No, I was thinking of the time when a crazy person shot four police officers. That got a lot of media attention in comparison to the BART Police murder.
The media is on a pro-Police state trend after their Oakland PD story. It's too soon to start showing Police being bad if just two weeks ago they got turned into swiss-cheese by some crazed rapist with an assault rifle.
Oh, I thought Linux and GNU was just a bunch of really pissed off programmers who got mad at <OS goes here> and wanted to try and do it better. As a result the product is esoteric and only really usable by other programmers and half-programmers known as IT specialists.
The Linux desktop phenomenon was just a bunch of half-IT specialists (call them "power users") egging the programmers into writing stuff that they (the programmers) think is better than <OS goes here>, repeat ad nauseam.
That's what I think Linux is. And for all the instability and potential collapse that could happen with Linux, it runs my website.
It would be a huge and very messy change to implement.
Isn't writing law what we pay these damn legislators to do? "Awe, it's so much work!" well they're on government payroll, so they don't exactly have to worry - so long as they look busy they'll get re-elected anyways!
Actually, marriage existed as a civil institution long before religion stuck its nose into it.
You become annoying. Jews have been performing marriages since 600 BCE by the most insulting of estimates, and since around 4,000 BCE by their own records. If you wanted to be nice you could estimate that it started around 1200 BCE to 800 BCE.
Any government that was operating around that time was so brutal and corrupt by our standards that I really don't think it deserves the honor of being able to pass "marriage" down to our government.
There was a religion that came still earlier, but I forget its name.
Marriage was even still an institution belonging to private individuals still longer before government decided to stick its nose into it, whether you care about religion or not!
What it really comes down to is this: marriage has three elements: legal (ie. marriage certificate and associate rights), personal (ie. romantic love), and spiritual (ie. religious sacrament). The first two (theoretically, at least) apply to all marriages. The third does not. So why should the arbiter of the third be the "owner" of the institution?
Because the first is going to (whether your think it or not, it's coming) mandate that the third operate 100% contrary to its beliefs and perform marriages to homosexuals.
If marriage is REMOVED from government it is by default in the hands of INDIVIDUALS. Therefore, ANYONE can decide what marriage is FOR THEM. Churches can continue to have their little routine going in their little world, the homosexuals can do whatever they want, and people who just don't give a damn can still do what they want.
You want a world where 1/3 of the parties are shafted. I want a world where 3/3 win. Marriage has no place in government - at all!
Allow me to edit so that your tiny mind can understand (edits are bolded for readability):
> Essentially, you're wanting to legislate a change in terminology, which is simply a waste of > tax dollars and something that the general public will fight kicking and screaming.
Not at all.
This whole "gay marriage mess" is a side effect of the fact that the US Government has decided to meddle in something that EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET views as a primarily PERSONAL/PRIVATE matter. So public policy gets conflated with PRIVATE VALUES....
The PEOPLE in FAR FAR AWAY shouldn't get to bully around people in entirely different states.
First it was inter-denominational marriages. Then it was inter-faith marriages. Then it was inter-racial marriages.
Every time, it's the same mess because the secular government failed to do what it was supposed to to begin with.
Let the INDIVIDUAL decide what a MARRIAGE should be and keep any hint of MARRIAGE out of what the government does.
You ever stop and think "gee, maybe we shouldn't even be talking about marriage in government contexts?"
Last I checked, marriage is between a man, a woman, and God. I don't remember the government being in there anywhere.
Just another instance where government took something that would have quietly and naturally evolved into something else for the small percentage of people who care and made a gigantic steaming pile of shit out of it by forcing it upon the vast majority who care that it doesn't change.
If you remove government from the equation, the shit goes away. Individual churches and individuals can decide what marriage means to them. MORE freedom is given to the people. Why the hell is the state even in this stuff? PRIVATIZE marriage people, don't make it another state-sponsored fail-fest!
