And by that, I mean both the Tamba Bay and the Slashdot article. There is nothing anywhere about how she got the biodiesel from algae, which at this point is the only interesting thing about the experiment. It mentions photoautotrophic cultivation, which just means that the algae use light to grow, which is a big no-shit-Sherlock. It mentions osmotic sonication, which is a fancy word for using sound waves and osmotic principles to get the detergent into the cell innards. Google searches turn up no indication of how the experiment was set up, what the actual results or anything of interest. The best thing I got was a list of who else won what other categories at the fair.
So we have two utterly known principles being applied to biodiesel generation from algae, and somehow this makes news as a breakthrough. Yawn.
Which leads me to my second rant: the insistence of news organizations to hail science fair winners as geniuses who solved a problem no one else could (I'm specifically looking at the stories about the kid arranging solar cells in a tree shape). It completely oversells the experiment, turns the kid into something they're not, and covers up the actual interesting item: that you can do cool science in your home that goes beyond baking powder volcanoes. It could even be science that is relevant to an existing topic of interest to actual scientists, which should put the kids on a good trajectory to actually solving the problem. But no, instead we are presented with kid geniuses who solve world hunger, and I get to fend off all kinds of dumb questions and comments about science, the state of technology and why we're not listening more to kids.
Utterly, completely, fantastically, wrong. Exhibit A: Castle Crashers, which is still in the top 5 of the most popular XBLA games ever, and it was released by someone who, until then, had only released a flash game. Exhibit B: Orcs Must Die, whose developer had until then never published an XBOX 360 game. Exhibit C: Limbo, whose single developer had never published any game on any console before. And those are just the games I bought.
I understand that MS is making quite a few mistakes, but it also seems that a lot of the "issues" are lies and misunderstandings repeated in the Internet echo chamber.
The slight problem is that rhinos aren't cows. You can't ranch them in the traditional sense. The only thing you can do is to provide them with the space, the environment and the partners necessary to reproduce, and then hope you don't have to ever get close to them again. That means... wide-open parks that cannot be reasonably policed. Which invites the same poachers.
That said, I'd also like to see responsible horn harvesting. It can only drop demand for illegally obtained horn. The trick is to make sure people can verify it was responsibly harvested.
You are ascribing multi-generational planning to people who are shooting every animal they can find to get at some keratin? Or who shoot gorilla parents so that they can hawk a gorilla baby on the black market? Really? Current data says that you're delusional.
So you're saying that without this law, companies would actually stop the dig and check for what's going on? No, they would do exactly what they were doing even after the law was enacted.
All that this shows is that laws that ask people to self-report and incur significant costs due to the self-reporting are going to fail. There are a couple of solutions to it, whether it is to have the public pay for the cost (not going to happen in Texas), to not grant construction permits in areas with caves or to have an archeologist attached to every construction, but just passing a law that says "you will pay significant money anytime something happens that no one will find out about" is silly. It also shows that self-regulation is a complete boondoggle that works only for the most masochistic corporations, or where there is great publicity attached to every event that is supposed to be self-regulated.
I fully expect news to surface that he was into drugs, has been accused of sexual assault, a slacker and general no-good person. We already have the slacker/stupid angle (he didn't graduate high-school!). Maybe they can find somebody who said that he smoked pot at some point, and his girlfriend is probably going to be labeled a stripper, or at least her pole-dancing video is the only thing anyone is ever going to mention.
You, and pretty much all the other gun nuts, have this fantasy that you'll be facing the intruders or attackers at the ready, hunkered down behind a bulletproof couch or car, dispensing justice with your True American gun of BadAssery.
Here's how those things actually pan out: intruders quietly get into the house, either through an unlocked door, through an open window or through a broken window. By the time you realize what's going on, they are either pointing a gun at you, took what they came for or decided it wasn't worth it to rob an occupied house. And for every anecdote about a home owner chasing off dangerous criminals with guns, I'll give you a story about a home owner gunned down by intruders while they were looking for their gun. See for example the deaths of the district attorney in Texas.
