Russia can be a pure autarky if absolutely necessary in a sense that it has all the resources and enough manpower... but it would be subsistence living. Not quite as bad as DPRK, but much closer to it, as opposed to the standard of living that currently has (which is above many Eastern European countries). I very much doubt the populace would be supportive of such policies for long. And right now, at least, it's essentially a populist dictatorship - there's a certain degree of political oppressiveness, but by and large, it is maintained by genuine public support.
Unless all of NSA is busy sifting through Facebook status updates, I would expect any such purchase to receive some very special attention. As it should be.
He does have a point, though. They really are two different classes of devices, and calling them by the same name is not particularly useful. I mean, it's useful insofar as it correctly identifies the form factor, but there's just so much more to it that we really need some more descriptive terms there.
I have a Surface Pro 3, and it's a great device. I also have a Nexus 7, and it's also a great device. I use both, because their strengths and weaknesses are in different areas, and don't overlap as much as one would think.
Based on today's definition, everyone was a radical back then.
You haven't been at war with them for long, either. If you recall, there was that peace treaty (which still stands, by the way).
And, of course, "they" back then weren't Muslims. It was one particular nation (or rather, more like a federation of tribes in the process of national genesis) that happened to be Muslim. They don't really have any meaningful connection to any Muslim nations that US has fought since then (and it didn't fight any until more than a hundred years later, and that when trying to occupy other countries, like Philippines).
Barbary pirates were Muslim. They weren't radically so, however, and Islam didn't play any particular role in their agenda. They were attacking ships for profit, not because they believed in an impending Armageddon or building a worldwide Caliphate.
Nouning the verbs (and vice versa) is part of what makes English awesome, actually. It's virtually always clear from context which one is which (esp. as English has articles to help disambiguate), and it allows for a lot of flexibility.
You didn't. You have conjured up a bunch of other points, which have nothing whatsoever to do with OP's original assertion, which is comparing things solely on the basis of how much power they can generate. This is the baseline that we need to establish before we go into which one is more polluting etc.
As for question 1, yes. I'm reasonably sure that 42% is a minority
This is 42% that admits to being a Young Earth Creationist, which is the extreme far end of "people with faith-based beliefs that override reasoned thought". This doesn't include people who don't believe in evolution but otherwise accept old Earth, and we didn't even get started on other issues such as climate change, where the picture is even more bleak. But to me, the fact that 42% (or even 30%) believe that Earth is 10,000 years old is already a major a catastrophe from an educational perspective, given that we're talking about a First World nation with mandatory education.
As for question 2, there's a reason that we aren't seeing legislators bring forth new laws regarding religion
Oh, they're bringing them all the time - just look at the regular bills related to abortion, for example. They don't get passed, yes, because there's presently a legislative deadlock in the Congress on anything even remotely touchy. If you look at state level, things are much worse in red states where such bills do regularly become laws. Again, abortion is the biggest item that is targeted there right now, but also climate change research, secular education, and anti-discrimination laws (under the guise of "religious freedom" laws).
That is because in many of the states, the majority does in fact stand for such laws (and even more extreme ones - right now it's largely the judiciary that keeps the excesses of state legislatures in check to some extent, by shooting them down as unconstitutional; and not the people through voting). And given that US is a federal republic with a strong degree of decentralization, what happens on state level is equally if not more important than federal level - to remind, the states are largely responsible for education, for example.
With respect to the majority of voters actually being able to affect policy, I will also remind you that given a district-based FPTP electoral system, the representation in Congress (or state equivalent) does not actually directly correspond to popular vote (e.g. given the current House, GOP has 57% of the seats while only securing 52% of popular vote). In fact, it is entirely possible to have the seat distribution be the opposite of popular vote, where the minority becomes the majority - the House elections in 2012 saw GOP take 48% of popular vote, but the majority of the seats.
And then there's gerrymandering. If you live in, say, Austin, and you're a liberal, how many congressmen are actually representing you and several hundred thousand people like you?
Except for the fact that Al-Qaeda and such came out of Afghanistan of the 80's and have direct lineage to Taliban and the Mujaheddin that fought the USSR. Part of which can be traced back to Jimmy Carter in the late 70's. Which can be traced back to the 1950s, and back then to WW1.
Radical Islam wasn't really a thing back in WW1 outside of the Arabian peninsula (Wahhabi). The ongoing rise of Salafism in Afghanistan, Iraq etc can all be traced down to the Afghan War - it was the funding of the most extreme factions of the mujahideen by CIA and especially ISI that made them from a fringe group of a few crazy fanatics into a large and formidable force that could preach all over the world and steadily attract new recruits.
