Down that path there be dragons. It would make every site on the internet beholden to the most autocratic, backwater, fundamentalist, etc concerns. I know I don't want every company on the internet to be subject to the laws of China or Saudi Arabia. I don't think every indie game designer should have to implement checks on IP addresses to make sure that a customer isn't coming from Germany (where game violence is heavily censored), or Australia (where a handful of fuckwads are essentially banning some video games). Even within America, I don't want porn limited to the "community standards" of some small town of fundamentalists in the middle of Arkansas.
And we haven't even got started on the actual tampering with the computer yet.
Why tamper with the computer anyway? Easier to toss a flash drive in their desk drawer. If it's not plausible for them to have it unencrypted, encrypt it yourself with some high but plausibly breakable level of encryption and claim that you spent some large amount of time to decrypt the drive.
If a group of people are doing nothing but talking, what's the problem? Typing on a keyboard doesn't require that someone has molested a child, and assuming the people aren't actually molesting children, I'd much rather they get their jollies off by jacking it in front of their computer than actually harming a child.
Assuming an online poll counts as 'consolidating' (did you mean confirmed?)
Did you even click the link? The top 10 list was whittled down from 5000. That's what I mean by "consolidated".
anything, and ignoring that Dick Armey and Ryan Hecker are not leaders of any tea party,
Dick was on the Daily Show two days ago talking an awful lot like he thought he was part of the Tea Party movement. But who else do you want me to throw in their? Someone is setting up rallies.
did you even read that contract? More than half the issues mentioned there are economic issues.
Half of what I said was economic issues.
Note the things you don't see. You don't see "Get our country back for God-fearin white Americans", you don't see anything about immigration. Now, the majority may feel some way or another on those issues, but the thing that holds them together is the economic. If that goes then they break up into segments, the religious right, the anti-immigration group, etc.
Actually your entire post shows a lack of understanding of political realities. For example, gun-rights advocates aren't divided along the dem/rep lines, they are divided in a rural/urban way. The NRAA pays a lot of money to Democrats. In 2008, 20% of their budget went to Democrats.
Oooo, 20%? It's not like they're an industry lobby group paying off whoever they can to get what they want or anything...
Besides, urban areas lean much more towards Democrats and rural areas tend to be more Republican. They all have a lot of the same correlation.
You've also misunderstood the power balance. The tea-partiers are not following Newt Gengrich, Newt Gengrich is following tea-partiers. He knows how to attract a crowd, and he's saying all the right things to make them like him, but he is following them.
Huh? That's how every political party works. I don't think that there's people with mind control powers or dictators forcing anyone to march in lockstep. That doesn't mean that there aren't figureheads, and the figureheads that get reported on are current or former Republican leadership.
63% of mainstream Americans stated that their views were closer the Tea Party Movement than to president Obama (mainstream as opposed to the political class). You better take anything like that seriously, whether you agree with it or not.
80% of Americans think that the government is covering up the existence of aliens. Many, many people will believe stupid things. Regardless, poll results show a much fewer numbers actually following the Tea Partiers. Most people tend to be apathetic (non-voters are more common than voters for any presidential candidate in quite some time).
You're repeated attempts to paint things in broad strokes account for a lot of your stupidity. Stop doing it. It only makes you dumber./quote>
Again, depends on the broad strokes. It's a broad stroke to say that the average physician has an MD (a small minority don't, but the vast majority do). If statistics can be found to back up the stroke, it's not uncalled for. Again, the vast majority of Tea Partiers are the conservative Republican base. They're not some vast number of untapped libertarians coming out of the woodwork, to rain economic theory manna from the heaven, so don't pretend that they're only interested in economic issues.
Then can I go to a concert and sue them if they're making a recording of the audio because my voice might get imperceptibly picked up on the microphone? Or sue if someone else in the room calls a tech support hot line that records the call and I don't know about it and say something?
What about the Contract from America? Written by Dick Armey (former house Republican leader) and Ryan Hecker and consolidated from polling Tea Partiers. It's all about reducing taxes and challenging the parts of government they think are unconstitutional.
And according to polls, they're predominantly white, middle class, gun owning, religious, Conservative Republicans. Are there other smaller groups within it? Undoubtedly, though when Tea Partiers rally around Republican leadership like Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin, it's hard to take the rest of it seriously, and given that kind of leadership, it's not at all unfair to paint the sky with broad strokes of blue.
