Ah, voting. What do we do when the voting system becomes corrupted? I'm not saying that it IS, I'm just wondering what you think we SHOULD do if that ever were to happen. Godzilla forbid. (Hint: The correct answer is "armed revolution," same as it was in 1776.)
You'd have a real fighting chance against the US military, BTW. I'd like to see that covered on CNN.
CNN? Are you completely unaware of the ass-handing we're currently receiving in Iraq? What do you think they're doing? Sneak attacks, guerilla warfare, terrorism, underground resistance, etc. You don't think Americans could pull that off against their OWN government? Frontal assault is not the only way to attack a professional armed force.
Oh, I see. It's not inconvenient enough to qualify as "inconvenient" to you. Got it. Is there somewhere I can see the reference standard for inconvenience, so I know in the future whether or not I'm allowed to find something inconvenient?
Aaaaand, the courts (lots of them, indicating that it wasn't just one dumb decision) decided that based on their reading of current patent law. Congress has 100% of the power to correct the situation; pass a simple law stating that software cannot be patented, and the court decisions are obviated.
First of all, if the laws allow one court to decide differently than another court, then they're probably not good enough laws. Laws should be ultra-clear. Patent law as much as any other law.
This is impossible in practical terms. In order for a law to be "ultra-clear" as you suggest, it would have to detail the rules for every possible situation that it covers -- this is impractical on its face, as there are literally countless quadrillions of variations for any situation you can think of. Enumerating them all is not possible.
Even if it were, laws can only very rarely and by accident account for situations no one had foreseen, or that had never occurred yet. That's why we have a judiciary: Someone has to have the power to look at the facts of a situation and decide whether or not the actions of the people involved violate the law as written.
What you are essentially saying is that laws should be perfect, which would require the people who write them to be perfect, and I certainly hope you know why that's not possible.
Police think that young black males are more likely to commit crimes than the average person. So they arrest, detain, harass, and pull over young black males more frequently.
I recall a study that found that blacks were pulled over by the police much more frequently than whites, but whites were arrested during traffic stops much more frequently than blacks. Draw your own conclusions.
if foreign meddling = terrorism then the US should be seeing south american suicide bombers daily in the US.
Your explanation is clear, simple, and wrong.
The main reason why we see a lot of Middle Eastern terrorists, and not South American terrorists, is that we interfered in South America mostly in our crusade to prevent socialism and communism from spreading. South American countries are relatively poor; even though their citizens may be pissed at us for meddling, they don't have the resources to get all the way over here and blow us up, assuming they even understand our culpability in the matter. In recent decades, Colombia has gotten a lot of money because of cocaine, but the people ending up with the money aren't pissed at the U.S.; far from it. Our drug policy is what allows rich Colombians to be rich. Why would they attack us?
Further, a lot of our South American meddling is in the past. We are still screwing around a lot down there, but mostly in the form of official governmental pressure and trade regulations; we've more or less stopped overthrowing governments and installing puppets, as I understand it.
However, in the Middle East, we interfered not because we were worried about those countries becoming communist or socialist. We interfered because we wanted (and want) to keep their oil supply stable and (relatively) cheap. However we're still buying the oil from those countries, sending them scores of billions of dollars per year. (And so are a lot of other countries, all over the world.)
This specific, latest wave of terrorism -- namely, bin Laden's -- was able to occur because bin Laden is a billionaire. He's college-educated and has the vast resources and know-how to run terrorist campaigns. And he was pissed that we offered our help to train him and his friends to be terrorists in the 1980s, so that they could cause trouble for the USSR in Afghanistan, and then basically left him high and dry later on. And then we installed a bunch of military bases in Saudi Arabia, which REALLY pissed him off. So now he's running a terrorist campaign against us.
Extremist Muslims tend to be of the "Kill all the infidels" variety, and unfortunately a lot of them live in countries with officially Muslim governments, where the politicians ARE clergy. And oddly, a lot of those countries are countries that the U.S. has spent a few decades fucking around with behind the scenes. Extremist Christians in the U.S. don't do that kind of thing, because, well, why would they? Their government is already waging actual war against the people they hate, so they don't need to commit terrorism.