This is not entirely true. The specific people behind ISIS are in those positions because of Iraq War, but their ideology is older (and likely something like that would have popped up elsewhere a few years later, anyway). Arguably, the real starting point of when it became a serious thing (and not just a few crazies like e.g. Sayyid Qutb) was when CIA and ISI started to support the Afghani mujahideen in their civil war against the Soviet-backed DRA government.
To remind, the mujahideen were all Islamists to some degree, and their list of grievances with the PDPA, among legitimate things like their collectivization policies, included items such as mixed-gender schools, and the existence of male gynecologists. Some of those guys were pretty hardline, too - e.g. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - and, ironically, it was those hardliners that received the most support in money and arms and training, because they were "more efficient" (and because Zia ul-Haq was quite fond of fundie Islam himself, but that wasn't listed as the official reason, obviously).
When those same people discovered Qutb, we've got Taliban, and also a bunch of fighters who became "professional mujis", so to speak - as the collapse of multi-ethnic states (USSR, Serbia etc) around the world resulted in many localized conflicts where Muslims were one of the sides, they traveled there to join the fight, which was always welcomed because they brought their experience. But at the same time, they also became Salafi preachers, wooing the converts by their military prowess while also explaining to them the theology of jihad fard-ayn. This happened in Chechnya, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Palestine etc. The other fault of US was creating the conditions in Iraq and Syria (and Libya) that were ripe for those same people, or their students, to come in and do what they're used to doing. But if that wouldn't have happened, they would have done the same later, or possibly in a different country (Tajikistan in particular is very likely to flare up soon).
Add to this that NASA has made "adjustments" to the data about ten times over the past 30 years and each time, of the six possibilities, they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present. The chance of this happening randomly from correcting random faults in the data is 1 in 6 = 1 in 60-million.
Have it occurred to you that the faults were not really random?
OEC is incompatible with the literal reading of the rest of the Bible. The moment you admit that some of those tales are just that, tales, not meant to describe any events precisely, but present an allegory for some pertinent question (which is the doctrine that both Catholics and Orthodox generally adhere to), it's all perfectly compatible.
Clearly, that is to punish us for our immorality. As you point out yourself, as time passes by, the viruses get tougher. At the same time, we keep legalizing sins and perversions such as sodomy and abortion. Indeed, if you plot one against the other, there's a clear correlation! ~
Or perhaps the Garden of Eden story is, in fact, about evolution. Or rather, specifically, about that particular step in it that made some primate species somewhere from animals (who do not "know good and evil") into people (who do).
(BTW, I'm not saying that this is necessary something that actually happened - I don't believe there's a hard line between the two concepts, and we know from ethology that animals have some ethical concepts - we just choose to call them "instincts". But many people do believe there's a difference, and such a myth is one way to allegorically represent it.)
This shows that cats and humans were more successful lifeforms than cold blooded animals in the colder environment that happened after the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs, which were the height of cold blooded animals in terms of evolution and were brought down by climactic change of the environment from a warm to colder average temperature.)
I don't think this follows from your exact example, because crocodiles didn't really change all that much since before the K-T extinction - and are thriving in the current environment just the same. So I wouldn't say that cats, for example, are "more successful". Cats just happened to fill the new niches that appeared due to climate change, which crocs couldn't do... but the niche that they occupied heretofore was still there, and they were (and are) still superbly adapted to it. This can be trivially demonstrated by throwing a cat in a gator-infested swamp and observing the outcome:)
Pretty much all mainstream Linux distros (which, let's be honest, is 90+% of *nix platform these days) have Python out of the box. On others, installing it is a single command along the lines of "pkg add python" away. It sounds like an excuse.
There's no real advantage to probably 2/3 of the things in natural languages (and English has its own share of ridiculousness there, starting with spelling). For pure communication, we could just as well use Lojban.
OTOH, all that stuff adds "color" and "flavor" to the language, if you know what I mean. This can have a very real advantage when it comes to literary works, especially poetry.
Slashdot Mirror
Russia can be a pure autarky if absolutely necessary in a sense that it has all the resources and enough manpower... but it would be subsistence living. Not quite as bad as DPRK, but much closer to it, as opposed to the standard of living that currently has (which is above many Eastern European countries). I very much doubt the populace would be supportive of such policies for long. And right now, at least, it's essentially a populist dictatorship - there's a certain degree of political oppressiveness, but by and large, it is maintained by genuine public support.