For muggings and robberies in the street, you're looking at even worse odds, because the attacker by definition pulls the gun on you before you do. Unless, of course, you walk with your gun drawn at all times, and then you're still open for someone to surprise you from behind. And finally, to be the hero in a mass shooting, you actually need to shoot the murderer. I'd like to see you identify the right guy from a crowd of 5-6 people all pointing guns in various directions.
And for a real fun fact, I'll give you a neat robbery scenario. Friends of ours woke up one morning with all the carpets gone in their apartment (persian rugs can fetch nice sums). Turns out the criminals had actually broken into the apartment and gassed it with sleeping gas.
In short, guns are an illusion of safety. Someone who wants to get you will get you, because they always have the benefit of surprise.
And this entire business of stopping a dedicated army with rifles and guns is an even bigger illusion. Syria is nicely illustrating why.
Increasing energy efficiency is STILL a good thing, because it means that the increased use of it comes at a lower cost, raising overall standards ofThe living.
In other words, this is an interesting observation, but completely irrelevant to the question of whether increased efficiencies are something to promote or not. They are only relevant to the question of how "how much energy are we going to need in the future" and to "what kind of policies do we want to pursue if we want to reduce the usage of energy". The answer to the latter is always "use tax".
I'm using this comeback fairly regularly these days. Specifically when talking to people who told me in 2001-2008 that I should get out of the country if I didn't like the current policies. Turnabout is fair play, I would say.
Yep. And there isn't a single political system in the world that can prevent an act like that from being passed. You know why? Because any legal framework (and that's what the Constitution is, nothing more, nothing less) that forbids this law can be changed to allow it. The only thing that cannot be changed are religious texts, and most of the western world fought long and hard to remove religious texts from legal frameworks. Turning the Constitution into a religious work will be counter-productive on an epic scale.
For a real-world example of exactly this, look into a tax-act that was passed right after the 2008 crisis: it essentially targeted specific AIG bankers with massive taxes so that they would not be able to enjoy their 8-9 figure bonuses that they were paid out at the end of 2008. It was the Beardo-act, except aimed at bankers. And everyone cheered it on, and everyone agreed it was Constitutional.
The only thing that prevents this type of legislation is a social understanding that this is Not Cool (TM). The only way to achieve that is through education. And, looking through the current thread, education is exactly what's missing.
A democracy and a free society are incompatible because a democracy is simply the tyranny of a majority and leads to the exact same abuses as with a dictatorship or an oligarchy.
This is probably the single most idiotic meme floating around this topic. Unfortunately, it's getting more traction recently. The cynic in me is not surprised that it is doing that, as it plays right into the hands of an egoistic elite. The idealist in me is disappointed that no one actually reads what the Founding Fathers wrote on that topic, and that people are walking back a lot of the advances of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
Here's why this train of thought is utterly moronic: There are exactly three ways that power can be appointed in a government. The first is self-appointment through physical coercion. The second is appointment by decision of a small subset of the population, which is by necessity the social and economic elite in the population. The third is by general suffrage. There is a fourth one, random decision, but no one has ever implemented that on a significant scale. Everything else just deals with the details of the power transitions, the details of how rules are made and enforced, etc. This means that if appointment through general suffrage (which is the only thing that democracy refers to) is just another dictatorship, and since self-appointment by definition results in a dictatorship, the only legitimate form of government is option 2... which coincidentally branches out into the following forms of government: feudalism, theocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy. And now you know why the moneyed elites in the US are so keen on pushing this meme.
The fact that they sat right on the Internet backbones meant that this was merely a question of funding, not of intent or capability. The next step is DPI of every packet that flows through an NSA closet. And every law-and-order-type person is still going to argue that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
Very little of my communication is done by cell phone voice, other than at work and the occasional call to a tech-challenged friend most of my communication is through e-mails, skype, IM, and various sites.
In essence, the "it didn't affect me then, so I didn't care" defense.
There's a huge difference between simply logging phone numbers and intercepting communications online.
Since all telephony migrated to IP-technology on the back-end around the mid 00s, there really never was.
So no, they didn't "move on" when the PC market became a commodity; it took them a very long time to wake up and smell the coffee, and even then it took them a while before they finally sold off that business unit.
To their credit, they moved far quicker and far better than any of their original competitors. Look at HP and Dell (or the companies they merged with) as an example of why IBM is a model for every company trying to divest from a core but dying business.