Personally I don't mind it in principle, I just mind that in America we outsource everything to the lowest bidder (or biggest briber), and that it invariably produces broken results. Our current ballot system is broken, but it's at least likely that attempts to stuff the box can be found and traced. There's very little way to trace a paperless machine. Personally, I'd just prefer something akin to a scantron test. It's easy for both humans and machines to read (fill in a bubble, if you can't figure it out, you probably shouldn't vote), so we could run them through a machine for quick results and still hand count them if we need to.
Huh? From where I'm sitting it looks exactly like the Republican talking points of "Get our country back for God-fearin white Americans", "Deport all the Mexicans", "Reduce taxes for the rich and it will trickle down on us like a golden shower", and "Reign in bad government" (where "government" means policies and court decisions they disagree with). They might not be talking specifically about marijuana, abortion, gays, etc, but given all the figureheads of the movement, it's obvious where they stand.
If ANY religion teaches hate, then it is not real, It's nothing but made up by man, designed only for the control others through shame and coercion.
If you can't imagine your religion also existing right now unchanged on an alien planet, it's not the right one. Incidentally, since every religion ever has been changed, interpreted, reinterpreted, etc, I can't possibly imagine that a planet that has no reference to the same books would come up with the same thing as anything currently. The only things that will be the same are probably math (give or take some concepts) and basic sciences (Newtonian level physics will probably be figured out by any decently advanced civilization).
To be fair, I think there's two main problems with pay as you go: ISPs gouge on data costs and there's a lot of traffic to your computer that you didn't ask for and definitely don't want. The latter one is impossible to avoid - even if you keep your computer locked down, you'll still get traffic from a shit ton of people that have no business contacting your computer. Seriously, I run Peerblock and see everything from big corporations, to small firms, to government entities on the other side of the work. Either I'm on every watch list ever made, or the average person is getting so bombarded with traffic that overage charges would happen to everyone every month (to the ISP's delight, no doubt).
You can write software that simulates changing connection patterns (and run it on static hardware). Given an initial state, a definition of what causes changes in the connections, and an interface to some set of sensory input, you could write a program to simulate the brain (assuming that's all the brain does from a computational standpoint, though some disagree with that assumption). Those 3 conditions are well outside current science, sure, but that's the theoretical backdoor if we can't find any good programming shortcuts or more interesting hardware.
Exactly. Comparing something as nebulous as "lines of code" to the genome ignores the incredible information compression of the genome (essentially it's a giant archive that is meaningless until you decompress it, whereupon you see that it's a self-replicating, self-modifying, reflective structure relying upon a fair bit of random outside variables to produce an outcome). Even if you could quantify it and revise the estimates up many orders of magnitude, comparing that to something like "lines of code" is still useless. I can write a few million lines of NOOP's in assembly and it would carry no information content at all (other than that I had too much time on my hands), or you could write a program in a much smaller number of lines running an infinite number of universal Turing Machines running an infinite number of tape conditions.
Geek squad tries to get you top spend a few hundred on magical audio cables. God squad tries to get you to spend an hour a week and donate a few thousand so they can spread their message of "donate to us" to others.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but must point out that unless you're approaching or in retirement, bonds are not a good investment vehicle. 2-3% returns does nothing but prevent inflation from eating your savings. Exchange traded funds are a much better bet (even if you're really lazy, you can dump all your money into something like the Wilshire 5000 and get a piece of damn near every stock in the US, or Vanguard Total World Stock Index to diversify across the whole world), since you'll grow pretty reliably at the rate of the market (8-10% per year on average) and the only way to lose everything is if the whole world economy tanks (in which case the only reliable investment is SPAM).
Slashdot Mirror
Next year I'll suddenly learn German? Awesome!
Down that path there be dragons. It would make every site on the internet beholden to the most autocratic, backwater, fundamentalist, etc concerns. I know I don't want every company on the internet to be subject to the laws of China or Saudi Arabia. I don't think every indie game designer should have to implement checks on IP addresses to make sure that a customer isn't coming from Germany (where game violence is heavily censored), or Australia (where a handful of fuckwads are essentially banning some video games). Even within America, I don't want porn limited to the "community standards" of some small town of fundamentalists in the middle of Arkansas.
