. To each his own :).
Cell phones are great, but having a payphone option definitely comes in handy. I was at a large public event (a St Patrick's Day thing) a while back and had had a bit too much to drink and got separated from the group I was with. Had no idea where I was at and for some reason (I'm guessing just tower overload) my cell phone wasn't working. I kept trying to dial out for another hour or so but the battery eventually died. It was around 3am in the morning and virtually everything was closed.
Long story short, I was able to eventually find a payphone, call a cab, and get back to the hotel. Cell phones are great, but it doesn't even take a natural disaster to run into a scenario when you really need something else to fall back on.
Yep. I'm stuck on a Droid 1 right now to keep my unlimited data. Doing the math for my usage habits it would be another $40-50 per month higher over my existing plan to move to the "Share Everything plan" with enough bandwidth. Taking a subsidized phone isn't worth that, but there is a definite lack of any reasonably priced unsubsidized phones for Verizon. $299 for this phone I could handle, but seems every decent handset on Verizon (even the ones they're GIVING away subsidized) is over $500 without contract.
Angry Birds is a fun time killer, but realistically it's not all that innovative. Its basically the same game as Worms - which was in turn was much like many of the various Artillery-style games that have been available on home computers since the 70's.
I get that tablet games can be fun for some. I play them. Angry Birds (standard and Space), Where's my Water, Doodle-jump, etc. All have been good brief diversions, but none stuck for very long. Comparing them to a full length game is about like comparing a comic-strip to a classic novel.
Granted, I've gotten to where lately I play more and more games on my PC rather than the console, but the major driving factor there is basically online distribution and the extreme sales that are often ran on Steam and other services. After a game has been out more than a year as lnng as you can wait for a sale you can often get them for $5 or less. When you consider that a moderate gaming PC really isn't that much more expensive than a console (and most computer still want a PC around anyways - so you're really just looking at the price DIFFERENCE between a gaming-capable PC and one that's not), it really does make PC gaming pretty attractive again.
What's particularly good is that for FPS games you get the mouse and keyboard option, but for games that control better with a controller (Batman Arkham Asylum for example), you can plug a wired XBOX 360 controller into the PC and most modern games seem to pick it up and map the controls exactly as they would be on the console.
Don't know about the state, but the county level agencies still run a ton of OS/400 stuff written in COBOL. Suggestions to replace the aging codebase with something newer are quickly reigned in when they hear about the cost involved.
While that works, part of the problem in modern society is the cost involved in starting up a competitive business. Most of the tenants of capitalism were thought up when the largest companies around would qualify as a small business by modern standards. The industrial revolution saw the rise of megacorps and the problem has continued to rise into the digital age. It costs a fortune to start a telecom company to compete with an existing one - not quite the same as wholesaling your apples for less than the competing cart next door.
What the solution is I'm not sure, but I think it will eventually have to involve government ownership of some of the very core services or at a minimum some rather strict regulation. We already have that with some things - where I live the power generation is handled by a government entity (Santee Cooper - a SC state agency), as is water and sewer services. Ambulance/911, law enforcement, and military are already handled by the government. Its just a matter of deeming telecommunications a critical public service.
So you declined an interview to a qualified applicant because they partied in college?
I hate to break it to you, but almost all your other interviewee's did too. What we need to do - as a society - is recognize certain social norms. We already do to an extent, but its the silent code that its all ok until you get caught.
Having just read RA Salvatore's Homeland it reminds me of the Drow society - everyone attacking each other and scheming and its fine if you get away with it but if you get caught society punished you to the utmost.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
Which would only affect people running that particular application while it was running. At that point it becomes a security issue with the game - not the library. They recompile and issue it along with their standard game patches.
Particularly when you boil the situation down to the most basic premise - people are still visiting their site. They're literally made at Google for making it too easy for people to find what they actually WANT from that site. They want the users to have to wade through their own poor interface for a given amount of time - seeing their ads - before they finally find the content.
Forcing your customers into a more difficult path for your own benefit with no incentive to them will not work well. Never has, never will.
Indeed. To a large degree I don't even CARE what site news comes from. I'm just looking for some general info. Google News lets me find that via a search and that's all that matters. No matter how many leave, there will likely always be enough to provide what I need. That's part of the problem with news agencies anyways - aside from very local news they're all repeating the same information. There's WAY too much redundancy there to maintain in this day and age.
Actually the kernel pretty much IS the OS. A lot of distributions throw their own software packages atop that OS but they're all Linux. Same binary format and you can pretty much expect that they're all running an x.org server for graphics.
Also - many programs already have binary Linux distributions that work on just about any target platform. You just use statically compiled libraries and for the most part you're good.