Next time, how about blaming the real culprits: white and Hispanic Catholics and white evangelical Protestants.
Fuck off man. Stop telling them how to run their state. If they're the majority why the hell should they vote otherwise? Are you saying you'd rather see tyranny of the minority? 'Cause we've seen how well that works throughout history... think of France, specifically ("let them eat cake!")
If I see an axe murderer on the far end of my lawn (and given there is actual reason to think he will attempt to do me or my family harm), I will attempt to disable him first. If I see him at the far end of my kitchen, I will shoot to kill (though I wouldn't really keep a gun in the kitchen, but you get the idea).
Given the tactical luxury, I will always opt for less-than-lethal.
Here's one: What if he has a friend and you just wasted several rounds trying to hit his arms or shoulders? Are you gonna have enough rounds left to defend yourself from his friend(s) until the police arrive? Personally, if he is threatening my life I'm shooting center of mass until he goes down. If he isn't threatening my life then I don't really have any reason to shoot him, do I?
That wouldn't be "an [singular] axe murder," now would it?
Obviously a higher number of targets means different munitions strategies need to be deployed. Even if you only see one violent intruder, there may be one or more accomplices that you don't know about. I don't think that even with a gun you can 100% guarantee your ability to come out alive, but I can 100% guarantee that your odds of coming out alive are massively increased.
Yeah, thankfully the advent of the computer lightened the backpack! Those Navajo Code Talkers really were a drag! (Imagine some poor guy with a Navajo in his backpack like something out of The Emperor's New Groove)
If the South succeeded from the union again, what would stop them? Oh they don't have the legal right to do that. Why, because some piece of paper a bunch of northerners signed says they don't?
Gun ownership is advocating your right as a human being to posses the means to defend your life, liberty and property. People who don't own guns scare me - are they really so casual about their life that they are unwilling to posses the means to defend it?
You are operating under the false assumption, I take it, that the police will protect you.
They will not.
The police are not there to protect you, they are there to catch criminals who have committed a crime. If a crazed axe murderer is in your house, the police cannot do anything (beyond perhaps the trespassing charges, but as if they will have responded to a trespassing charge before the axe murderer is done) until he kills you and/or your family. If you own a gun and he is threatening you with that axe, you are perfectly within your rights to blow his deranged brains out, or if you're like me you'll try and disable him instead of kill (multiple shots - if I can't get his shoulder or arm, then with the remaining rounds I might be forced for a body shot - yes I have been bored and thought through the classical canon of nightmare scenarios, you should too).
Owning a weapon does not signify a crime. Owning a firearm does not enable someone to commit murder. Strangulation and stabbing are still completely viable (and probably easier) ways to kill someone.
Please, wait for a crime to happen to punish it. Don't retro-actively punish us all by taking away our weapons because of the acts of a few strange people.
Freeze their future assets and prevent them from ever leaving the country? "Well, we can't get your accounts in the caymans, but the moment a cent tries to go back to your credit card so you can use your money domestically, well... you won't be buying much in the future."
They'll be forced to become either a) a Mennonite or b) a cloistered monk, medieval style.
What makes you think that the constitution applies in the US? Congress and Obama seem to be doing an admirable job of skirting around nearly every rule. We're still far away from blatant infractions of the constitution, but the slippery slope has already seen us slide down a significant section.
And yes, I concede that much of that falling from grace (the grace of the Rule of Law, as opposed to Ruling Over Law) did take place during the Bush administration. I see nothing, however, in the Obama administration to indicate that my hope for the future will be rewarded. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, eh?
I have been curious as to the lack of adoption of the better Lithium-Iron (LiFe) battery systems. They don't have the same thermal runaway and degradation problems seen in LiOn cells. Well, they still have them, but they're nowhere near as pronounced.
I know their native voltages are different, however, I would imagine that would be trivial to work around.
