That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break.
I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.
"The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain." -- Scotty, Star Trek III
There used to be an engineering strategy called the "KISS principle". KISS was an acronym for "keep it simple, stupid." Today's nerds, especially those who work for Microsoft and at most web sites, have thrown this concept out the window.
But look at an iPhone or an Android -- their designers did what they could to make the sevice as simple as possible for the user. No good coder will write a thousand lines of code when fifty will do the same job.
Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down
Yes, they're more complex and more reliable, but unlike firearms, automobiles were always complex. Firearms are simple machines requiring little maintenance... and BTW, cars are a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain these days. There was no such thing as a "brain box" or a "climate control module" in a 1970 Ford, and if one of these goes out it will cost you hundreds of dollars to replace. If your water pump went out you could fix it yourself in twenty minutes with a $20 part. Today? Good luck even finding the water pump, you're going to have to hire a mechanic. Gun owners don't want to take their gun to a gunsmith every damned hunting season.
My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. This topic is kind of a straw man anyway; none of these measures would have stopped the bloodshed last week; these measures mostly make the liklihood of it going off prematurely and killing the owner. And if a hunter's gun doesn't fire when that nine point buck is in his sights, you're going to have one pissed off hunter who will never buy that brand of gun again.
The pills themselves are cheap. I think she really needs help from a psychologist/psychiatrist (I can't remember the differences between the two),
A psychaitrist is an MD and can prescribe drugs.
but she can't get that help. Health insurance doesn't cover those types of doctors.
And there's the problem right there. Most insurance doesn't. Every suicide is the result of that, and suicide is just as tragic as any other death, perhaps more so to the victim's loved ones.
This is a historical list of countries by firearm-related death-rate per 100,000 population in one year. The US comes in tenth, with 10.2 gun related deaths (including suicides and accidents) per 100,000 people.
Meanwhile, 12.3 per 100,000 die on the highways here. We're quite far down on that list, which surprises the hell out of me considering how stupid people drive here.
Almost all of the polish jokes I ever heard were from a guy named Kowalski. The best irish jokes I've heard (my ancestry is Irish as well) were from a tourist from Dublin. Some people have thin skins and no sense of humor, illustrated by this joke:
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A:THAT'S NOT FUNNY YOU FUCKING GODDAMNED CHAUVINIST PIG!!!!!
Not common sense, reason. Pi assumes a one dimentional line around the circle, that is exactly zero mm thick. Real vessels have walls quite a bit thicker.
If it had noted the thickness as well as the circumference and the numbers didn't add up he would have had a point.
Spanish has all the advantages of Portuguese plus one advantage over Portuguese -- Portuguese is only spoken in Portugal, while Spanish is spoken in most of the Americas as well as Spain, making it far more useful.
Of course you have to love your neighbour if he's a good [insert religion X], but that damned heretic a few doors down, well we should burn him/her.
Sadly, as someone pointed out earlier, few Christians actually read their bibles. That's not surprising because only something like 3% of the population reads any kind of book at all. The bible makes it clear that these folks are in the wrong in their beliefs. You're supposed to love someone while he's shooting your dog while telling you that God is gay and your child is ugly and stupid. The problem is that it takes a superhuman to do that.
The problem isn't religion, it's people. People suck.
Asimov, an athiest, was always my favorite author, but he got a lot wrong when he talked about religion. Case in point: Asimov On Numbers. He shows his "spherical cow" from a bible verse where God told the Israelites what the circumfrance of a certain vessel should be and what the diameter should be, and it doesn't work out to pi. What Asimov neglected to take into account was the thickness of the vessel's walls.
Seeing the amount of hate spewed by the so call religious right lately, I have SERIOUS doubts that is the problem.
Just fucking stop, please. There's plenty of hate being spewed from the left, right and center.
Yes, but the left and center don't profess to be Christian. Christians aren't supposed to spew hate.
Of course, they're not supposed to divorce a dying wife while fucking their mistresses like Gingrich did, either. Nor are they supposed to judge someone because of their sexuality. They're also not supposed to do much of anything the "religious" right does.
There is precedent in the U.S. federal government's history of land grants to railroad corporations -- once the corporation owned the land, it had a strong incentive to increase the land's value by laying track. The situations are not quite parallel: in that case, the land rights only covered surface uses, not mineral rights; and of course, in the case of the Moon, the federal government has no land to grant. But while the general recognition of secured property rights would here take the place of grants from a previous governmental owner, the central premise still applies.
In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.