I'm thinking you don't really understand the history or issues of the U.S.'s interference in either South America or the Middle East. It's vastly more complicated than the childishly simplistic claim of "Extremist Muslims hate all non-Muslims."
If you ask me, all bills should have a sunset. It forces us to renew the debate and see if the bill is still popular.
Popularity is not an appropriate judge for whether a law should exist. A just society not only protects its people from oppression by its government, but it also protects minorities from oppression by majorities.
Nonetheless, I agree that all bills should have automatic (say, 10-year) sunset provisions. Temporal bills would obviously be excluded (like, budget allocations that are a "one-time" thing, finacing a dam or something), but any "permanent" law should require renewal, or else it expires after some time.
I come into South Station and for weeks after London my commuter train would get stopped in Norwood for about five minutes while police with dogs walked the aisles of the train. Not once did the searches inconvenience me or anyone else on my train in any form,
Extending everyone's commute by five minutes doesn't qualify as inconveniencing them?
Sooo, whenever there's hurricanes, the entire country should drop everything else?
I don't like the current administration either (I'm from the "all politicians should be very, very closely watched and held accountable" school), but come on, it's not like they said, "Hey, hurricane's a-comin'. Let's launch a comm jammer satellite!" Like, you think they designed and planned it last week? This satellite's probably been under design and construction for two or three years. At least.
mean really, if HTML was really just there for CSS all you'd need would be , , ,
, , , , and . You wouldn't even need since you could could just define inline divs.
All we'd need is a bunch of commas and spaces? Sweet!
Note however that if you grow vast stretches of soybeans in an effort to cut down on the carbon in the atmosphere, but then turn around and make biodiesel out of those soybeans, you've accomplished nothing.
I could be wrong, but I don't think this is exactly true, in practical terms. What you'd really be doing is planting enough soybeans to pull X tons of carbon out of the air. Soybeans take time to grow. While they're growing, you're planting more soybeans. Eventually you harvest the first crop and burn it for fuel, but you've *still* got Y tons of soybeans sitting around, growing, and *those* soybeans have pulled yet another X tons of carbon out of the air.
Long-term, you'd be carbon-neutral, but at any given time the amount of carbon in the atmosphere would be somewhat lower than it was at the point just before you started planting the first soybeans, since at any given time, you'd have some amount of that carbon locked up in the currently-growing soybean crop.
Or, could it be, that it's just more of the movie industry being greedy?
All industries are greedy, all the time, or they cease to exist. Stop pretending that the movie industry is some kind of special evil. But that's tangential; on to the main point.
The studios (mostly) do not own movie theaters. Most theaters decide their own ticket prices. Per-movie pricing has several quite real economic problems:
0) Theater owners don't end up getting most of the ticket receipts. In the first weeks of a major release, most of the ticket revenue goes to the distributor. In later weeks, the percentage shifts until finally the theater owners gets all of the ticket revenue, but usually by that time, attendance is low for that film, and so they get very little money out of it. Switching to a market-based ticket-pricing system would not benefit the theater owners in the slightest.
1) If you're going to do it, you want to do it right, which means that pricing needs to change in real time in response to supply and demand. Conveying this information to the consumer would be very difficult. A movie might cost $5 when you leave home, and then be $10 when you get there, which would be a very nasty surprise. Hell, the price of a movie might double in the time it takes you to get to the front of the line. Online ticket-buying might alleviate this problem, since prices would not change much in the few seconds it would take to confirm the transaction electronically.
Displaying this information would also be very space-intensive. Putting all that information on the big board behind the ticket counter would require a lot of space. And what about discount (children/seniors/students/etc.) tickets? Now you've got to display four or five times the info.
