It believes in the supernatural (souls, reincarnation, various beings that are another plane of existence, etc) in a some sort of coherent way amongst many people. It's a religion.
Except that Virginia was settled based purely on attempts to get money, Carolina was founded by settlers in Virginia who wanted new land (the colony later split over political issues), New York and New Jersey were founded by Dutch traders, Georgia was founded by debtors, New Hampshire was founded as a land grant, Delaware was made after some strange compromises (and it's population was heterogeneous since colonization). So that's 8/13 that weren't founded because of religious reasons. (And Virginia came before Massachusetts).
Should be a pretty short committee. The Supreme Court told Creationists to fuck off (and to not come back trying to hide themselves). So it's a choice between follow the law or get sued and spend $millions on a lost cause.
If we want to bring them freedom, why is their constitution not fully secular? Their constitution (made in 2004) requires their president to be Muslim. It also describes Islam as being the state religion and says no law can contradict it. There's no freedom of conscience and apostasy is punishable by death.
Don't give me bullshit about baby steps. We wrote up a constitution for Japan, and they had just as much reason to resist as Afghans do, yet they haven't made any amendments since 1947 and they're a free and prosperous country. Set your goals to be lofty and then follow through and you might actually get a real, honest to goodness secular democracy in the Middle East, instead of a corrupt state where theocratic thugs violate human rights even as America is supposedly "bringing freedom and liberty".
Maybe that's why we're in a holographic universe. The overlords were going to go for an uncompressed version, but the only way the data growth was manageable was to run some compression. Maybe we're all just a part of a large tar file.
The flip side of this is the case of Duke Nukem Forever, which had no constraints on either features or release date. 12 years and one giant development team layoff later, even what was developed for DNF still probably won't see the light of day.
Exactly. We can bitch about how English has a bunch of exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions, and weird constructs, sure, but consider two other languages: French and Japanese.
French has several different conjugation forms for it's verbs (and a bunch of irregular verbs that just do whatever the fuck they want), inanimate objects with gender (or animals with a linguistic gender, regardless of actual gender), and it's inflexible to new words being created (At least officially they make their own words up with a central body, even long after the public at large already adopted some other word borrowed from a different language).
Japanese has a honorifics system that requires knowing a whole bunch of background cultural knowledge. It also has different words for use depending on gender (even when talking about yourself). Also, there's a few thousand Kanji to memorize to be able to read the daily newspaper. Good luck picking that up easily.
In most of the United States you could bang her. Yes, that's right, you can fuck a 16 year olds brains out (consensually), but heaven help you if you take a picture of your completely legal action.
Paterson came out and admitted the affair pretty much as soon as he became governor (because if he tried to keep it under wraps, he'd have been totally fucked). He still got plenty of jokes cracked at him (why would a blind man need to cheat, etc, etc). Of course, Patterson ended up being powerless in his time in office. I lived in New York till recently, and as much as the Spitzer scandals pissed me off (more for the hypocrisy of Hookergate than anything), the state probably would've been better off keeping him as governor.
Sure there is, it's called negative user feedback. Amazon would backpedal so fast your head would spin. Look at what happened when Blizzard tried to make all their users use their real name on their forums. They reversed course the next day due to the overwhelming negative response.
What makes you think that you'd know that Amazon is the one behind it? You'd probably try to get on $website and have it time out on you repeatedly until you give up. A reasonable person up till now would assume that it's just that $website is running off some crappy server/poor connection, but could you be sure anymore?
Net neutrality means nothing of the sort. Net neutrality tells the providers that they can't charge for tiered access, something they already do. So your $40 per month cable bill will instantly go to over $100. If they have to give the same quality of service to everyone, you can bet your ass that they're going to make sure you pay for it. This bill removes the freedom we all enjoy right now. I'll take throttled traffic over a tripled bill any day of the week.