Unless all of NSA is busy sifting through Facebook status updates, I would expect any such purchase to receive some very special attention. As it should be.
Unlike iPad, Surface has SD card slot. There's no reason to buy the higher-end version just for storage. And the base 64Gb model costs $800.
He does have a point, though. They really are two different classes of devices, and calling them by the same name is not particularly useful. I mean, it's useful insofar as it correctly identifies the form factor, but there's just so much more to it that we really need some more descriptive terms there.
I have a Surface Pro 3, and it's a great device. I also have a Nexus 7, and it's also a great device. I use both, because their strengths and weaknesses are in different areas, and don't overlap as much as one would think.
3 hours on battery? Have you actually used one?
Based on today's definition, everyone was a radical back then.
You haven't been at war with them for long, either. If you recall, there was that peace treaty (which still stands, by the way).
And, of course, "they" back then weren't Muslims. It was one particular nation (or rather, more like a federation of tribes in the process of national genesis) that happened to be Muslim. They don't really have any meaningful connection to any Muslim nations that US has fought since then (and it didn't fight any until more than a hundred years later, and that when trying to occupy other countries, like Philippines).
How convenient that what the Koran demands of them just happened to be what was profitable.
As I recall, conquistadors also often used rationales such as "we are here to bring Christ to the heathens"...
Barbary pirates were Muslim. They weren't radically so, however, and Islam didn't play any particular role in their agenda. They were attacking ships for profit, not because they believed in an impending Armageddon or building a worldwide Caliphate.
When did Microsoft "embrace" Delphi or OpenGL?
Nouning the verbs (and vice versa) is part of what makes English awesome, actually. It's virtually always clear from context which one is which (esp. as English has articles to help disambiguate), and it allows for a lot of flexibility.
You didn't. You have conjured up a bunch of other points, which have nothing whatsoever to do with OP's original assertion, which is comparing things solely on the basis of how much power they can generate. This is the baseline that we need to establish before we go into which one is more polluting etc.
OP said that he uses Python for "day-to-day automation of things". What software package are we talking about?
As for question 1, yes. I'm reasonably sure that 42% is a minority
This is 42% that admits to being a Young Earth Creationist, which is the extreme far end of "people with faith-based beliefs that override reasoned thought". This doesn't include people who don't believe in evolution but otherwise accept old Earth, and we didn't even get started on other issues such as climate change, where the picture is even more bleak. But to me, the fact that 42% (or even 30%) believe that Earth is 10,000 years old is already a major a catastrophe from an educational perspective, given that we're talking about a First World nation with mandatory education.
As for question 2, there's a reason that we aren't seeing legislators bring forth new laws regarding religion
Oh, they're bringing them all the time - just look at the regular bills related to abortion, for example. They don't get passed, yes, because there's presently a legislative deadlock in the Congress on anything even remotely touchy. If you look at state level, things are much worse in red states where such bills do regularly become laws. Again, abortion is the biggest item that is targeted there right now, but also climate change research, secular education, and anti-discrimination laws (under the guise of "religious freedom" laws).
That is because in many of the states, the majority does in fact stand for such laws (and even more extreme ones - right now it's largely the judiciary that keeps the excesses of state legislatures in check to some extent, by shooting them down as unconstitutional; and not the people through voting). And given that US is a federal republic with a strong degree of decentralization, what happens on state level is equally if not more important than federal level - to remind, the states are largely responsible for education, for example.
With respect to the majority of voters actually being able to affect policy, I will also remind you that given a district-based FPTP electoral system, the representation in Congress (or state equivalent) does not actually directly correspond to popular vote (e.g. given the current House, GOP has 57% of the seats while only securing 52% of popular vote). In fact, it is entirely possible to have the seat distribution be the opposite of popular vote, where the minority becomes the majority - the House elections in 2012 saw GOP take 48% of popular vote, but the majority of the seats.
And then there's gerrymandering. If you live in, say, Austin, and you're a liberal, how many congressmen are actually representing you and several hundred thousand people like you?
Except for the fact that Al-Qaeda and such came out of Afghanistan of the 80's and have direct lineage to Taliban and the Mujaheddin that fought the USSR. Part of which can be traced back to Jimmy Carter in the late 70's. Which can be traced back to the 1950s, and back then to WW1.