A lot of users don't realize that LiOn batteries loose their ability to hold a charge over time. You can slow this dying effect by - ironically enough - beating the hell out of your battery. Literally, use the laptop on battery power! Drain it low - the lower the better - and then fill it back up. If you do this even once a week you can stall that inevitable kaput by a year or so.
I have an IBM X40 (still have, even though I've since moved onto a nice white MacBook) that - when it tried to run Windows - had this interesting battery tool that would drain and then recharge the battery. You left the machine plugged in, then the tool would somehow drain the battery, then recharge it. When I moved to Linux I lost this tool (but gained CPU frequency scaling, a working sleep mode, etc...) but I keep its lesson with me: beat up your battery! It likes it rough!
Similarly, I didn't like that in Age of Empires II committing war crimes - killing enemy peasants to take out productive capacity - was the best way to win.
Yes, but can't you understand why people would commit war crimes in real life now? It's not a universal act of unbridled rage and racism, it's sometimes a cold, pragmatic action.
Playing devil's advocate, the allies firebombed entire metropolises out of existence in Germany, and we wiped two cities off the map with nuclear weapons in Japan.
They weren't primary military targets. We were targeting their people - innocent people. It distills down to the ages-old question of whether the ends justifies the means. For the allies, the prospect of not sending perhaps a million more soldiers into battle made the prospect of annihilating their cities viable. For you, that might not be acceptable.
In the end, there is no right answer - it's a gamble. We will never know how many would have died by the gun had the war dragged on with a Germany's industrial cities unmolested. We will never know whether or not Hirohito would have made good on his oath to arm every man woman and child on mainland Japan should we invade.
It wasn't an easy question then, it isn't an easy question now.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I was thinking of the time when a crazy person shot four police officers. That got a lot of media attention in comparison to the BART Police murder.
Why don't we also sell their family into slavery? That'd be a good incentive to not fuck around as well.
Yes I am being sarcastic... or am I?
The media is on a pro-Police state trend after their Oakland PD story. It's too soon to start showing Police being bad if just two weeks ago they got turned into swiss-cheese by some crazed rapist with an assault rifle.
Oh, I thought Linux and GNU was just a bunch of really pissed off programmers who got mad at <OS goes here> and wanted to try and do it better. As a result the product is esoteric and only really usable by other programmers and half-programmers known as IT specialists.
The Linux desktop phenomenon was just a bunch of half-IT specialists (call them "power users") egging the programmers into writing stuff that they (the programmers) think is better than <OS goes here>, repeat ad nauseam.
That's what I think Linux is. And for all the instability and potential collapse that could happen with Linux, it runs my website.
Crazy...
It would be a huge and very messy change to implement.
Isn't writing law what we pay these damn legislators to do? "Awe, it's so much work!" well they're on government payroll, so they don't exactly have to worry - so long as they look busy they'll get re-elected anyways!
Actually, marriage existed as a civil institution long before religion stuck its nose into it.
You become annoying. Jews have been performing marriages since 600 BCE by the most insulting of estimates, and since around 4,000 BCE by their own records. If you wanted to be nice you could estimate that it started around 1200 BCE to 800 BCE.
Any government that was operating around that time was so brutal and corrupt by our standards that I really don't think it deserves the honor of being able to pass "marriage" down to our government.
There was a religion that came still earlier, but I forget its name.
Marriage was even still an institution belonging to private individuals still longer before government decided to stick its nose into it, whether you care about religion or not!
What it really comes down to is this: marriage has three elements: legal (ie. marriage certificate and associate rights), personal (ie. romantic love), and spiritual (ie. religious sacrament). The first two (theoretically, at least) apply to all marriages. The third does not. So why should the arbiter of the third be the "owner" of the institution?
Because the first is going to (whether your think it or not, it's coming) mandate that the third operate 100% contrary to its beliefs and perform marriages to homosexuals.
If marriage is REMOVED from government it is by default in the hands of INDIVIDUALS. Therefore, ANYONE can decide what marriage is FOR THEM. Churches can continue to have their little routine going in their little world, the homosexuals can do whatever they want, and people who just don't give a damn can still do what they want.