2) Moviegoers will not tolerate rapid fluctuations in the cost of entertainment. They go to the movies to be entertained, not to try and get a good deal on tickets. Having to deal with market fluctuations, waiting for the right time to get good prices, etc. interferes with the potential for enjoying the experience.
3) It doesn't cost a theater significantly more or less to show movie A versus movie B. They may recoup more or less of their costs, but the actual cost of showing the movie is fairly stable. (It can go up or down based on attendance; more moviegoers means you need more security and janitorial staff; you also need more concessions and ticket sellers, but if you need more, it means you're also earning more, whereas security and janitorial are both "pure loss.")
4) The studios would get pissed off when their movies got price-slashed. They'd (rightly) think that moviegoers would use the movie's ticket price as a gauge of its popularity and therefore quality. Theater owners are not likely to do things that piss off their suppliers.
5) Demand for a particular movie might, in fact, not change in response to price. The number of people who go see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" would almost certainly not increase by any significant amount if the ticket price was drastically reduced. I'd bet that most people would not see that movie even if they were paid the ticket price instead.
6) Don't forget the flipside: Highly popular movies would suffer from extremely inflated ticket prices. Want to see Episode III opening weekend at the Cinerama Dome? That's $50 a ticket, please, because every show will sell out in a matter of hours since demand is so high.
If half of your face had been eaten away by some kind of bacteria or disease, I think you might think twice about getting this procedure.
Yeah. The better solution is to cover your disfigurement with some kind of futuristic alloy mask that can shoot lasers, and then rename yourself "Doctor Destruction" or "Commander Chaos" or some other bit of alliteratively villainous nomenclature.
A lot of replies to the parent (and those who agree with him) seem to miss the point. He's not just saying that the term "gimp" is offensive and therefore The GIMP shouldn't be named that. His main point is that we're going to have a harder time getting major organizations to use it as long as it's called "The GIMP". Whether you personally find the term "gimp" offensive in one context or another, the above bolded statement is a fact.
It's a matter of political and economic practicality; it has nothing to do with free speech or personal freedom.
The Katrina rebuilding phase will bring about a fairly large economic boom. The increase of both construction jobs and money being exchanged for goods/services will translate into more tax revenues.
Uh... you do realize that in order for those construction jobs to exist, hundreds of thousands of other jobs had to be lost and billions of dollars in property utterly destroyed? People in that region would have been engaging in the same commerce as usual if Katrina hadn't happened. It's not like they were sitting on piles of cash, and now that New Orleans is underwater, they've finally got something to spend it on.
Well, I've heard about a guy who was pretty severely colorblind who could color-correct photos in Photoshop by the numbers and come up with better results than those who didn't share his impairment...if the lights of the EQ become just as valid a form of expression as the sounds driving them.
The thing is, the numbers displayed for the graphic image are just alternate representations of the same data. All the data is still there. A graphic equalizer isn't equivalent to the waveform of the sound it represents, it just shows (as far as I know) the amplitude of the signal at various frequencies. But only a small selection of frequencies; there's not enough data displayed in the EQ to reconstruct the original signal. To put it another way, there are multiple distinct signals that can have the exact same EQ representation.
Thank god I've spent the last five years practicing how to make keyboard clicking sounds with my mouth. You'll never get my password!
Re:For crying out loud...
on
Brute Force
·
· Score: 1
Er, I was under the impression that in the sentence "Matt spells better than [I/me]," since "Matt" is the subject and "I/me" is the object, you use the object pronoun, which is "me."
I spell better than Matt. Matt spells better than me.
Both of which are really odd things to say, since my name is also Matt.
Two ways to end the war: (1) Kill all terrorists. (2) Convert to Islam. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not a part of either
(0) Which war? The "war on terror" isn't a war, it's just an excuse to expand government powers. The war in Iraq? The one where major combat operations ended two years ago, according to the head of the U.S. military?
(1) You can't kill all terrorists. Terrorists are not a species or an ethnicity, they are regular people who have joined a political cause. Kill all the existing terrorists and more will arise from the populace, until the end of time, or until you stop doing whatever it is that's making them want to commit terror acts.