Radical Islam wasn't really a thing back in WW1 outside of the Arabian peninsula (Wahhabi). The ongoing rise of Salafism in Afghanistan, Iraq etc can all be traced down to the Afghan War - it was the funding of the most extreme factions of the mujahideen by CIA and especially ISI that made them from a fringe group of a few crazy fanatics into a large and formidable force that could preach all over the world and steadily attract new recruits.
This is not entirely true. The specific people behind ISIS are in those positions because of Iraq War, but their ideology is older (and likely something like that would have popped up elsewhere a few years later, anyway). Arguably, the real starting point of when it became a serious thing (and not just a few crazies like e.g. Sayyid Qutb) was when CIA and ISI started to support the Afghani mujahideen in their civil war against the Soviet-backed DRA government.
To remind, the mujahideen were all Islamists to some degree, and their list of grievances with the PDPA, among legitimate things like their collectivization policies, included items such as mixed-gender schools, and the existence of male gynecologists. Some of those guys were pretty hardline, too - e.g. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - and, ironically, it was those hardliners that received the most support in money and arms and training, because they were "more efficient" (and because Zia ul-Haq was quite fond of fundie Islam himself, but that wasn't listed as the official reason, obviously).
When those same people discovered Qutb, we've got Taliban, and also a bunch of fighters who became "professional mujis", so to speak - as the collapse of multi-ethnic states (USSR, Serbia etc) around the world resulted in many localized conflicts where Muslims were one of the sides, they traveled there to join the fight, which was always welcomed because they brought their experience. But at the same time, they also became Salafi preachers, wooing the converts by their military prowess while also explaining to them the theology of jihad fard-ayn. This happened in Chechnya, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Palestine etc. The other fault of US was creating the conditions in Iraq and Syria (and Libya) that were ripe for those same people, or their students, to come in and do what they're used to doing. But if that wouldn't have happened, they would have done the same later, or possibly in a different country (Tajikistan in particular is very likely to flare up soon).
Add to this that NASA has made "adjustments" to the data about ten times over the past 30 years and each time, of the six possibilities, they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present. The chance of this happening randomly from correcting random faults in the data is 1 in 6 = 1 in 60-million.
Have it occurred to you that the faults were not really random?
OEC is incompatible with the literal reading of the rest of the Bible. The moment you admit that some of those tales are just that, tales, not meant to describe any events precisely, but present an allegory for some pertinent question (which is the doctrine that both Catholics and Orthodox generally adhere to), it's all perfectly compatible.
Clearly, that is to punish us for our immorality. As you point out yourself, as time passes by, the viruses get tougher. At the same time, we keep legalizing sins and perversions such as sodomy and abortion. Indeed, if you plot one against the other, there's a clear correlation! ~
There is a vocal minority of people
Are you sure?
They are not in charge.
Are you sure?
Or perhaps the Garden of Eden story is, in fact, about evolution. Or rather, specifically, about that particular step in it that made some primate species somewhere from animals (who do not "know good and evil") into people (who do).
(BTW, I'm not saying that this is necessary something that actually happened - I don't believe there's a hard line between the two concepts, and we know from ethology that animals have some ethical concepts - we just choose to call them "instincts". But many people do believe there's a difference, and such a myth is one way to allegorically represent it.)
This shows that cats and humans were more successful lifeforms than cold blooded animals in the colder environment that happened after the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs, which were the height of cold blooded animals in terms of evolution and were brought down by climactic change of the environment from a warm to colder average temperature.)
I don't think this follows from your exact example, because crocodiles didn't really change all that much since before the K-T extinction - and are thriving in the current environment just the same. So I wouldn't say that cats, for example, are "more successful". Cats just happened to fill the new niches that appeared due to climate change, which crocs couldn't do... but the niche that they occupied heretofore was still there, and they were (and are) still superbly adapted to it. This can be trivially demonstrated by throwing a cat in a gator-infested swamp and observing the outcome :)
That's exactly why Muslims like to liberally append "Insha'Allah" to statements about the future, and "Alhamdulillah" to statements about the past.
Pretty much all mainstream Linux distros (which, let's be honest, is 90+% of *nix platform these days) have Python out of the box. On others, installing it is a single command along the lines of "pkg add python" away. It sounds like an excuse.
There are plenty of lightweight WebKit-based browsers these days. E.g. Xombrero.
There's no real advantage to probably 2/3 of the things in natural languages (and English has its own share of ridiculousness there, starting with spelling). For pure communication, we could just as well use Lojban.
OTOH, all that stuff adds "color" and "flavor" to the language, if you know what I mean. This can have a very real advantage when it comes to literary works, especially poetry.