Neat. Small problem: the dissenters have been, and will be, labeled as traitors who are selling the country out to the enemy. As a result, the Military will be happy to shoot at specific citizens, since they are a threat to the nation. Keep in mind that the Military will be very careful not to send troops to their own neighborhoods. Instead, they'll bring out units from far-flung and aligned areas, or even enroll militias to do the dirty work. Like you, for example. Since you are very keen on shooting Americans without a trial, without due process, you are a prime candidate for the type of militia that was happy to do the purging that happened in China, Germany, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and countless other countries.
You do not want an armed revolution. You do not want it, because it won't be heroic, the country will be destroyed for the near future, and what will arise from the ashes is very unlikely to be any different from what was before. You can look at the US Civil War for a great example of what happens when the talking stops and shooting starts: it's destruction all-around, and in the end, it's all the same.
Constitutional is a subset of lawful. It means that some particular action is allowed by the laws set forth in the Constitution. There is no action that is also lawful that is simultaneously not also constitutional.
I'm pretty sure that our Founding Fathers would NOT have supported this.
Oh, I see. By "Constitutional", you mean "whatever I think the Founding Fathers (hallowed be their name) would have thought". We really need to move away from the sanctification of the people who signed the Constitution, away from the sanctification of the Constitution, and especially move away from injecting hypotheticals about what some people in 1776 may or may not think about a specific situation in 2013. We're adults, and we need to take responsibility for figuring out our own shit. Yes, they were very bright people with some very interesting insights into political and governmental structures, but they were not all-knowing saints. We need to stop treating them as such.
More of our people die when their own family kills them than die from "terrorists" in the US.
This is something I wish more people would keep in mind. It's like the "think of the children" mantra: in the vast majority of the cases (over 2/3), child molestation is carried about by people close the victim. We'd be much safer if we'd try to solve the more common problem of domestic abuse than that of terrorism. Especially if we spend trillions (hello, two wars) on the smaller problem and a couple of hundred million to address the other.
I wouldn't say completely - they definitely jettisoned their consumer hardware, but they were still a big player in enterprise hardware, with a big focus on selling servers. It looks now that they plan to completely remove themselves from selling hardware altogether. The main thing I would retain from their acquisition is that this is how you do a complete switch in your core business model: you first expand the area you want to switch to, then quietly jettison the area that used to be your core business. Furthermore, you do it quietly, with internal reorganizations preceding small, easily absorbed acquisitions. HP, you might want to take notes.
Considering that IBM is actually getting datacenters+software+customers+sales people+support organization, this is a much better deal than, say, Instagram or many of the other recent "Cloud" deals. This is an actual cloud provider, with actual hardware and sales. Looks like Big Blue is getting serious about switching to being a service provider instead of a hardware provider.
You really shouldn't be commenting on the use of the moderation, as you clearly don't have a clue. Trifish's post consisted of one utterly useless and trivial statement that is little more than "Me too!", which is in and of itself reason enough to mod a post down: it contributes nothing and just takes up space. Might have as well posted some frosty piss. On top of that, Trifish tries to goad moderators by explicitly stating that any downmod is the same as a disagreement, and therefore illegitimate and abusive. That is, by itself, also a reason to downmod a post.
In short, we have two statements in his post, each of which merit a downmod for different reasons. Now stop digging before you start to pull out First Amendment and groupthink arguments.
Lest someone mods you up - you're utterly wrong. Republic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic. Democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy. For some reason, right wingers are pushing this idea, when it is completely, and utterly wrong. Not only that, but it completely muddles the discussion about what makes a dictatorship a dictatorship, what makes a decision by the ruler/ruling party illegitimate but not illegal, etc.
In short, you're creating an ideological environment in which dictatorships are more probably in the US, rather than less.
As with many things, the problem is speed - i.e., how quickly do we introduce genes that do completely different. You're not going to get BT corn via cross-pollination. You're not going to get glow-in-the-dark food through cross-pollination. You can, however, do almost anything you want via gene manipulation.