You want a world where 1/3 of the parties are shafted. I want a world where 3/3 win. Marriage has no place in government - at all!
You apparently never learned to read metaphors.
Allow me to edit so that your tiny mind can understand (edits are bolded for readability):
> Essentially, you're wanting to legislate a change in terminology, which is simply a waste of
> tax dollars and something that the general public will fight kicking and screaming.
Not at all.
This whole "gay marriage mess" is a side effect of the fact that the US Government has decided to meddle in something that EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET views as a primarily PERSONAL/PRIVATE matter. So public policy gets conflated with PRIVATE VALUES. ...
The PEOPLE in FAR FAR AWAY shouldn't get to bully around people in entirely different states.
First it was inter-denominational marriages.
Then it was inter-faith marriages.
Then it was inter-racial marriages.
Every time, it's the same mess because the secular government failed to do what it was supposed to to begin with.
Let the INDIVIDUAL decide what a MARRIAGE should be and keep any hint of MARRIAGE out of what the government does.
You ever stop and think "gee, maybe we shouldn't even be talking about marriage in government contexts?"
Last I checked, marriage is between a man, a woman, and God. I don't remember the government being in there anywhere.
Just another instance where government took something that would have quietly and naturally evolved into something else for the small percentage of people who care and made a gigantic steaming pile of shit out of it by forcing it upon the vast majority who care that it doesn't change.
If you remove government from the equation, the shit goes away. Individual churches and individuals can decide what marriage means to them. MORE freedom is given to the people. Why the hell is the state even in this stuff? PRIVATIZE marriage people, don't make it another state-sponsored fail-fest!
Next time, how about blaming the real culprits: white and Hispanic Catholics and white evangelical Protestants.
Fuck off man. Stop telling them how to run their state. If they're the majority why the hell should they vote otherwise? Are you saying you'd rather see tyranny of the minority? 'Cause we've seen how well that works throughout history... think of France, specifically ("let them eat cake!")
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
And if your goal is the opposite, what is the order in which one removes these boxes from use?
If you're from Russia, chuck out the first two, then just use the last two ad nauseam.
A little revolution every now and then is a good thing, don't you think?
Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox -> Webkit (Chrome and Safari)
-> IE 6 ->
If I see an axe murderer on the far end of my lawn (and given there is actual reason to think he will attempt to do me or my family harm), I will attempt to disable him first. If I see him at the far end of my kitchen, I will shoot to kill (though I wouldn't really keep a gun in the kitchen, but you get the idea).
Given the tactical luxury, I will always opt for less-than-lethal.
Here's one: What if he has a friend and you just wasted several rounds trying to hit his arms or shoulders? Are you gonna have enough rounds left to defend yourself from his friend(s) until the police arrive? Personally, if he is threatening my life I'm shooting center of mass until he goes down. If he isn't threatening my life then I don't really have any reason to shoot him, do I?
That wouldn't be "an [singular] axe murder," now would it?
Obviously a higher number of targets means different munitions strategies need to be deployed. Even if you only see one violent intruder, there may be one or more accomplices that you don't know about. I don't think that even with a gun you can 100% guarantee your ability to come out alive, but I can 100% guarantee that your odds of coming out alive are massively increased.
Yeah, thankfully the advent of the computer lightened the backpack! Those Navajo Code Talkers really were a drag! (Imagine some poor guy with a Navajo in his backpack like something out of The Emperor's New Groove)
You, sir, have never considered the quantity of rockets I propose using. If rockets are not your last resort, then you failed to use enough of them.
If the South succeeded from the union again, what would stop them? Oh they don't have the legal right to do that. Why, because some piece of paper a bunch of northerners signed says they don't?
Gun ownership is advocating your right as a human being to posses the means to defend your life, liberty and property. People who don't own guns scare me - are they really so casual about their life that they are unwilling to posses the means to defend it?