I'm not even sure where to begin with this bullshit. Net neutrality is saying that since I pay for a pipe into my home, the company doesn't get to say "It'd be an awful shame if you couldn't access Youtube. Maybe you should pay me $10/mo, so that there's no 'network issues' with them." If I've got a pipe connecting to the net, I get to point that pipe to some data source and grab what I want. I can understand being ok with some types of data being prioritized over others (voice, video, games, etc being delivered in a timely manner is more necessary than a Bittorrent download), though my two caveats with that are that only the type matters, not the source or destination (no preferring Skype to Google Voice), and no dropping certain types wholesale.
Wait, so now it's safe to call Tom Cruise a fudge packer? And he can't even sue me in England? Because I thought I saw him at a fudge factory, packing up boxes, and had to tell someone.
Hell, peak uranium is unlikely unless we dramatically increase our use of it. Humans are mining just over 50,000 tons of uranium a year globally. There's 5.5 million tons that are economical to mine, and another 35 million tons classed as "mineral resources", and yes, there's quite a bit in sea water (4.6 billion tons, though there's no good way to get it out right now). It's also nice that many of the reserves are in friendly countries. Australia has a quarter of the world's known reserves and Canada has plenty too.
Every main branch and the NSA and CSS all have their own cyber warfare units. There's a US Cyber Command established and run by the NSA to organize all of them. Of course, going into Army, Navy, Marines, or Air Force requires getting past a boot camp of skills that are completely useless to a desk jockey working out of an office building in the US. I don't know if the NSA or CSS have similar boot camps (they're both defense agency groups too, so I wouldn't be surprised). Most of the US intelligence agencies (There's 16 of them) have some jurisdiction or missions involving the internet. Probably only a handful actually go out and bring systems down on purpose, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Dept. of Energy's OICI cracks foreign systems to see what they know.
You might catch a couple terrorists... and a whole lot more curious teenage boys with time on their hands, but no real means or motive to make a real bomb.
nobody's around long enough to do permanent damange
The president has 8 years maximum, sure, but members of the House and Senate can last forever. Byrd was a senator for over 50 years. The Supreme Court is also appointed for life, and basically can't be removed. Depending on your state, there might not be term limits on the governor or state legislature. Yes, you can theoretically vote out the bozos, but even though congress has 25-30% approval ratings, they always manage to get well over 90% retention rate. Even if we fully believe in completely honest elections, most districts are gerrymandered to hell and back such that only a handful of them are even within 10% of a 50-50 split. Those in power are doing exactly what they want: draining us dry by giving us gifts bought for by ourselves while they siphon off what they can.
There's an energy drink currently on the shelves called "Cocaine". It's available in 49 states. No one cares. If we follow your logic, we should ban running because it leads to "runner's high".
correct answer
almost correct answer
opposite answer
stupid answer
format. For the vast majority of standardized tests that the average person will take, being able to eliminate obviously wrong answers will get you to at least a 33% chance of being right, and probably a 50-50 shot of getting it right. Even with a penalty for wrong answers like the SAT, you're still coming out ahead on average. Even with somewhat more open ended tests like the AP ones, they're still not that hard (at least, not hard to get a good score on). I went to high school in New York, and the regents tests were a joke. I don't understand how it would even be possible to fail one of them. I took the French regents and despite being absolutely terrible at French (seriously, I knew a few handfuls of verbs and nouns), I came out with a 90.
Admittedly the New York Board of Education were run by idiots who said to themselves "Hey, we've got these regents tests for high level students to distinguish themselves. Wouldn't it be great it we had everyone perform up to these tests by graduation, no matter how 'special needs' they are?", and as anyone can tell you, tests written so that anyone can pass them aren't even worth being called tests. They're fill in the bubble exercises in regurgitation at best, with maybe some fill in the blank or free answer spaces where anyone who can produce even a few lines of bullshit gets some effort points.
Re:The day after 9/11 you found a rock?
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 1
Puns are the only thing that separates us from The Terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
It believes in the supernatural (souls, reincarnation, various beings that are another plane of existence, etc) in a some sort of coherent way amongst many people. It's a religion.
Except that Virginia was settled based purely on attempts to get money, Carolina was founded by settlers in Virginia who wanted new land (the colony later split over political issues), New York and New Jersey were founded by Dutch traders, Georgia was founded by debtors, New Hampshire was founded as a land grant, Delaware was made after some strange compromises (and it's population was heterogeneous since colonization). So that's 8/13 that weren't founded because of religious reasons. (And Virginia came before Massachusetts).
