Off-topic, but I'll bite anyway. I think it's OK for the IRS to target any group they suspect are lying about being a social welfare organization. Republicans are always talking about how they think profiling is OK and should be used to target limited law enforcement resources where they are needed most. Why should the IRS waste time checking random 501(c)(4) applications, when there are a whole bunch of them that are easy to recognize as bullshit? The only thing they did wrong was not also targeting groups with other words like "progressive" in their names.
Also off-topic, but closer to the point, before the Republican primary, most Texans had not even heard of Ted Cruz. He was a long-shot candidate for the better part of the race. He is seen as a joke by most of the Democrats, and most of the establishment Republicans. They only voted for him because he has an R in front of his name. If it had been a three way race between Cruz, Dewhurst, and Sadler, I'm sure Sadler and Dewhurst would have ended up in the runoff. (yeah, I know, citation needed)
You had me until "Ted Cruz for Prez." Have you ever even heard this guy speak? He's a complete whack-job. I'm a Texan. Hell, I've even voted Republican from time to time. I liked Kay Bailey Hutchison just fine, most of the time. But this guy? He's either nuts or very good at faking it. It's obvious that he's hella smart, so I guess it could all be a big show. I do agree with him that we need to have a constitutional congress to get some "no seriously, we meant it" style amendments. But I have no doubt that he's just as corrupt as the next guy, and that he sees nothing wrong with perpetuating the utter dysfunction currently crippling our capital. (ooh alliteration!)
Man, that brings back memories. When my brother and I were little (like 6 or 7), mom was getting her education degree. Her professor let us hang out in this room (closet) where they kept their TI-99 with it's tape drive. It had been usurped by some Apple computers in the main computer lab. We would transcribe the programs from 3-2-1 Contact magazine (So it had to have been between 85 and 88).
We would do the same thing as you, tweaking things here and there. I remember having 100 lives in the snake game. Or making it go slower. There was one ridiculous program that actually included a map of the US or maybe the world. Which meant writing a whole shitload of lines of code, one for each line segment. Man... that was a long time ago. I can remember listening to the tape to make sure we weren't going to overwrite somebody else's program.
Probably the most programming I did was Pascal in high school. I made a Mandelbrot screen saver and a piano emulator. I could only produce one tone at a time, so for chords, I had to alternate between the different tones. Sounded terrible.
shoot, my company just took out my water cooler, because there's only three people in this particular building. Fanta is right out.
At least we still get coffee! Once they take that away, I'll... I don't know. Stop drinking coffee I guess.
This student created an illegal explosive device by mixing those chemicals
Illegal? Prove it. Have you forgotten about innocent until proven guilty? Oh that's right, it doesn't apply in schools.
What law did she violate? It certainly wasn't Chapter 790 of the FL statutes, because a device has to be intended to cause harm in order to be covered. Clearly this girl wasn't intending to cause harm.
“Destructive device” means any bomb, grenade, mine, rocket, missile, pipebomb, or similar device containing an explosive, incendiary, or poison gas and includes any frangible container filled with an explosive, incendiary, explosive gas, or expanding gas, which is designed or so constructed as to explode by such filler and is capable of causing bodily harm or property damage;
*snip*
“Destructive device” does not include:
(a)A device which is not designed, redesigned, used, or intended for use as a weapon;
*snip*
(5)“Explosive” means any chemical compound or mixture that has the property of yielding readily to combustion or oxidation upon application of heat, flame, or shock, including but not limited to dynamite, nitroglycerin, trinitrotoluene, or ammonium nitrate when combined with other ingredients to form an explosive mixture, blasting caps, and detonators; but not including:... [fireworks, guns, and toy rockets]
So unless this was intended to be a weapon, it is not a "destructive device" under the law. If it did not lead to combustion or oxidation (read fire), then it's not an "explosive" under the law. It may be a "bomb," but only in the same sense as a cherry bomb.
So I'm really curious what felony they think they can charge her with, because it's certainly not one of these. It might be against school policy, but there's no way a felony charge will stick. The DA is foolish to try it.
