What's so different about terrorism that you'd happily give up rights and liberties to fight it that you wouldn't give up to fight regular crime? Far more Americans are affected by non-terrorist crime every month than have been affected by terrorism ever.
If you wouldn't want your government to have certain ``tools'' for fighting crime, don't let them have them for fighting terrorism either.
The are laws preventing churches and the like from bribing politicians, at least in theory. There are no such laws preventing them from bribing industry self-regulators. It's not like religious groups don't heavily influence things like the ESRB. At least if the ESRB were a government panel, you could (theoretically) put a stop to it.
This idea that private industry tends to screw up less often than the government is naive and, given the evidence of the past few decades, silly. The American government has its excesses, but they by no means hold a monopoly on sucking.
Pidgin also comes with Ubuntu, you just have to know what it's for. Which the tooltip explains when you hover over it in the menu.
As for Flash, I don't know why it didn't happen for this user, but when I first went to a website that used Flash on a basic Ubuntu install, I was prompted to install a Flash plugin, which installed successfully with no hassle at all. Going to random websites and just installing the software you find there is an incredibly bad thing to teach clueless users, especially since you also have to teach them that under all other circumstances, they have to click CANCEL instead of YES or ACCEPT.
When my parents got a new PC a while ago, I installed Ubuntu on it. My dad initially didn't like it much because he had fallen into some hard-to-break routines after years of using Windows (since 3.1, in fact; he's getting better now, though), but my mom immediately loved it because it was much, much more intuitive than Windows. In Windows if she's stuck doing something, she pretty much has no option but to call me so I can fix it. In Ubuntu, she still ends up calling me occasionally, but she knows that if there's something she wants to do, she will get there on her own if she just does things like search for keywords in the Add/Remove Software window, or read the tooltips on menu items that are already there.
At one point (pre-Google) Blogger was one of the best free blogging services available (which, granted, said more about the availability than about Blogger), and once you've had a blog for a few years, it becomes very inconvenient to switch. WordPress does have a thing where you can import posts and users from Blogger (and other services), but there's also the issue of having a new URL, converting your blog's skin (since your readers will be familiar with the old one), getting search engines to realise your old blog doesn't exist anymore, &c.
I'm not sure when a failure to understand switching costs became Insightful.
Like most absurd debates where both sides are vehemently opposed, the answer actually lies in the middle.
In most debates where both sides are vehemently opposed, either one side is correct or both are flat-out wrong; it happens far less often than people would like to believe that the answer is some mix of both.
In this particular case, the question is meaningless and both sides are wrong because the entire premise of the debate is flawed.
Jurisdiction issues, more often than not. The US has extradition treaties with pretty much everyone, but most EU member states don't, and invading countries to arrest their citizens for breaking a law which might not even apply in said country is generally frowned upon.
The sad part is that you got modded Insightful. Note that these are only *suspected* pedophiles, and apparently the authorities couldn't even be bothered to get a warrant to get the same information through legal, uncontroversial channels. Kneejerk reactions like yours ruin society for the rest of us, far more so than a handful of pedophiles, real or alleged, ever could.
I'm not confusing best practices with allowable practices; so many people who feel the need to write PHP tutorials on the internet (and who apparently get offered book deals) seem to.
I actually like working in PHP, and I know the fact truly horrible code can run fine on it is one of the reasons it's so popular, but people who write these sorts of books should really know better than to think the fact that their crap code runs makes it fine to hold up as an example to students.
For instance, on page 5, one of the statements (abbreviated here), echo "$row[product_name]," generates two errors: "unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE" and "Use of undefined constant key -- assumed 'product_name'."
Both of those are Warnings, not Errors. And in true PHP tradition, unless it breaks the script completely (which Warnings don't by default), it's not only not wrong, but pretty close to best practices.
Honestly, this sounds like one of those books that gives PHP its bad reputation.
The point of having a stockpile of nuclear weapons isn't to use it, it's *only* to act as a detterent. There's no nuclear weapon small enough that it won't seriously impact innocent civilians, unless you're targetting tiny islands in the Pacific.
For legitimate users the domain is the least expensive part of running a website. For squatters, who generally have thousands upon thousands of domains all pointing to one or a handful of servers, it's not. Or it wouldn't be if not for domain kiting.
A couple of extra bucks times a few hundred thousand. Most domain squatters don't squat just one domain. Of course, it doesn't matter much as long as the five-day grace period makes domain kiting possible.
Various reasons. Their disgusting abuse of the legal system, for one. Their extortionary practices. The fact that they're a dangerous cult, and that several people have died in their care, and many more are suffering psychological abuse every day. Tom Cruise.