Even then, if you want something that even depends on some things within a distribution you can target Red Hat and Debian and cover 90% of the market. Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian all basically fall under the same structure and Redhat, Fedora, and CentOS all fall under the same structure. Outside of those main few the userbase drops considerably and for many on systems like Arch or Gentoo they're the types that will figure out how to make it work regardless.
All well an good, but none of those games are designed for Windows 3.1. If you'll remember - in the Windows 3.1 days virtually no "real" games depended on Windows. Aside from basic things like card games and a few tetris clones and the like, you mostly exited out of Windows to play a game then booted back into Windows afterwards.
It wasn't until Windows 95 came along that you had a significant number of games that actually required WIndows.
This whole concept is stupid. What they're essentially saying is that free speech can only be practiced as long as it doesn't offend anyone.
When in the hell did THAT type of speech ever need protection in the first place? The entire point of having a law in place protecting free speech is to make sure that people CAN say the things that are controversial. If we're just slapping each other on the ass saying how great everyone else is then any laws protecting it are redundant.
Indeed. As a matter of fact I'd say that most people who would commit sexual harassment probably can get laid without the cash.
Think of it like a shotgun approach - some women like jerks. Sad, but true, and realistically anyone who will commit sexual harassment isn't of the shy or quiet type. If you're a confident jerk that hits on a lot of women some percentage of them will fall for it. Doesn't mean most, but some will.
Now take the quiet guy who would never say such things to a woman, but he still has the same biological urges. For someone like that who is inept at the social scene the sheer simplicity of "Hand money over, get sex in return." is attractive.
Compare it to other things in life. I know plenty of people who whenever something happens to them - be it damage to a house or a broken down lawnmower or just needing a ride to the airport, they "know somebody". Their social nature has built up a network of people that they can call in favors from.
Others prefer to just call a professional and be done with it. I'm not going to call my cousin who knows plumbing to come fix that broken pipe - I'm going to call a plumber. Nor will I seek out that friend from work to fix the lawnmower - I'm taking it to a repair shop. I'm also not going to ask my neighbor to take me to the airport. I'm calling a taxi.
For almost all things in life its accepted that you can take a "social" or a monetary approach to solving your problems.
Sex however - due largely to our outdated and prudish moral code - is treated differently. Its ok for those who can to obtain it through social prowess, but despite there being perfectly willing buyers and sellers, society has deemed it illegal to obtain through financial means (at least not directly for money - countless women trade sex for chocolate and jewelry every Valentines day). Those who or unable or unwilling to play the social game are supposed to just do without. When you consider the level of hormonal urges involved, its no surprise that many just do so illegally.
If that was the motive then they'd do a lot better outlawing random hookups at a bar. Its not as if outlawing prostitution is ushering in a new wave of monogamy.
I find it truly strange that its perfectly legal to GIVE AWAY something but if charged for it it instantly becomes a societal taboo with both parties worthy of shame. It'd be as if they outlawed restaurants (but not home meals or public cookouts) on the basis that since you don't really know the cook they might poison you.
Indeed. I remember one down the street back then called "Advanced Data Computers". I always wondered what was so advanced about their data compared to everyone else.
In particular I loved the owner's response to if you asked if he had any particular item. It was invariably "No - but I can order it!". No thanks buddy. Even back then I could at least order it out of Computer Shopper myself if I felt like waiting.
TFA serves as a springboard for discussion, and to a large degree the discussion thread AROUND this article has become about abortion, not rape-related abortion specifically.
To many in the pro-life realm using "what-ifs" to say why general abortion should be legal seems senseless. Instead, common sense exceptions are more palatable.
IE, instead of giving rape or incest or life of the mother as reasons why abortion should be legal, I think you'd gain a lot more support from pro-lifers by a propsal that abortion is completely legal (and provided by the state at no cost even) in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is significantly in danger. With that exception though, comes that UNDER NO OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES is an abortion legal.
That's my position. And it's not a religious position (if you knew me you'd know I'm anything but). To me that life begins at conception is pretty scientifically sound. The insistence that life doesn't begin until some unquantifiable point until the child has a brain and looks cute is very akin to the religious idea of a soul. The reality is that humans are humans based on our DNA, and the instant a self-replicating group of cells that match human DNA comes into existence then that is a life and that life is human.
That applies in cases of rape just fine. It's less cut and dry in cases of voluntary intercourse. The reality is that sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy. You can do some things to lessen the chances of it happening (birth control and the like), but nothing is fool-proof, and any time you have sexual intercourse there is a chance of pregnancy. That's a risk that in voluntary intercourse is being willingly accepted.
To crudely append it to your analogy, lets assume that the fatal kidney ailment mentioned was caused by you. Every now and then you like to toss an infected syringe out of you window. You usually put a rubber tip on the needle so that even if it hits them it can't poke and infect someone, but whadda ya know - that last one the tip came off and infected this guy.
Does the story change a bit when the person keeping the other alive CAUSED their condition in the first place?