And we haven't even got started on the actual tampering with the computer yet.
Why tamper with the computer anyway? Easier to toss a flash drive in their desk drawer. If it's not plausible for them to have it unencrypted, encrypt it yourself with some high but plausibly breakable level of encryption and claim that you spent some large amount of time to decrypt the drive.
"Hey cutie, why don't you stop redacting your dangerous bits?"
Wow, 10 GB? If I didn't have adblock, I'm not sure that would cover all the flash "punch the monkey" ads I'd see, let alone any actual content.
The King James Bible has a perpetual copyright in Great Britain owned by the crown.
If a group of people are doing nothing but talking, what's the problem? Typing on a keyboard doesn't require that someone has molested a child, and assuming the people aren't actually molesting children, I'd much rather they get their jollies off by jacking it in front of their computer than actually harming a child.
Assuming an online poll counts as 'consolidating' (did you mean confirmed?)
Did you even click the link? The top 10 list was whittled down from 5000. That's what I mean by "consolidated".
anything, and ignoring that Dick Armey and Ryan Hecker are not leaders of any tea party,
Dick was on the Daily Show two days ago talking an awful lot like he thought he was part of the Tea Party movement. But who else do you want me to throw in their? Someone is setting up rallies.
did you even read that contract? More than half the issues mentioned there are economic issues.
Half of what I said was economic issues.
Note the things you don't see. You don't see "Get our country back for God-fearin white Americans", you don't see anything about immigration. Now, the majority may feel some way or another on those issues, but the thing that holds them together is the economic. If that goes then they break up into segments, the religious right, the anti-immigration group, etc.
Those are the exact conservative talking points. Regardless:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/us/politics/16rallly.html
Actually your entire post shows a lack of understanding of political realities. For example, gun-rights advocates aren't divided along the dem/rep lines, they are divided in a rural/urban way. The NRAA pays a lot of money to Democrats. In 2008, 20% of their budget went to Democrats.
Oooo, 20%? It's not like they're an industry lobby group paying off whoever they can to get what they want or anything...
Besides, urban areas lean much more towards Democrats and rural areas tend to be more Republican. They all have a lot of the same correlation.
You've also misunderstood the power balance. The tea-partiers are not following Newt Gengrich, Newt Gengrich is following tea-partiers. He knows how to attract a crowd, and he's saying all the right things to make them like him, but he is following them.
Huh? That's how every political party works. I don't think that there's people with mind control powers or dictators forcing anyone to march in lockstep. That doesn't mean that there aren't figureheads, and the figureheads that get reported on are current or former Republican leadership.
63% of mainstream Americans stated that their views were closer the Tea Party Movement than to president Obama (mainstream as opposed to the political class). You better take anything like that seriously, whether you agree with it or not.
80% of Americans think that the government is covering up the existence of aliens. Many, many people will believe stupid things. Regardless, poll results show a much fewer numbers actually following the Tea Partiers. Most people tend to be apathetic (non-voters are more common than voters for any presidential candidate in quite some time).
You're repeated attempts to paint things in broad strokes account for a lot of your stupidity. Stop doing it. It only makes you dumber./quote> Again, depends on the broad strokes. It's a broad stroke to say that the average physician has an MD (a small minority don't, but the vast majority do). If statistics can be found to back up the stroke, it's not uncalled for. Again, the vast majority of Tea Partiers are the conservative Republican base. They're not some vast number of untapped libertarians coming out of the woodwork, to rain economic theory manna from the heaven, so don't pretend that they're only interested in economic issues.
Then can I go to a concert and sue them if they're making a recording of the audio because my voice might get imperceptibly picked up on the microphone? Or sue if someone else in the room calls a tech support hot line that records the call and I don't know about it and say something?
So if I go to Chicago, can I sue any stores that have video cameras pointed at a sidewalk? No? Why?
What about the Contract from America? Written by Dick Armey (former house Republican leader) and Ryan Hecker and consolidated from polling Tea Partiers. It's all about reducing taxes and challenging the parts of government they think are unconstitutional.
And according to polls, they're predominantly white, middle class, gun owning, religious, Conservative Republicans. Are there other smaller groups within it? Undoubtedly, though when Tea Partiers rally around Republican leadership like Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin, it's hard to take the rest of it seriously, and given that kind of leadership, it's not at all unfair to paint the sky with broad strokes of blue.