Ron Paul opposes net neutrality. More can be said about how his naive view of the economy would mean far less buying power regardless of whether people have more money and the like, but really, his stance on net neutrality is all you need to know to see how "good" his influence in this area would be.
Of course, but the fact that we don't have the perfect solution right now (and probably never will; there are very few modern products that don't generate some kind of toxic waste) doesn't mean we should stick to the worst possible option until we do. CFLs are a damn sight better than incandescents, no matter how you look at it.
You'd think so, but in my experience it's mostly right-wingers looking to score points against either CFLs or anti-mercury measures pushed by the environmentalist left a few decades ago. It's generally a win-win for them.
There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.
I wish people would challenge memes like these, because they're mostly bullshit crafted to stir up/reinforce discontent, in this case by the right-wing noise machine against "environmentalists", because that sells newspapers.
CFLs, like all fluorescent lights, do contain a miniscule amount of mercury (and I do mean miniscule; about 4 mg), but to call it a problem is to vastly overstate the dangers involved. If you break a bulb, you may want to open a window for a bit, but that's about it. The clean-up steps the EPA mentions on their website (mentioned in the linked/. post) are there for the hyper-paranoid, and apply just as much to the regular old-school fluorescent tubes (moreso, since they contain more mercury).
The "problem" is serious enough that if you have a large population that uses CFLs (like places where incandescents aren't allowed anymore), you want to encourage people to dispose of them safely rather than to just throw them with the rest of the trash, but even if the mercury does end up in the environment, it will be less mercury than has been prevented from getting out by its power savings (Wikipedia has this picture, which demonstrates the principle for coal plants, but the same thing applies to other types of power plants, except "green" ones like hydroelectric and wind energy; but again, this is only relevant if the bulbs are disposed of unsafely, which is illegal in many places that mandate their use).
Correlation may not be causation, but it's still correlation. They're not unrelated, by definition (unless they're a statistical artifact, of course). What correlation does possibly mean, beside your points 2 and 3, is that there is a hidden variable which is responsible for both the decreased success and the increased drinking, or the increase success and the decreased drinking.
People have gotten so fond of yelling ``correlation is not causation'' many people seem to be under the impression any kind of statistical data is worthless because of it.
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What's so different about terrorism that you'd happily give up rights and liberties to fight it that you wouldn't give up to fight regular crime? Far more Americans are affected by non-terrorist crime every month than have been affected by terrorism ever.
If you wouldn't want your government to have certain ``tools'' for fighting crime, don't let them have them for fighting terrorism either.
``Tornado resistance'' is probably more of a hardware feature than a software one, wouldn't you think?
It's Tom Lehrer, not "Larher". Which is a great name, since "Lehrer" is German for "teacher".
The are laws preventing churches and the like from bribing politicians, at least in theory. There are no such laws preventing them from bribing industry self-regulators.
It's not like religious groups don't heavily influence things like the ESRB. At least if the ESRB were a government panel, you could (theoretically) put a stop to it.
This idea that private industry tends to screw up less often than the government is naive and, given the evidence of the past few decades, silly. The American government has its excesses, but they by no means hold a monopoly on sucking.
Pidgin also comes with Ubuntu, you just have to know what it's for. Which the tooltip explains when you hover over it in the menu.
As for Flash, I don't know why it didn't happen for this user, but when I first went to a website that used Flash on a basic Ubuntu install, I was prompted to install a Flash plugin, which installed successfully with no hassle at all.
Going to random websites and just installing the software you find there is an incredibly bad thing to teach clueless users, especially since you also have to teach them that under all other circumstances, they have to click CANCEL instead of YES or ACCEPT.
When my parents got a new PC a while ago, I installed Ubuntu on it. My dad initially didn't like it much because he had fallen into some hard-to-break routines after years of using Windows (since 3.1, in fact; he's getting better now, though), but my mom immediately loved it because it was much, much more intuitive than Windows. In Windows if she's stuck doing something, she pretty much has no option but to call me so I can fix it. In Ubuntu, she still ends up calling me occasionally, but she knows that if there's something she wants to do, she will get there on her own if she just does things like search for keywords in the Add/Remove Software window, or read the tooltips on menu items that are already there.
At one point (pre-Google) Blogger was one of the best free blogging services available (which, granted, said more about the availability than about Blogger), and once you've had a blog for a few years, it becomes very inconvenient to switch. WordPress does have a thing where you can import posts and users from Blogger (and other services), but there's also the issue of having a new URL, converting your blog's skin (since your readers will be familiar with the old one), getting search engines to realise your old blog doesn't exist anymore, &c.
I'm not sure when a failure to understand switching costs became Insightful.
In most debates where both sides are vehemently opposed, either one side is correct or both are flat-out wrong; it happens far less often than people would like to believe that the answer is some mix of both.