We were in the back yard making rockets out of a film canister and vinegar/baking soda. OMFG we could totally go to jail. What will my six-year-old do in prison? I hope he knows to make somebody his bitch the very first day.
Well said! My university's program also focused more on how to attack problems. They seemed to know that in 20 years the things you'd be attacking would be different. But the basic methodology of problem solving hasn't changed in hundreds if not thousands of years. Sure DOE is a little more rigorous and refined, but the scientific method is still the scientific method.
The other part of that equation is how to interpret and communicate results. This is something too many schools leave out. I have seen too many EEs who have no idea how to write a paragraph. We even had classes on technical writing and engineering economics. Those classes have come in more useful than I expected. (as has mass/energy transfer and drafting, who knew?)
I'm an EE in the US. I'd have to agree that the quality of engineers is declining. Part of the problem is that there is just so many more topics to learn. You could spend an entire career doing something that there's only enough time in an undergrad curriculum to devote a week or two to. I mean, hell, at my school you could get a EE degree without taking any advanced power systems classes. This was 13 years ago. I imagine it's even worse now.
It didn't much matter for me, I still learned enough on the job to be the generator protection expert in a matter of months. But you'd think that a nice engineering program would at least offer a one hour course in something like that. I got to take a 3 hour research class where I played with Lego Mindstorms and wrote a NSF proposal. You'd think a primer in transmission lines wouldn't be too hard to come by. But you spend so much time on electronics, Fourier transforms, wavelets, etc., that you don't have time to learn about PLCs and lightning arrestors.
Let's not overlook continuing education, though. I don't think I would have made it in the power world without my IEEE CED seminars. Most people were there just to get their PE hours checked off, but I was green and actually there to learn.
They're not bribes. They're campaign contributions, and it's perfectly legal free speech protected by the first amendment. What are you, some kind of pinko commie?
This. I have a coworker who I inadvertently offended. The next day she sat down in my office and explained how she took what I said. I was mortified. I didn't even understand that I was being offensive. So yeah, confronting the individual is the way to go. The best thing is that I can count on this person to tell me when I'm being a dick. Sometimes my annoy-o-meter needs recalibration.
Actually, the legal test is whether a reasonable person would have been offended, and whether the behavior is targeted at a protected group (sex, race, religion, etc.). There's a lot of leeway for a jury (or boss) in this regard. Our sexual harassment training video even had an example of a manager who says inappropriate things about all of his employees. That's apparently legal, since it's not targeted; being offensive wasn't enough. Against policy, sure, but legal all the same. We had one incident where a guy was offended about some mild religious jokes that were being made. The same guy started making really offensive gay-bashing comments (he would argue they were jokes). But he was safe because sexual orientation isn't a protected group according to the law.
If it was about distractions, why can I read my dead tree book, or the Sky Mall catalog? My book certainly weighs more than my wife's iPhone, and would be a worse projectile. My kids can play with their plastic toys (as long as they don't look like knives or guns). And the lady next to me can knit while we're taking off. All of these things are worse distractions and projectiles, so don't pretend like there's any logic to these rules. They are capricious and stupid byproducts of a political system gone terribly awry.
OK, cell phones and RC cars, I can see banning. But an e-ink display puts off less noise than wristwatch. For that matter, they have TV screens showing Big Bang reruns on half the airplanes during takeoff and landing. So it's clearly not a distraction or electronic noise issue. Just BS rules to cover somebody's ass.
You seem concerned about somebody's book getting in your way when the plane crashes during takeoff or landing. I'd be more concerned with the fuselage getting in the way of my arteries, or the overhead bins getting in the way of my brain stem. If nothing like that happens during a plane crash, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
How can you talk intelligently about government subsidies for something when you know nothing about what is being subsidized? Her whole point is that the US is wasting money on solar. It is a waste because it'll never work anyway. It'll never work because we don't get enough sun. So yes, the fact that she knows nothing about how much sun we get puts a pretty big dent in her argument regarding government subsidies.