It's 911 all over again, complete with horrified overreaction. I wonder how many children died in car accidents the day of that shooting? Their parents are grieving just as hard, but they're unsung. You never hear about it unless it happens in your home town. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death among children. You want fewer kids dying? Fix the roadways. Almost NO kids die in school, this horror notwithstanding. Most dead kids are peeled off of pavements.
Look, folks, your kids are safe in school, or at least, safer than they'd be anywhere else.
But you're right, his mother was an idiot to have those guns around him, considering his handicaps. I wouldn't be against a law that said if there's someone with certain disorders (bipolar, schitzoaffective, a few others) in the house you can't store a gun there.
ANY gun. This talk of assault rifles is stupid, half a dozen automatic pistols in his trenchcoat pockets would have resulted in as many deaths -- maybe more, since his rifle jammed.
About fifteen years ago one of the PC (politically correct) clowns ragged my boss at a lunch for saying something about reverse polish notation because she thought it was a pollack joke! He and I had a good laugh about that one.
The stock market is a zero-sum game. Whatever money you make will be taken out of other investors, thus draining mankind's industrial capacity.
Bullshit, almost all real wealth starts with a shovel or a chain saw or a plow. The wealth is the minerals and other resources, which are simply magnified in value when used in manufacturing.
Money is NOT wealth, it's simply a means of counting and managing wealth.
What you actually want to do is create new wealth by introducing future technology.
New technology creates no new wealth, it amplifies the old wealth. It's still just dollars going from hand to hand. Planting a field of corn? That's creating wealth. Digging a mine? That's uncovering wealth. Selling something? That's transfer of wealth. The wealth owned by the McDonald's corporation comes from the farms the "food" is grown on, amplified by the workers who turn that raw wealth into an enhansed product that someone will buy, or in other words, a transfer of wealth.
I wouldn't want to go on a 1200 year trip. Chances are I'd be beat there by another ship launched from Earth years later.
There's a novel about that, starting off with time dialation and other artifacts of near light speed. But in the novel (can't remember the name or author, I think it was either Heinlein or Niven), had the first bunch not gone, they wouldn't have discovered the mechanism by which they could overcome the speed of light limitation.
So even if you were overtaken, it still might not be a loss (as it was on one of the ships in the story that crashed or got eaten or something, been a while since I read it).
You should read Doctorow. It won't cost you a dime, he puts his books on boingboing for free and credits that for his standing as a best selling author. IINM "Makers" is the one with a good explanation for teh worth of piracy, but I could be wrong. Hell, read them all, they're free. You might wind up with a few copies on your shelf and him with an extra buck or two.
I wonder why libraries never put print authors out of business? I wonder why I have a dozen Asimov books on my shelf, when every single one of them is or was available at the library? After all the library is a monstrous pirate haven, with all those people getting books, CDs, and DVDs for no cost whatever! The horror! Close down all the libraries!
Nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many talented artists have starved from obscurity. And IMO anyone who can't understand that is not very intelligent.
Communication is challenging because Chinese and English are completely different.
Indeed, I had no trouble at all learning Spanish, but after a year in Thailand I still spoke only a smattering, the least amount necessary to get by there. Oh, and if you are travelling to another country, learn the language! Knowing how to speak Thai saved my life once when a dope dealer's pistol was aimed at my face after I stumbled on his cache.
I don't see any point in learning a second language unless going to have an opportunity to use it for real - or you're never actually going to become fluent in it.
Indeed. Language is like every other thing you've learned -- use it or lose it. I was told by South American tourists when I worked for Disney World in the early '80s that I spoke Spanish very well; some thought I was a native speaker from a different country than them.
Today? If somebody dropped me in Acapulco I'd never be able to communicate with the natives.
Slashdot Mirror
"The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain." -- Scotty, Star Trek III
There used to be an engineering strategy called the "KISS principle". KISS was an acronym for "keep it simple, stupid." Today's nerds, especially those who work for Microsoft and at most web sites, have thrown this concept out the window.
But look at an iPhone or an Android -- their designers did what they could to make the sevice as simple as possible for the user. No good coder will write a thousand lines of code when fifty will do the same job.
Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down
Yes, they're more complex and more reliable, but unlike firearms, automobiles were always complex. Firearms are simple machines requiring little maintenance... and BTW, cars are a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain these days. There was no such thing as a "brain box" or a "climate control module" in a 1970 Ford, and if one of these goes out it will cost you hundreds of dollars to replace. If your water pump went out you could fix it yourself in twenty minutes with a $20 part. Today? Good luck even finding the water pump, you're going to have to hire a mechanic. Gun owners don't want to take their gun to a gunsmith every damned hunting season.