I'm glad that GMO food so far has had little nefarious side-effects. That said, I'd like to keep an eye on it, and would like to be able to identify which plants were created by direct gene manipulation, and which ones were created through cross-pollination. Oh, and I would like scientists to check the work of other scientists to make sure no one screws up and introduces some wild toxin into the food supply.
But for some reason, there are a shit-ton of people out there who seem to think that that's just too much regulation, and that poor Agribusiness will just go under if we do that.
Point taken. Although.50s have the advantage of being reloadable. Claymores are a one-shot deal, and, while more useful in specific situations, lack the flexibility of a.50 cal. Plus close-range field-suppression can be achieved by turreted flame-throwers.
On second thought, I have no idea why I'm spending so much time on this.
I have a natural born right to self-defense and defense of my loved ones. I want the absolute best tool for the job.
Your absolute best tool for the job of self-defense is a bunker, automated 50-cal turrets, one 360-degree antitank gun, an AA-gun (possibly supplanted by a SAM battery) and a computer-calibrated sniper rifle. Depending on how worried you are about suppressing a wide area at close range, a flame-thrower would be necessary as well. Since it's for self-defense only, the large guns are all stationary.
Those are the best tools for the job. Your silly 30-round Bushmaster is a joke in any sort of serious self-defense situation: that is, anything more than 2-3 people armed with knives or maces of +2 smiting. What's more, you assume that people will not escalate the weapons in play when they see you wielding your 30-round bushmaster. Mexico is a nice example: the cartels are now fielding their own tanks and submarines.
In short, the vast majority of situations you'll ever be exposed to can be defused by doing nothing more than pointing an empty revolver at people. For the rest, you're going to be so completely outgunned and taken by surprise that an assault rifle under the bed is going to be little more than loot for the attackers.
My possession of the tools of self defense harms no one.
Your possession does not. However, your improper storage of the ammunition, incorrect maintenance and carry of the weapon and negligent control over its access is going to hurt someone. Statistically, it will be someone close to you. Oh wait, you're part of the demographic that will never be hurt by its own weapons, doesn't get divorced, and always wins the lottery. Congratulations on your lot in your life.
most likely not since your average MLB hitter won't swing at most pitches that fly erratically. sure he'll get a few who do, but most average hitters will blow him out of the game
Mariano Rivera has made a Hall of Fame career out of a single pitch that delivers an erratic flight-pattern.
Yeah..... I normally don't buy used games, but do swap games with friends. Not sure I'm liking where this is going. I was already very lukewarm about the Xbox, but this is moving me from lukewarm to wait more. Enough events like that, and I will just never get around to getting a new Xbox.
Guns were the great equalizer of power that changed society from being run by warlords ('Kings' in British parlance) to being one that supports democracy.
Yep, that's why the French instituted a Republic in 1789, because that's when guns became available to the French. Or why the Magna Carta was signed by the King of England in 1215. Or why Athens decided to run things through elections, because boy were the rulers afraid of guns. Yep. Nothing happened before guns.
The USDOJ has a comprehensive study on defensive gun use available,
Comprehensive my ass. At best it is a list of people reporting their successful defensive use of guns. I.e., self-selected with no ability to control for any paramaters.
the US CDC has a searchable database of causes of death
The CDC is explicitly barred from using funds to study deaths by firearms. That's because the one time it did, it found that the impact of guns on personal safety were overblown by the NRA and the republicans.
and Rummell at U. Hawaii has comprehensive democide statistics (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, et. al.).
What does democide have to do with gun control? Besides, his statistics are terrible, as they conflate actual killings, starvation, miscellaneous dead, wars, and are estimates with almost zero documentation. They are all extrapolations from some very incomplete data sets.
If only the UK could be as safe as Switzerland where every home is required to keep at least one military-grade weapon.
Besides the fact that that statement is flat out false (only certain active military troops are required to keep their guns in the home, with some retired ones allowed to keep their old guns), the regulations on gun ownership and handling would make your eyes water. Did you know for example that in Switzerland, you are responsible for what happens with your gun, even if it is stolen (notice: not taken, but stolen)? Yeah, didn't think so.
But, don't take my word for it, this is science; do the analysis yourself - it's all available and accessible.