That being said, we should cut her some slack; she's from Oklahoma City. Okies make Texans look smart.
First of all I'm not admitting defeat. Second of all, "abattoir"? Really? We're talking about ISPs and video games, not extraordinary rendition and waterboarding (although even those things really don't stir up the populace either).
Third, you seem to be confusing the message and the messenger. I donate to EFF and ACLU just like a lot of people I know. So people like me are anything but willing cattle. My point is that you cannot afford to turn a blind eye to reality. And the reality is a paralyzing complacency has a pretty tight grip on most people. You have to understand, most Americans see us anti-RIAA/TSA types the same way Jon Stewart sees Alex Jones.
The only way that has any chance of wining the fight is by forcing them to take more and more extreme measures until enough people are pissed with them.
ha ha ha ha ha! I can't even get my wife riled up over not being able to fast forward through the previews on purchased DVDs. Probably 95% of people just don't give a shit about this stuff. The only reason people learned about SOPA was because of the blackout.
TSA, warrant-less wiretapping, extraordinary renditions, seizing domain names, convicting weev, DUI checkpoints, etc. There is no such thing measures extreme enough for people to be pissed. And even when we do get pissed, we get a month long OWS movement that accomplishes absolutely nothing. As long as we get our reality TV and 99c value menus*, the vast majority of us just don't care. And it's not just America. Look at Australia or Italy for some equally bizarre and draconian measures that sneak by under the public's noses.
* - We will see if the NY proposed ban on big soft drinks will run afoul of the 99c value menu rule, or if even that will be ignored by our chubby populace.
You're muddying the waters by bringing up that other case. I fail to see how the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for some stupid teenager that "slipped a finger" in some passed out chick at a pretty debauched party. It's a stupid thing to do, and a pretty bad violation. But a) she won't remember any of it, and the psychological trauma of rape is a big part of why it's so bad in the first place. And b) it's not like they shoved a baseball bat or a turkey baster full of sperm up there; she's not physically damaged or at risk of being pregnant, the other two factors that make rape so heinous.
I've got a buddy who's on the sex offenders list because his girlfriend who was two years younger than him had parents that didn't like him. And in Midland it's pretty easy to have somebody found guilty by virtue of being Mexican. So yeah. Let's kill everybody found guilty of rape, because we know how infallible our justice system is. Who needs the Eighth Amendment anyway? While we're at it let's throw out the sixth, too. Since we all know anybody charged with rape is obviously guilty.
Oh my god. The Samsung Netflix app is a piece of shit. You can't even add new movies to your queue (c. 2011). I assume that was Netflix's fault, not Samsung. We fired Netflix after the whole price hike "apology" email, but we had pretty much given up watching it on the Samsung. The main reason was not queue issue, but streaming problems.
Let me explain. We also have a Toshiba BR player with Netflix. It did not suck as bad. Still couldn't add movies to it, but it would stream at a reasonable quality without any blips. Mind you, the Toshiba's connected over wireless. The Samsung TV is hooked right into the router, but for whatever reason, it would always try to download it at too high a quality. So here I am, not even able to watch an episode of Word World with my 3 year old. Not like it's some 1080p action flick. Every 90 seconds it would pause to buffer some more. Rather than just bumping down the stream quality. Seriously, WTF?
And don't even get me started about the updates. Sometimes it would download an update to e.g. the ESPN app, just to have another download in the same update cycle that deleted the ESPN app altogether. (why it has to download to delete an app is another mystery, but whatever) Look I'm not gonna let you lock up my TV for half a damn hour just to watch some Netflix. A cancel button, or an estimate on download time would be nice. GRRRRR.
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Off-topic, but I'll bite anyway. I think it's OK for the IRS to target any group they suspect are lying about being a social welfare organization. Republicans are always talking about how they think profiling is OK and should be used to target limited law enforcement resources where they are needed most. Why should the IRS waste time checking random 501(c)(4) applications, when there are a whole bunch of them that are easy to recognize as bullshit? The only thing they did wrong was not also targeting groups with other words like "progressive" in their names.