So the Bible says 1=3. It also says pi is equal to 3. We all know pi is irrational. Since 1=God, does that mean God is irrational?
Things are so much clearer now.
The Supreme Court decided this back in 1987. (Edwards v. Aguillard)
Should be a pretty short committee. The Supreme Court told Creationists to fuck off (and to not come back trying to hide themselves). So it's a choice between follow the law or get sued and spend $millions on a lost cause.
If we want to bring them freedom, why is their constitution not fully secular? Their constitution (made in 2004) requires their president to be Muslim. It also describes Islam as being the state religion and says no law can contradict it. There's no freedom of conscience and apostasy is punishable by death.
Don't give me bullshit about baby steps. We wrote up a constitution for Japan, and they had just as much reason to resist as Afghans do, yet they haven't made any amendments since 1947 and they're a free and prosperous country. Set your goals to be lofty and then follow through and you might actually get a real, honest to goodness secular democracy in the Middle East, instead of a corrupt state where theocratic thugs violate human rights even as America is supposedly "bringing freedom and liberty".
Not if you're trying to fit reals into wholes.
Maybe that's why we're in a holographic universe. The overlords were going to go for an uncompressed version, but the only way the data growth was manageable was to run some compression. Maybe we're all just a part of a large tar file.
The flip side of this is the case of Duke Nukem Forever, which had no constraints on either features or release date. 12 years and one giant development team layoff later, even what was developed for DNF still probably won't see the light of day.
Exactly. We can bitch about how English has a bunch of exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions, and weird constructs, sure, but consider two other languages: French and Japanese.
French has several different conjugation forms for it's verbs (and a bunch of irregular verbs that just do whatever the fuck they want), inanimate objects with gender (or animals with a linguistic gender, regardless of actual gender), and it's inflexible to new words being created (At least officially they make their own words up with a central body, even long after the public at large already adopted some other word borrowed from a different language).
Japanese has a honorifics system that requires knowing a whole bunch of background cultural knowledge. It also has different words for use depending on gender (even when talking about yourself). Also, there's a few thousand Kanji to memorize to be able to read the daily newspaper. Good luck picking that up easily.
So... one day we'll be saying it's the Year of Prolog?
Funny thing, though. It would scale pretty well to any number of processors... it's just that it's a pain in the ass to write in.
In most of the United States you could bang her. Yes, that's right, you can fuck a 16 year olds brains out (consensually), but heaven help you if you take a picture of your completely legal action.
Paterson came out and admitted the affair pretty much as soon as he became governor (because if he tried to keep it under wraps, he'd have been totally fucked). He still got plenty of jokes cracked at him (why would a blind man need to cheat, etc, etc). Of course, Patterson ended up being powerless in his time in office. I lived in New York till recently, and as much as the Spitzer scandals pissed me off (more for the hypocrisy of Hookergate than anything), the state probably would've been better off keeping him as governor.
Given that many Chinese goods end up here, that sounds like a way to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Sure there is, it's called negative user feedback. Amazon would backpedal so fast your head would spin. Look at what happened when Blizzard tried to make all their users use their real name on their forums. They reversed course the next day due to the overwhelming negative response.
What makes you think that you'd know that Amazon is the one behind it? You'd probably try to get on $website and have it time out on you repeatedly until you give up. A reasonable person up till now would assume that it's just that $website is running off some crappy server/poor connection, but could you be sure anymore?
Net neutrality means nothing of the sort. Net neutrality tells the providers that they can't charge for tiered access, something they already do. So your $40 per month cable bill will instantly go to over $100. If they have to give the same quality of service to everyone, you can bet your ass that they're going to make sure you pay for it. This bill removes the freedom we all enjoy right now. I'll take throttled traffic over a tripled bill any day of the week.