Funny that. The actual data, when it does exist, says the exact opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
And by that, I mean both the Tamba Bay and the Slashdot article. There is nothing anywhere about how she got the biodiesel from algae, which at this point is the only interesting thing about the experiment. It mentions photoautotrophic cultivation, which just means that the algae use light to grow, which is a big no-shit-Sherlock. It mentions osmotic sonication, which is a fancy word for using sound waves and osmotic principles to get the detergent into the cell innards. Google searches turn up no indication of how the experiment was set up, what the actual results or anything of interest. The best thing I got was a list of who else won what other categories at the fair.
So we have two utterly known principles being applied to biodiesel generation from algae, and somehow this makes news as a breakthrough. Yawn.
Which leads me to my second rant: the insistence of news organizations to hail science fair winners as geniuses who solved a problem no one else could (I'm specifically looking at the stories about the kid arranging solar cells in a tree shape). It completely oversells the experiment, turns the kid into something they're not, and covers up the actual interesting item: that you can do cool science in your home that goes beyond baking powder volcanoes. It could even be science that is relevant to an existing topic of interest to actual scientists, which should put the kids on a good trajectory to actually solving the problem. But no, instead we are presented with kid geniuses who solve world hunger, and I get to fend off all kinds of dumb questions and comments about science, the state of technology and why we're not listening more to kids.
Now get off my lawn.
Utterly, completely, fantastically, wrong. Exhibit A: Castle Crashers, which is still in the top 5 of the most popular XBLA games ever, and it was released by someone who, until then, had only released a flash game. Exhibit B: Orcs Must Die, whose developer had until then never published an XBOX 360 game. Exhibit C: Limbo, whose single developer had never published any game on any console before. And those are just the games I bought.
I understand that MS is making quite a few mistakes, but it also seems that a lot of the "issues" are lies and misunderstandings repeated in the Internet echo chamber.
The slight problem is that rhinos aren't cows. You can't ranch them in the traditional sense. The only thing you can do is to provide them with the space, the environment and the partners necessary to reproduce, and then hope you don't have to ever get close to them again. That means... wide-open parks that cannot be reasonably policed. Which invites the same poachers.
That said, I'd also like to see responsible horn harvesting. It can only drop demand for illegally obtained horn. The trick is to make sure people can verify it was responsibly harvested.
You are ascribing multi-generational planning to people who are shooting every animal they can find to get at some keratin? Or who shoot gorilla parents so that they can hawk a gorilla baby on the black market? Really? Current data says that you're delusional.
So you're saying that without this law, companies would actually stop the dig and check for what's going on? No, they would do exactly what they were doing even after the law was enacted.
All that this shows is that laws that ask people to self-report and incur significant costs due to the self-reporting are going to fail. There are a couple of solutions to it, whether it is to have the public pay for the cost (not going to happen in Texas), to not grant construction permits in areas with caves or to have an archeologist attached to every construction, but just passing a law that says "you will pay significant money anytime something happens that no one will find out about" is silly. It also shows that self-regulation is a complete boondoggle that works only for the most masochistic corporations, or where there is great publicity attached to every event that is supposed to be self-regulated.
I fully expect news to surface that he was into drugs, has been accused of sexual assault, a slacker and general no-good person. We already have the slacker/stupid angle (he didn't graduate high-school!). Maybe they can find somebody who said that he smoked pot at some point, and his girlfriend is probably going to be labeled a stripper, or at least her pole-dancing video is the only thing anyone is ever going to mention.
You, and pretty much all the other gun nuts, have this fantasy that you'll be facing the intruders or attackers at the ready, hunkered down behind a bulletproof couch or car, dispensing justice with your True American gun of BadAssery.
Here's how those things actually pan out: intruders quietly get into the house, either through an unlocked door, through an open window or through a broken window. By the time you realize what's going on, they are either pointing a gun at you, took what they came for or decided it wasn't worth it to rob an occupied house. And for every anecdote about a home owner chasing off dangerous criminals with guns, I'll give you a story about a home owner gunned down by intruders while they were looking for their gun. See for example the deaths of the district attorney in Texas.
For muggings and robberies in the street, you're looking at even worse odds, because the attacker by definition pulls the gun on you before you do. Unless, of course, you walk with your gun drawn at all times, and then you're still open for someone to surprise you from behind. And finally, to be the hero in a mass shooting, you actually need to shoot the murderer. I'd like to see you identify the right guy from a crowd of 5-6 people all pointing guns in various directions.