Also off-topic, but closer to the point, before the Republican primary, most Texans had not even heard of Ted Cruz. He was a long-shot candidate for the better part of the race. He is seen as a joke by most of the Democrats, and most of the establishment Republicans. They only voted for him because he has an R in front of his name. If it had been a three way race between Cruz, Dewhurst, and Sadler, I'm sure Sadler and Dewhurst would have ended up in the runoff. (yeah, I know, citation needed)
You had me until "Ted Cruz for Prez." Have you ever even heard this guy speak? He's a complete whack-job. I'm a Texan. Hell, I've even voted Republican from time to time. I liked Kay Bailey Hutchison just fine, most of the time. But this guy? He's either nuts or very good at faking it. It's obvious that he's hella smart, so I guess it could all be a big show. I do agree with him that we need to have a constitutional congress to get some "no seriously, we meant it" style amendments. But I have no doubt that he's just as corrupt as the next guy, and that he sees nothing wrong with perpetuating the utter dysfunction currently crippling our capital. (ooh alliteration!)
Man, that brings back memories. When my brother and I were little (like 6 or 7), mom was getting her education degree. Her professor let us hang out in this room (closet) where they kept their TI-99 with it's tape drive. It had been usurped by some Apple computers in the main computer lab. We would transcribe the programs from 3-2-1 Contact magazine (So it had to have been between 85 and 88).
We would do the same thing as you, tweaking things here and there. I remember having 100 lives in the snake game. Or making it go slower. There was one ridiculous program that actually included a map of the US or maybe the world. Which meant writing a whole shitload of lines of code, one for each line segment. Man... that was a long time ago. I can remember listening to the tape to make sure we weren't going to overwrite somebody else's program.
Probably the most programming I did was Pascal in high school. I made a Mandelbrot screen saver and a piano emulator. I could only produce one tone at a time, so for chords, I had to alternate between the different tones. Sounded terrible.
I feel super old now...
shoot, my company just took out my water cooler, because there's only three people in this particular building. Fanta is right out. At least we still get coffee! Once they take that away, I'll ... I don't know. Stop drinking coffee I guess.
3. There was a recent very public bombing.
There are recent shootings, too. A BB gun even has "gun" in the name. Racist or not, the DA is still stupid.
This student created an illegal explosive device by mixing those chemicals
Illegal? Prove it. Have you forgotten about innocent until proven guilty? Oh that's right, it doesn't apply in schools.
What law did she violate? It certainly wasn't Chapter 790 of the FL statutes, because a device has to be intended to cause harm in order to be covered. Clearly this girl wasn't intending to cause harm.
“Destructive device” means any bomb, grenade, mine, rocket, missile, pipebomb, or similar device containing an explosive, incendiary, or poison gas and includes any frangible container filled with an explosive, incendiary, explosive gas, or expanding gas, which is designed or so constructed as to explode by such filler and is capable of causing bodily harm or property damage;
*snip*
“Destructive device” does not include: (a)A device which is not designed, redesigned, used, or intended for use as a weapon;
*snip*
(5)“Explosive” means any chemical compound or mixture that has the property of yielding readily to combustion or oxidation upon application of heat, flame, or shock, including but not limited to dynamite, nitroglycerin, trinitrotoluene, or ammonium nitrate when combined with other ingredients to form an explosive mixture, blasting caps, and detonators; but not including: ... [fireworks, guns, and toy rockets]
So unless this was intended to be a weapon, it is not a "destructive device" under the law. If it did not lead to combustion or oxidation (read fire), then it's not an "explosive" under the law. It may be a "bomb," but only in the same sense as a cherry bomb.
So I'm really curious what felony they think they can charge her with, because it's certainly not one of these. It might be against school policy, but there's no way a felony charge will stick. The DA is foolish to try it.