I'm not even sure where to begin with this bullshit. Net neutrality is saying that since I pay for a pipe into my home, the company doesn't get to say "It'd be an awful shame if you couldn't access Youtube. Maybe you should pay me $10/mo, so that there's no 'network issues' with them." If I've got a pipe connecting to the net, I get to point that pipe to some data source and grab what I want. I can understand being ok with some types of data being prioritized over others (voice, video, games, etc being delivered in a timely manner is more necessary than a Bittorrent download), though my two caveats with that are that only the type matters, not the source or destination (no preferring Skype to Google Voice), and no dropping certain types wholesale.
...a game of looking for an extremely large needle in an infinite haystack.
I think I saw that porno once. It was almost as hot as this star.
Wait, so now it's safe to call Tom Cruise a fudge packer? And he can't even sue me in England? Because I thought I saw him at a fudge factory, packing up boxes, and had to tell someone.
IT'S FUCKING IOWA! It's one gigantic cornfield with pretty much NOTHING else to recommend it.
Be nice, they have soy beans and pigs too. (Said as the son to 2 Iowans. Too many vacations to that boring as all fuck place.)
Hell, peak uranium is unlikely unless we dramatically increase our use of it. Humans are mining just over 50,000 tons of uranium a year globally. There's 5.5 million tons that are economical to mine, and another 35 million tons classed as "mineral resources", and yes, there's quite a bit in sea water (4.6 billion tons, though there's no good way to get it out right now). It's also nice that many of the reserves are in friendly countries. Australia has a quarter of the world's known reserves and Canada has plenty too.
Every main branch and the NSA and CSS all have their own cyber warfare units. There's a US Cyber Command established and run by the NSA to organize all of them. Of course, going into Army, Navy, Marines, or Air Force requires getting past a boot camp of skills that are completely useless to a desk jockey working out of an office building in the US. I don't know if the NSA or CSS have similar boot camps (they're both defense agency groups too, so I wouldn't be surprised). Most of the US intelligence agencies (There's 16 of them) have some jurisdiction or missions involving the internet. Probably only a handful actually go out and bring systems down on purpose, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Dept. of Energy's OICI cracks foreign systems to see what they know.
You might catch a couple terrorists... and a whole lot more curious teenage boys with time on their hands, but no real means or motive to make a real bomb.
nobody's around long enough to do permanent damange
The president has 8 years maximum, sure, but members of the House and Senate can last forever. Byrd was a senator for over 50 years. The Supreme Court is also appointed for life, and basically can't be removed. Depending on your state, there might not be term limits on the governor or state legislature. Yes, you can theoretically vote out the bozos, but even though congress has 25-30% approval ratings, they always manage to get well over 90% retention rate. Even if we fully believe in completely honest elections, most districts are gerrymandered to hell and back such that only a handful of them are even within 10% of a 50-50 split. Those in power are doing exactly what they want: draining us dry by giving us gifts bought for by ourselves while they siphon off what they can.
There's an energy drink currently on the shelves called "Cocaine". It's available in 49 states. No one cares. If we follow your logic, we should ban running because it leads to "runner's high".
Eh, most tests follow the:
correct answer
almost correct answer
opposite answer
stupid answer
format. For the vast majority of standardized tests that the average person will take, being able to eliminate obviously wrong answers will get you to at least a 33% chance of being right, and probably a 50-50 shot of getting it right. Even with a penalty for wrong answers like the SAT, you're still coming out ahead on average. Even with somewhat more open ended tests like the AP ones, they're still not that hard (at least, not hard to get a good score on). I went to high school in New York, and the regents tests were a joke. I don't understand how it would even be possible to fail one of them. I took the French regents and despite being absolutely terrible at French (seriously, I knew a few handfuls of verbs and nouns), I came out with a 90.
Admittedly the New York Board of Education were run by idiots who said to themselves "Hey, we've got these regents tests for high level students to distinguish themselves. Wouldn't it be great it we had everyone perform up to these tests by graduation, no matter how 'special needs' they are?", and as anyone can tell you, tests written so that anyone can pass them aren't even worth being called tests. They're fill in the bubble exercises in regurgitation at best, with maybe some fill in the blank or free answer spaces where anyone who can produce even a few lines of bullshit gets some effort points.
Puns are the only thing that separates us from The Terrorists.
So... you're saying the terrorists should win?