And for a real fun fact, I'll give you a neat robbery scenario. Friends of ours woke up one morning with all the carpets gone in their apartment (persian rugs can fetch nice sums). Turns out the criminals had actually broken into the apartment and gassed it with sleeping gas.
In short, guns are an illusion of safety. Someone who wants to get you will get you, because they always have the benefit of surprise.
And this entire business of stopping a dedicated army with rifles and guns is an even bigger illusion. Syria is nicely illustrating why.
Increasing energy efficiency is STILL a good thing, because it means that the increased use of it comes at a lower cost, raising overall standards ofThe living.
In other words, this is an interesting observation, but completely irrelevant to the question of whether increased efficiencies are something to promote or not. They are only relevant to the question of how "how much energy are we going to need in the future" and to "what kind of policies do we want to pursue if we want to reduce the usage of energy". The answer to the latter is always "use tax".
I'm using this comeback fairly regularly these days. Specifically when talking to people who told me in 2001-2008 that I should get out of the country if I didn't like the current policies. Turnabout is fair play, I would say.
Yep. And there isn't a single political system in the world that can prevent an act like that from being passed. You know why? Because any legal framework (and that's what the Constitution is, nothing more, nothing less) that forbids this law can be changed to allow it. The only thing that cannot be changed are religious texts, and most of the western world fought long and hard to remove religious texts from legal frameworks. Turning the Constitution into a religious work will be counter-productive on an epic scale.
For a real-world example of exactly this, look into a tax-act that was passed right after the 2008 crisis: it essentially targeted specific AIG bankers with massive taxes so that they would not be able to enjoy their 8-9 figure bonuses that they were paid out at the end of 2008. It was the Beardo-act, except aimed at bankers. And everyone cheered it on, and everyone agreed it was Constitutional.
The only thing that prevents this type of legislation is a social understanding that this is Not Cool (TM). The only way to achieve that is through education. And, looking through the current thread, education is exactly what's missing.
A democracy and a free society are incompatible because a democracy is simply the tyranny of a majority and leads to the exact same abuses as with a dictatorship or an oligarchy.
This is probably the single most idiotic meme floating around this topic. Unfortunately, it's getting more traction recently. The cynic in me is not surprised that it is doing that, as it plays right into the hands of an egoistic elite. The idealist in me is disappointed that no one actually reads what the Founding Fathers wrote on that topic, and that people are walking back a lot of the advances of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
Here's why this train of thought is utterly moronic:
There are exactly three ways that power can be appointed in a government. The first is self-appointment through physical coercion. The second is appointment by decision of a small subset of the population, which is by necessity the social and economic elite in the population. The third is by general suffrage. There is a fourth one, random decision, but no one has ever implemented that on a significant scale. Everything else just deals with the details of the power transitions, the details of how rules are made and enforced, etc.
This means that if appointment through general suffrage (which is the only thing that democracy refers to) is just another dictatorship, and since self-appointment by definition results in a dictatorship, the only legitimate form of government is option 2... which coincidentally branches out into the following forms of government: feudalism, theocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy. And now you know why the moneyed elites in the US are so keen on pushing this meme.
Orwell would be proudly spinning in his grave.
The fact that they sat right on the Internet backbones meant that this was merely a question of funding, not of intent or capability. The next step is DPI of every packet that flows through an NSA closet. And every law-and-order-type person is still going to argue that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
Very little of my communication is done by cell phone voice, other than at work and the occasional call to a tech-challenged friend most of my communication is through e-mails, skype, IM, and various sites.
In essence, the "it didn't affect me then, so I didn't care" defense.
There's a huge difference between simply logging phone numbers and intercepting communications online.
Since all telephony migrated to IP-technology on the back-end around the mid 00s, there really never was.
So no, they didn't "move on" when the PC market became a commodity; it took them a very long time to wake up and smell the coffee, and even then it took them a while before they finally sold off that business unit.
To their credit, they moved far quicker and far better than any of their original competitors. Look at HP and Dell (or the companies they merged with) as an example of why IBM is a model for every company trying to divest from a core but dying business.