In this particular case, the question is meaningless and both sides are wrong because the entire premise of the debate is flawed.
Jurisdiction issues, more often than not. The US has extradition treaties with pretty much everyone, but most EU member states don't, and invading countries to arrest their citizens for breaking a law which might not even apply in said country is generally frowned upon.
The sad part is that you got modded Insightful. Note that these are only *suspected* pedophiles, and apparently the authorities couldn't even be bothered to get a warrant to get the same information through legal, uncontroversial channels.
Kneejerk reactions like yours ruin society for the rest of us, far more so than a handful of pedophiles, real or alleged, ever could.
You don't have any e-mail addresses? Where do you think most spam comes from?
Windows' crap security affects everyone.
I'm not confusing best practices with allowable practices; so many people who feel the need to write PHP tutorials on the internet (and who apparently get offered book deals) seem to.
I actually like working in PHP, and I know the fact truly horrible code can run fine on it is one of the reasons it's so popular, but people who write these sorts of books should really know better than to think the fact that their crap code runs makes it fine to hold up as an example to students.
Both of those are Warnings, not Errors. And in true PHP tradition, unless it breaks the script completely (which Warnings don't by default), it's not only not wrong, but pretty close to best practices.
Honestly, this sounds like one of those books that gives PHP its bad reputation.
The point of having a stockpile of nuclear weapons isn't to use it, it's *only* to act as a detterent. There's no nuclear weapon small enough that it won't seriously impact innocent civilians, unless you're targetting tiny islands in the Pacific.
For legitimate users the domain is the least expensive part of running a website. For squatters, who generally have thousands upon thousands of domains all pointing to one or a handful of servers, it's not.
Or it wouldn't be if not for domain kiting.
A couple of extra bucks times a few hundred thousand. Most domain squatters don't squat just one domain.
Of course, it doesn't matter much as long as the five-day grace period makes domain kiting possible.
That's what I said. It doesn't work.
Various reasons. Their disgusting abuse of the legal system, for one. Their extortionary practices. The fact that they're a dangerous cult, and that several people have died in their care, and many more are suffering psychological abuse every day. Tom Cruise.
There are more reasons, if you want to go looking for them. Wikipedia is a good starting point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies
Ron Paul opposes net neutrality. More can be said about how his naive view of the economy would mean far less buying power regardless of whether people have more money and the like, but really, his stance on net neutrality is all you need to know to see how "good" his influence in this area would be.
There needs to be a "-1, Divorced From Reality" mod. That's a powerful persecution complex you have going there.
Indeed. The best evidence of this is that there's still no iTunes for Linux, even though there are more Linux users than Mac users nowadays.
The real question is why people who are supposedly smarter than the population average still believe Ron Paul is libertarian.
Of course, but the fact that we don't have the perfect solution right now (and probably never will; there are very few modern products that don't generate some kind of toxic waste) doesn't mean we should stick to the worst possible option until we do. CFLs are a damn sight better than incandescents, no matter how you look at it.
You'd think so, but in my experience it's mostly right-wingers looking to score points against either CFLs or anti-mercury measures pushed by the environmentalist left a few decades ago. It's generally a win-win for them.
I wish people would challenge memes like these, because they're mostly bullshit crafted to stir up/reinforce discontent, in this case by the right-wing noise machine against "environmentalists", because that sells newspapers. /. post) are there for the hyper-paranoid, and apply just as much to the regular old-school fluorescent tubes (moreso, since they contain more mercury).
CFLs, like all fluorescent lights, do contain a miniscule amount of mercury (and I do mean miniscule; about 4 mg), but to call it a problem is to vastly overstate the dangers involved. If you break a bulb, you may want to open a window for a bit, but that's about it. The clean-up steps the EPA mentions on their website (mentioned in the linked
The "problem" is serious enough that if you have a large population that uses CFLs (like places where incandescents aren't allowed anymore), you want to encourage people to dispose of them safely rather than to just throw them with the rest of the trash, but even if the mercury does end up in the environment, it will be less mercury than has been prevented from getting out by its power savings (Wikipedia has this picture, which demonstrates the principle for coal plants, but the same thing applies to other types of power plants, except "green" ones like hydroelectric and wind energy; but again, this is only relevant if the bulbs are disposed of unsafely, which is illegal in many places that mandate their use).
Correlation may not be causation, but it's still correlation. They're not unrelated, by definition (unless they're a statistical artifact, of course).
What correlation does possibly mean, beside your points 2 and 3, is that there is a hidden variable which is responsible for both the decreased success and the increased drinking, or the increase success and the decreased drinking.
People have gotten so fond of yelling ``correlation is not causation'' many people seem to be under the impression any kind of statistical data is worthless because of it.