We were in the back yard making rockets out of a film canister and vinegar/baking soda. OMFG we could totally go to jail. What will my six-year-old do in prison? I hope he knows to make somebody his bitch the very first day.
Some kid thought it would be funny to make a huge bang at a place where huge bangs are known to cause massive administrative overreaction.
Where's that? Just about anywhere in America?
Well said! My university's program also focused more on how to attack problems. They seemed to know that in 20 years the things you'd be attacking would be different. But the basic methodology of problem solving hasn't changed in hundreds if not thousands of years. Sure DOE is a little more rigorous and refined, but the scientific method is still the scientific method.
The other part of that equation is how to interpret and communicate results. This is something too many schools leave out. I have seen too many EEs who have no idea how to write a paragraph. We even had classes on technical writing and engineering economics. Those classes have come in more useful than I expected. (as has mass/energy transfer and drafting, who knew?)
I'm an EE in the US. I'd have to agree that the quality of engineers is declining. Part of the problem is that there is just so many more topics to learn. You could spend an entire career doing something that there's only enough time in an undergrad curriculum to devote a week or two to. I mean, hell, at my school you could get a EE degree without taking any advanced power systems classes. This was 13 years ago. I imagine it's even worse now.
It didn't much matter for me, I still learned enough on the job to be the generator protection expert in a matter of months. But you'd think that a nice engineering program would at least offer a one hour course in something like that. I got to take a 3 hour research class where I played with Lego Mindstorms and wrote a NSF proposal. You'd think a primer in transmission lines wouldn't be too hard to come by. But you spend so much time on electronics, Fourier transforms, wavelets, etc., that you don't have time to learn about PLCs and lightning arrestors.
Let's not overlook continuing education, though. I don't think I would have made it in the power world without my IEEE CED seminars. Most people were there just to get their PE hours checked off, but I was green and actually there to learn.
They're not bribes. They're campaign contributions, and it's perfectly legal free speech protected by the first amendment. What are you, some kind of pinko commie?
damn. didn't see you had it in there already. urgh. need more coffeeeeeee!!!!
Would any of that Matter?
This. I have a coworker who I inadvertently offended. The next day she sat down in my office and explained how she took what I said. I was mortified. I didn't even understand that I was being offensive. So yeah, confronting the individual is the way to go. The best thing is that I can count on this person to tell me when I'm being a dick. Sometimes my annoy-o-meter needs recalibration.
Actually, the legal test is whether a reasonable person would have been offended, and whether the behavior is targeted at a protected group (sex, race, religion, etc.). There's a lot of leeway for a jury (or boss) in this regard. Our sexual harassment training video even had an example of a manager who says inappropriate things about all of his employees. That's apparently legal, since it's not targeted; being offensive wasn't enough. Against policy, sure, but legal all the same. We had one incident where a guy was offended about some mild religious jokes that were being made. The same guy started making really offensive gay-bashing comments (he would argue they were jokes). But he was safe because sexual orientation isn't a protected group according to the law.
If it was about distractions, why can I read my dead tree book, or the Sky Mall catalog? My book certainly weighs more than my wife's iPhone, and would be a worse projectile. My kids can play with their plastic toys (as long as they don't look like knives or guns). And the lady next to me can knit while we're taking off. All of these things are worse distractions and projectiles, so don't pretend like there's any logic to these rules. They are capricious and stupid byproducts of a political system gone terribly awry.
OK, cell phones and RC cars, I can see banning. But an e-ink display puts off less noise than wristwatch. For that matter, they have TV screens showing Big Bang reruns on half the airplanes during takeoff and landing. So it's clearly not a distraction or electronic noise issue. Just BS rules to cover somebody's ass.
You seem concerned about somebody's book getting in your way when the plane crashes during takeoff or landing. I'd be more concerned with the fuselage getting in the way of my arteries, or the overhead bins getting in the way of my brain stem. If nothing like that happens during a plane crash, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
How can you talk intelligently about government subsidies for something when you know nothing about what is being subsidized? Her whole point is that the US is wasting money on solar. It is a waste because it'll never work anyway. It'll never work because we don't get enough sun. So yes, the fact that she knows nothing about how much sun we get puts a pretty big dent in her argument regarding government subsidies.