Neat. Small problem: the dissenters have been, and will be, labeled as traitors who are selling the country out to the enemy. As a result, the Military will be happy to shoot at specific citizens, since they are a threat to the nation. Keep in mind that the Military will be very careful not to send troops to their own neighborhoods. Instead, they'll bring out units from far-flung and aligned areas, or even enroll militias to do the dirty work. Like you, for example. Since you are very keen on shooting Americans without a trial, without due process, you are a prime candidate for the type of militia that was happy to do the purging that happened in China, Germany, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and countless other countries.
You do not want an armed revolution. You do not want it, because it won't be heroic, the country will be destroyed for the near future, and what will arise from the ashes is very unlikely to be any different from what was before. You can look at the US Civil War for a great example of what happens when the talking stops and shooting starts: it's destruction all-around, and in the end, it's all the same.
Lawful is not the same as Constitutional.
Constitutional is a subset of lawful. It means that some particular action is allowed by the laws set forth in the Constitution. There is no action that is also lawful that is simultaneously not also constitutional.
I'm pretty sure that our Founding Fathers would NOT have supported this.
Oh, I see. By "Constitutional", you mean "whatever I think the Founding Fathers (hallowed be their name) would have thought". We really need to move away from the sanctification of the people who signed the Constitution, away from the sanctification of the Constitution, and especially move away from injecting hypotheticals about what some people in 1776 may or may not think about a specific situation in 2013. We're adults, and we need to take responsibility for figuring out our own shit. Yes, they were very bright people with some very interesting insights into political and governmental structures, but they were not all-knowing saints. We need to stop treating them as such.
More of our people die when their own family kills them than die from "terrorists" in the US.
This is something I wish more people would keep in mind. It's like the "think of the children" mantra: in the vast majority of the cases (over 2/3), child molestation is carried about by people close the victim. We'd be much safer if we'd try to solve the more common problem of domestic abuse than that of terrorism. Especially if we spend trillions (hello, two wars) on the smaller problem and a couple of hundred million to address the other.
I wouldn't say completely - they definitely jettisoned their consumer hardware, but they were still a big player in enterprise hardware, with a big focus on selling servers. It looks now that they plan to completely remove themselves from selling hardware altogether. The main thing I would retain from their acquisition is that this is how you do a complete switch in your core business model: you first expand the area you want to switch to, then quietly jettison the area that used to be your core business. Furthermore, you do it quietly, with internal reorganizations preceding small, easily absorbed acquisitions. HP, you might want to take notes.
Considering that IBM is actually getting datacenters+software+customers+sales people+support organization, this is a much better deal than, say, Instagram or many of the other recent "Cloud" deals. This is an actual cloud provider, with actual hardware and sales. Looks like Big Blue is getting serious about switching to being a service provider instead of a hardware provider.
You really shouldn't be commenting on the use of the moderation, as you clearly don't have a clue. Trifish's post consisted of one utterly useless and trivial statement that is little more than "Me too!", which is in and of itself reason enough to mod a post down: it contributes nothing and just takes up space. Might have as well posted some frosty piss. On top of that, Trifish tries to goad moderators by explicitly stating that any downmod is the same as a disagreement, and therefore illegitimate and abusive. That is, by itself, also a reason to downmod a post.
In short, we have two statements in his post, each of which merit a downmod for different reasons. Now stop digging before you start to pull out First Amendment and groupthink arguments.
Lest someone mods you up - you're utterly wrong. Republic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic. Democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy. For some reason, right wingers are pushing this idea, when it is completely, and utterly wrong. Not only that, but it completely muddles the discussion about what makes a dictatorship a dictatorship, what makes a decision by the ruler/ruling party illegitimate but not illegal, etc.
In short, you're creating an ideological environment in which dictatorships are more probably in the US, rather than less.
As with many things, the problem is speed - i.e., how quickly do we introduce genes that do completely different. You're not going to get BT corn via cross-pollination. You're not going to get glow-in-the-dark food through cross-pollination. You can, however, do almost anything you want via gene manipulation.