Personally I don't mind it in principle, I just mind that in America we outsource everything to the lowest bidder (or biggest briber), and that it invariably produces broken results. Our current ballot system is broken, but it's at least likely that attempts to stuff the box can be found and traced. There's very little way to trace a paperless machine. Personally, I'd just prefer something akin to a scantron test. It's easy for both humans and machines to read (fill in a bubble, if you can't figure it out, you probably shouldn't vote), so we could run them through a machine for quick results and still hand count them if we need to.
Huh? From where I'm sitting it looks exactly like the Republican talking points of "Get our country back for God-fearin white Americans", "Deport all the Mexicans", "Reduce taxes for the rich and it will trickle down on us like a golden shower", and "Reign in bad government" (where "government" means policies and court decisions they disagree with). They might not be talking specifically about marijuana, abortion, gays, etc, but given all the figureheads of the movement, it's obvious where they stand.
Talented, but dressed up stupidly in college?
Anyone who dressed themselves in the 80s doesn't get to complain about how kids today dress.
There is exactly one open atheist in the House of Representatives, Pete Stark, though he's also a Unitarian Univeralist.
If ANY religion teaches hate, then it is not real, It's nothing but made up by man, designed only for the control others through shame and coercion.
If you can't imagine your religion also existing right now unchanged on an alien planet, it's not the right one. Incidentally, since every religion ever has been changed, interpreted, reinterpreted, etc, I can't possibly imagine that a planet that has no reference to the same books would come up with the same thing as anything currently. The only things that will be the same are probably math (give or take some concepts) and basic sciences (Newtonian level physics will probably be figured out by any decently advanced civilization).
To be fair, I think there's two main problems with pay as you go: ISPs gouge on data costs and there's a lot of traffic to your computer that you didn't ask for and definitely don't want. The latter one is impossible to avoid - even if you keep your computer locked down, you'll still get traffic from a shit ton of people that have no business contacting your computer. Seriously, I run Peerblock and see everything from big corporations, to small firms, to government entities on the other side of the work. Either I'm on every watch list ever made, or the average person is getting so bombarded with traffic that overage charges would happen to everyone every month (to the ISP's delight, no doubt).
You can write software that simulates changing connection patterns (and run it on static hardware). Given an initial state, a definition of what causes changes in the connections, and an interface to some set of sensory input, you could write a program to simulate the brain (assuming that's all the brain does from a computational standpoint, though some disagree with that assumption). Those 3 conditions are well outside current science, sure, but that's the theoretical backdoor if we can't find any good programming shortcuts or more interesting hardware.
Exactly. Comparing something as nebulous as "lines of code" to the genome ignores the incredible information compression of the genome (essentially it's a giant archive that is meaningless until you decompress it, whereupon you see that it's a self-replicating, self-modifying, reflective structure relying upon a fair bit of random outside variables to produce an outcome). Even if you could quantify it and revise the estimates up many orders of magnitude, comparing that to something like "lines of code" is still useless. I can write a few million lines of NOOP's in assembly and it would carry no information content at all (other than that I had too much time on my hands), or you could write a program in a much smaller number of lines running an infinite number of universal Turing Machines running an infinite number of tape conditions.
Hah, you should've gotten IPv6. I adopted it early on and got 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 !
But a radio receiver doesn't broadcast.
the Hell
New Jersey?
Because George Lucas wants to see his past destroyed so that he doesn't have to keep living up to it in the future.
Geek squad tries to get you top spend a few hundred on magical audio cables. God squad tries to get you to spend an hour a week and donate a few thousand so they can spread their message of "donate to us" to others.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but must point out that unless you're approaching or in retirement, bonds are not a good investment vehicle. 2-3% returns does nothing but prevent inflation from eating your savings. Exchange traded funds are a much better bet (even if you're really lazy, you can dump all your money into something like the Wilshire 5000 and get a piece of damn near every stock in the US, or Vanguard Total World Stock Index to diversify across the whole world), since you'll grow pretty reliably at the rate of the market (8-10% per year on average) and the only way to lose everything is if the whole world economy tanks (in which case the only reliable investment is SPAM).