That being said, we should cut her some slack; she's from Oklahoma City. Okies make Texans look smart.
I think Fox News should borrow the Daily Show's tagline: "Where more Americans get their news... than probably should."
First of all I'm not admitting defeat. Second of all, "abattoir"? Really? We're talking about ISPs and video games, not extraordinary rendition and waterboarding (although even those things really don't stir up the populace either).
Third, you seem to be confusing the message and the messenger. I donate to EFF and ACLU just like a lot of people I know. So people like me are anything but willing cattle. My point is that you cannot afford to turn a blind eye to reality. And the reality is a paralyzing complacency has a pretty tight grip on most people. You have to understand, most Americans see us anti-RIAA/TSA types the same way Jon Stewart sees Alex Jones.
Isn't that called racketeering?
The only way that has any chance of wining the fight is by forcing them to take more and more extreme measures until enough people are pissed with them.
ha ha ha ha ha! I can't even get my wife riled up over not being able to fast forward through the previews on purchased DVDs. Probably 95% of people just don't give a shit about this stuff. The only reason people learned about SOPA was because of the blackout.
TSA, warrant-less wiretapping, extraordinary renditions, seizing domain names, convicting weev, DUI checkpoints, etc. There is no such thing measures extreme enough for people to be pissed. And even when we do get pissed, we get a month long OWS movement that accomplishes absolutely nothing. As long as we get our reality TV and 99c value menus*, the vast majority of us just don't care. And it's not just America. Look at Australia or Italy for some equally bizarre and draconian measures that sneak by under the public's noses.
* - We will see if the NY proposed ban on big soft drinks will run afoul of the 99c value menu rule, or if even that will be ignored by our chubby populace.
You're muddying the waters by bringing up that other case. I fail to see how the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for some stupid teenager that "slipped a finger" in some passed out chick at a pretty debauched party. It's a stupid thing to do, and a pretty bad violation. But a) she won't remember any of it, and the psychological trauma of rape is a big part of why it's so bad in the first place. And b) it's not like they shoved a baseball bat or a turkey baster full of sperm up there; she's not physically damaged or at risk of being pregnant, the other two factors that make rape so heinous.
I've got a buddy who's on the sex offenders list because his girlfriend who was two years younger than him had parents that didn't like him. And in Midland it's pretty easy to have somebody found guilty by virtue of being Mexican. So yeah. Let's kill everybody found guilty of rape, because we know how infallible our justice system is. Who needs the Eighth Amendment anyway? While we're at it let's throw out the sixth, too. Since we all know anybody charged with rape is obviously guilty.
Hallelujah! It's a Jamaica dungeon porn MIRACLE!!!!!
Oh my god. The Samsung Netflix app is a piece of shit. You can't even add new movies to your queue (c. 2011). I assume that was Netflix's fault, not Samsung. We fired Netflix after the whole price hike "apology" email, but we had pretty much given up watching it on the Samsung. The main reason was not queue issue, but streaming problems.
Let me explain. We also have a Toshiba BR player with Netflix. It did not suck as bad. Still couldn't add movies to it, but it would stream at a reasonable quality without any blips. Mind you, the Toshiba's connected over wireless. The Samsung TV is hooked right into the router, but for whatever reason, it would always try to download it at too high a quality. So here I am, not even able to watch an episode of Word World with my 3 year old. Not like it's some 1080p action flick. Every 90 seconds it would pause to buffer some more. Rather than just bumping down the stream quality. Seriously, WTF?
And don't even get me started about the updates. Sometimes it would download an update to e.g. the ESPN app, just to have another download in the same update cycle that deleted the ESPN app altogether. (why it has to download to delete an app is another mystery, but whatever) Look I'm not gonna let you lock up my TV for half a damn hour just to watch some Netflix. A cancel button, or an estimate on download time would be nice. GRRRRR.