I'm glad that GMO food so far has had little nefarious side-effects. That said, I'd like to keep an eye on it, and would like to be able to identify which plants were created by direct gene manipulation, and which ones were created through cross-pollination. Oh, and I would like scientists to check the work of other scientists to make sure no one screws up and introduces some wild toxin into the food supply.
But for some reason, there are a shit-ton of people out there who seem to think that that's just too much regulation, and that poor Agribusiness will just go under if we do that.
Point taken. Although .50s have the advantage of being reloadable. Claymores are a one-shot deal, and, while more useful in specific situations, lack the flexibility of a .50 cal. Plus close-range field-suppression can be achieved by turreted flame-throwers.
On second thought, I have no idea why I'm spending so much time on this.
I have a natural born right to self-defense and defense of my loved ones. I want the absolute best tool for the job.
Your absolute best tool for the job of self-defense is a bunker, automated 50-cal turrets, one 360-degree antitank gun, an AA-gun (possibly supplanted by a SAM battery) and a computer-calibrated sniper rifle. Depending on how worried you are about suppressing a wide area at close range, a flame-thrower would be necessary as well. Since it's for self-defense only, the large guns are all stationary.
Those are the best tools for the job. Your silly 30-round Bushmaster is a joke in any sort of serious self-defense situation: that is, anything more than 2-3 people armed with knives or maces of +2 smiting. What's more, you assume that people will not escalate the weapons in play when they see you wielding your 30-round bushmaster. Mexico is a nice example: the cartels are now fielding their own tanks and submarines.
In short, the vast majority of situations you'll ever be exposed to can be defused by doing nothing more than pointing an empty revolver at people. For the rest, you're going to be so completely outgunned and taken by surprise that an assault rifle under the bed is going to be little more than loot for the attackers.
My possession of the tools of self defense harms no one.
Your possession does not. However, your improper storage of the ammunition, incorrect maintenance and carry of the weapon and negligent control over its access is going to hurt someone. Statistically, it will be someone close to you. Oh wait, you're part of the demographic that will never be hurt by its own weapons, doesn't get divorced, and always wins the lottery. Congratulations on your lot in your life.
most likely not since your average MLB hitter won't swing at most pitches that fly erratically. sure he'll get a few who do, but most average hitters will blow him out of the game
Mariano Rivera has made a Hall of Fame career out of a single pitch that delivers an erratic flight-pattern.
Yeah..... I normally don't buy used games, but do swap games with friends. Not sure I'm liking where this is going. I was already very lukewarm about the Xbox, but this is moving me from lukewarm to wait more. Enough events like that, and I will just never get around to getting a new Xbox.
Guns were the great equalizer of power that changed society from being run by warlords ('Kings' in British parlance) to being one that supports democracy.
Yep, that's why the French instituted a Republic in 1789, because that's when guns became available to the French. Or why the Magna Carta was signed by the King of England in 1215. Or why Athens decided to run things through elections, because boy were the rulers afraid of guns. Yep. Nothing happened before guns.
The USDOJ has a comprehensive study on defensive gun use available,
Comprehensive my ass. At best it is a list of people reporting their successful defensive use of guns. I.e., self-selected with no ability to control for any paramaters.
the US CDC has a searchable database of causes of death
The CDC is explicitly barred from using funds to study deaths by firearms. That's because the one time it did, it found that the impact of guns on personal safety were overblown by the NRA and the republicans.
and Rummell at U. Hawaii has comprehensive democide statistics (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, et. al.).
What does democide have to do with gun control? Besides, his statistics are terrible, as they conflate actual killings, starvation, miscellaneous dead, wars, and are estimates with almost zero documentation. They are all extrapolations from some very incomplete data sets.
If only the UK could be as safe as Switzerland where every home is required to keep at least one military-grade weapon.
Besides the fact that that statement is flat out false (only certain active military troops are required to keep their guns in the home, with some retired ones allowed to keep their old guns), the regulations on gun ownership and handling would make your eyes water. Did you know for example that in Switzerland, you are responsible for what happens with your gun, even if it is stolen (notice: not taken, but stolen)? Yeah, didn't think so.
But, don't take my word for it, this is science; do the analysis yourself - it's all available and accessible.
Funny that. The actual data, when it does exist, says the exact opposite.