(2) Converting to Islam won't help. You may have noticed that there are plenty of Muslims being killed by terrorists in Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I see. It's not inconvenient enough to qualify as "inconvenient" to you. Got it. Is there somewhere I can see the reference standard for inconvenience, so I know in the future whether or not I'm allowed to find something inconvenient?
Aaaaand, the courts (lots of them, indicating that it wasn't just one dumb decision) decided that based on their reading of current patent law. Congress has 100% of the power to correct the situation; pass a simple law stating that software cannot be patented, and the court decisions are obviated.
Even if it were, laws can only very rarely and by accident account for situations no one had foreseen, or that had never occurred yet. That's why we have a judiciary: Someone has to have the power to look at the facts of a situation and decide whether or not the actions of the people involved violate the law as written.
What you are essentially saying is that laws should be perfect, which would require the people who write them to be perfect, and I certainly hope you know why that's not possible.
The main reason why we see a lot of Middle Eastern terrorists, and not South American terrorists, is that we interfered in South America mostly in our crusade to prevent socialism and communism from spreading. South American countries are relatively poor; even though their citizens may be pissed at us for meddling, they don't have the resources to get all the way over here and blow us up, assuming they even understand our culpability in the matter. In recent decades, Colombia has gotten a lot of money because of cocaine, but the people ending up with the money aren't pissed at the U.S.; far from it. Our drug policy is what allows rich Colombians to be rich. Why would they attack us?
Further, a lot of our South American meddling is in the past. We are still screwing around a lot down there, but mostly in the form of official governmental pressure and trade regulations; we've more or less stopped overthrowing governments and installing puppets, as I understand it.
However, in the Middle East, we interfered not because we were worried about those countries becoming communist or socialist. We interfered because we wanted (and want) to keep their oil supply stable and (relatively) cheap. However we're still buying the oil from those countries, sending them scores of billions of dollars per year. (And so are a lot of other countries, all over the world.)
This specific, latest wave of terrorism -- namely, bin Laden's -- was able to occur because bin Laden is a billionaire. He's college-educated and has the vast resources and know-how to run terrorist campaigns. And he was pissed that we offered our help to train him and his friends to be terrorists in the 1980s, so that they could cause trouble for the USSR in Afghanistan, and then basically left him high and dry later on. And then we installed a bunch of military bases in Saudi Arabia, which REALLY pissed him off. So now he's running a terrorist campaign against us.
Extremist Muslims tend to be of the "Kill all the infidels" variety, and unfortunately a lot of them live in countries with officially Muslim governments, where the politicians ARE clergy. And oddly, a lot of those countries are countries that the U.S. has spent a few decades fucking around with behind the scenes. Extremist Christians in the U.S. don't do that kind of thing, because, well, why would they? Their government is already waging actual war against the people they hate, so they don't need to commit terrorism.
I'm thinking you don't really understand the history or issues of the U.S.'s interference in either South America or the Middle East. It's vastly more complicated than the childishly simplistic claim of "Extremist Muslims hate all non-Muslims."
Nonetheless, I agree that all bills should have automatic (say, 10-year) sunset provisions. Temporal bills would obviously be excluded (like, budget allocations that are a "one-time" thing, finacing a dam or something), but any "permanent" law should require renewal, or else it expires after some time.
Sooo, whenever there's hurricanes, the entire country should drop everything else?
I don't like the current administration either (I'm from the "all politicians should be very, very closely watched and held accountable" school), but come on, it's not like they said, "Hey, hurricane's a-comin'. Let's launch a comm jammer satellite!" Like, you think they designed and planned it last week? This satellite's probably been under design and construction for two or three years. At least.
Wait a second...
Long-term, you'd be carbon-neutral, but at any given time the amount of carbon in the atmosphere would be somewhat lower than it was at the point just before you started planting the first soybeans, since at any given time, you'd have some amount of that carbon locked up in the currently-growing soybean crop.