You are operating under the false assumption, I take it, that the police will protect you.
They will not.
The police are not there to protect you, they are there to catch criminals who have committed a crime. If a crazed axe murderer is in your house, the police cannot do anything (beyond perhaps the trespassing charges, but as if they will have responded to a trespassing charge before the axe murderer is done) until he kills you and/or your family. If you own a gun and he is threatening you with that axe, you are perfectly within your rights to blow his deranged brains out, or if you're like me you'll try and disable him instead of kill (multiple shots - if I can't get his shoulder or arm, then with the remaining rounds I might be forced for a body shot - yes I have been bored and thought through the classical canon of nightmare scenarios, you should too).
Owning a weapon does not signify a crime. Owning a firearm does not enable someone to commit murder. Strangulation and stabbing are still completely viable (and probably easier) ways to kill someone.
Please, wait for a crime to happen to punish it. Don't retro-actively punish us all by taking away our weapons because of the acts of a few strange people.
No wonder Sun stock faceplanted recently...
I'm still supporting the local UPS driver, I guess.
He's on a work visa from China.
Should have learned COBOL.
Freeze their future assets and prevent them from ever leaving the country? "Well, we can't get your accounts in the caymans, but the moment a cent tries to go back to your credit card so you can use your money domestically, well... you won't be buying much in the future."
They'll be forced to become either a) a Mennonite or b) a cloistered monk, medieval style.
What makes you think that the constitution applies in the US? Congress and Obama seem to be doing an admirable job of skirting around nearly every rule. We're still far away from blatant infractions of the constitution, but the slippery slope has already seen us slide down a significant section.
And yes, I concede that much of that falling from grace (the grace of the Rule of Law, as opposed to Ruling Over Law) did take place during the Bush administration. I see nothing, however, in the Obama administration to indicate that my hope for the future will be rewarded. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, eh?
Interesting...
I have been curious as to the lack of adoption of the better Lithium-Iron (LiFe) battery systems. They don't have the same thermal runaway and degradation problems seen in LiOn cells. Well, they still have them, but they're nowhere near as pronounced.
I know their native voltages are different, however, I would imagine that would be trivial to work around.
A lot of users don't realize that LiOn batteries loose their ability to hold a charge over time. You can slow this dying effect by - ironically enough - beating the hell out of your battery. Literally, use the laptop on battery power! Drain it low - the lower the better - and then fill it back up. If you do this even once a week you can stall that inevitable kaput by a year or so.
I have an IBM X40 (still have, even though I've since moved onto a nice white MacBook) that - when it tried to run Windows - had this interesting battery tool that would drain and then recharge the battery. You left the machine plugged in, then the tool would somehow drain the battery, then recharge it. When I moved to Linux I lost this tool (but gained CPU frequency scaling, a working sleep mode, etc...) but I keep its lesson with me: beat up your battery! It likes it rough!
Similarly, I didn't like that in Age of Empires II committing war crimes - killing enemy peasants to take out productive capacity - was the best way to win.
Yes, but can't you understand why people would commit war crimes in real life now? It's not a universal act of unbridled rage and racism, it's sometimes a cold, pragmatic action.
Playing devil's advocate, the allies firebombed entire metropolises out of existence in Germany, and we wiped two cities off the map with nuclear weapons in Japan.
They weren't primary military targets. We were targeting their people - innocent people. It distills down to the ages-old question of whether the ends justifies the means. For the allies, the prospect of not sending perhaps a million more soldiers into battle made the prospect of annihilating their cities viable. For you, that might not be acceptable.
In the end, there is no right answer - it's a gamble. We will never know how many would have died by the gun had the war dragged on with a Germany's industrial cities unmolested. We will never know whether or not Hirohito would have made good on his oath to arm every man woman and child on mainland Japan should we invade.
It wasn't an easy question then, it isn't an easy question now.