I think, anyway. Could be wrong :)
The studios (mostly) do not own movie theaters. Most theaters decide their own ticket prices. Per-movie pricing has several quite real economic problems:
0) Theater owners don't end up getting most of the ticket receipts. In the first weeks of a major release, most of the ticket revenue goes to the distributor. In later weeks, the percentage shifts until finally the theater owners gets all of the ticket revenue, but usually by that time, attendance is low for that film, and so they get very little money out of it. Switching to a market-based ticket-pricing system would not benefit the theater owners in the slightest.
1) If you're going to do it, you want to do it right, which means that pricing needs to change in real time in response to supply and demand. Conveying this information to the consumer would be very difficult. A movie might cost $5 when you leave home, and then be $10 when you get there, which would be a very nasty surprise. Hell, the price of a movie might double in the time it takes you to get to the front of the line. Online ticket-buying might alleviate this problem, since prices would not change much in the few seconds it would take to confirm the transaction electronically.
Displaying this information would also be very space-intensive. Putting all that information on the big board behind the ticket counter would require a lot of space. And what about discount (children/seniors/students/etc.) tickets? Now you've got to display four or five times the info.
2) Moviegoers will not tolerate rapid fluctuations in the cost of entertainment. They go to the movies to be entertained, not to try and get a good deal on tickets. Having to deal with market fluctuations, waiting for the right time to get good prices, etc. interferes with the potential for enjoying the experience.
3) It doesn't cost a theater significantly more or less to show movie A versus movie B. They may recoup more or less of their costs, but the actual cost of showing the movie is fairly stable. (It can go up or down based on attendance; more moviegoers means you need more security and janitorial staff; you also need more concessions and ticket sellers, but if you need more, it means you're also earning more, whereas security and janitorial are both "pure loss.")
4) The studios would get pissed off when their movies got price-slashed. They'd (rightly) think that moviegoers would use the movie's ticket price as a gauge of its popularity and therefore quality. Theater owners are not likely to do things that piss off their suppliers.
5) Demand for a particular movie might, in fact, not change in response to price. The number of people who go see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" would almost certainly not increase by any significant amount if the ticket price was drastically reduced. I'd bet that most people would not see that movie even if they were paid the ticket price instead.
6) Don't forget the flipside: Highly popular movies would suffer from extremely inflated ticket prices. Want to see Episode III opening weekend at the Cinerama Dome? That's $50 a ticket, please, because every show will sell out in a matter of hours since demand is so high.
Firefox doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to be better than IE.
It just has to be competition for IE.
Yeah, and you're doing a great job of helping OSS, by trying to perpetuate the stereotype of the elitist OSS zealot. Shut the hell up.
A lot of replies to the parent (and those who agree with him) seem to miss the point. He's not just saying that the term "gimp" is offensive and therefore The GIMP shouldn't be named that. His main point is that we're going to have a harder time getting major organizations to use it as long as it's called "The GIMP". Whether you personally find the term "gimp" offensive in one context or another, the above bolded statement is a fact.
It's a matter of political and economic practicality; it has nothing to do with free speech or personal freedom.
Still, that guy's ability is pretty amazing.
Thank god I've spent the last five years practicing how to make keyboard clicking sounds with my mouth. You'll never get my password!
Er, I was under the impression that in the sentence "Matt spells better than [I/me]," since "Matt" is the subject and "I/me" is the object, you use the object pronoun, which is "me."
I spell better than Matt. Matt spells better than me.
Both of which are really odd things to say, since my name is also Matt.
(1) You can't kill all terrorists. Terrorists are not a species or an ethnicity, they are regular people who have joined a political cause. Kill all the existing terrorists and more will arise from the populace, until the end of time, or until you stop doing whatever it is that's making them want to commit terror acts.
(2) Converting to Islam won't help. You may have noticed that there are plenty of Muslims being killed by terrorists in Iraq.