My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. This topic is kind of a straw man anyway; none of these measures would have stopped the bloodshed last week; these measures mostly make the liklihood of it going off prematurely and killing the owner. And if a hunter's gun doesn't fire when that nine point buck is in his sights, you're going to have one pissed off hunter who will never buy that brand of gun again.
Well, Gollum's clothing was certainly tattered.
The pills themselves are cheap. I think she really needs help from a psychologist/psychiatrist (I can't remember the differences between the two),
A psychaitrist is an MD and can prescribe drugs.
but she can't get that help. Health insurance doesn't cover those types of doctors.
And there's the problem right there. Most insurance doesn't. Every suicide is the result of that, and suicide is just as tragic as any other death, perhaps more so to the victim's loved ones.
They sell pollack as walleye here, so maybe we should call them walleye jokes?
This is a historical list of countries by firearm-related death-rate per 100,000 population in one year. The US comes in tenth, with 10.2 gun related deaths (including suicides and accidents) per 100,000 people.
Meanwhile, 12.3 per 100,000 die on the highways here. We're quite far down on that list, which surprises the hell out of me considering how stupid people drive here.
Almost all of the polish jokes I ever heard were from a guy named Kowalski. The best irish jokes I've heard (my ancestry is Irish as well) were from a tourist from Dublin. Some people have thin skins and no sense of humor, illustrated by this joke:
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A:THAT'S NOT FUNNY YOU FUCKING GODDAMNED CHAUVINIST PIG!!!!!
Citation Needed.
Citation given.
Citation given.
Citation given.
Citation given.
Not common sense, reason. Pi assumes a one dimentional line around the circle, that is exactly zero mm thick. Real vessels have walls quite a bit thicker.
If it had noted the thickness as well as the circumference and the numbers didn't add up he would have had a point.
Spanish has all the advantages of Portuguese plus one advantage over Portuguese -- Portuguese is only spoken in Portugal, while Spanish is spoken in most of the Americas as well as Spain, making it far more useful.
I doubt you can get 5 justices of the Supreme Court to agree that "for a limited time" means longer than any living human has been alive
Cast your doubts aside, in the Lessig decision they said "unlimited" means whatever Congress says it means.
I didn't write the article, I only quoted it.
Of course you have to love your neighbour if he's a good [insert religion X], but that damned heretic a few doors down, well we should burn him/her.
Sadly, as someone pointed out earlier, few Christians actually read their bibles. That's not surprising because only something like 3% of the population reads any kind of book at all. The bible makes it clear that these folks are in the wrong in their beliefs. You're supposed to love someone while he's shooting your dog while telling you that God is gay and your child is ugly and stupid. The problem is that it takes a superhuman to do that.
The problem isn't religion, it's people. People suck.
Asimov, an athiest, was always my favorite author, but he got a lot wrong when he talked about religion. Case in point: Asimov On Numbers. He shows his "spherical cow" from a bible verse where God told the Israelites what the circumfrance of a certain vessel should be and what the diameter should be, and it doesn't work out to pi. What Asimov neglected to take into account was the thickness of the vessel's walls.
Remember, he was a biochemist, not a theologan.
Yes, but the left and center don't profess to be Christian. Christians aren't supposed to spew hate.
Of course, they're not supposed to divorce a dying wife while fucking their mistresses like Gingrich did, either. Nor are they supposed to judge someone because of their sexuality. They're also not supposed to do much of anything the "religious" right does.
If nobody reads TFA then why is it down, and how does anyone here know it's down?
FTR, I read it. It was mildly interesting, but not overly so. This one's safe to discuss without reading TFA.
Short version (it's a very long article)
There is precedent in the U.S. federal government's history of land grants to railroad corporations -- once the corporation owned the land, it had a strong incentive to increase the land's value by laying track. The situations are not quite parallel: in that case, the land rights only covered surface uses, not mineral rights; and of course, in the case of the Moon, the federal government has no land to grant. But while the general recognition of secured property rights would here take the place of grants from a previous governmental owner, the central premise still applies.
In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.
It's 911 all over again, complete with horrified overreaction. I wonder how many children died in car accidents the day of that shooting? Their parents are grieving just as hard, but they're unsung. You never hear about it unless it happens in your home town. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death among children. You want fewer kids dying? Fix the roadways. Almost NO kids die in school, this horror notwithstanding. Most dead kids are peeled off of pavements.
Look, folks, your kids are safe in school, or at least, safer than they'd be anywhere else.
But you're right, his mother was an idiot to have those guns around him, considering his handicaps. I wouldn't be against a law that said if there's someone with certain disorders (bipolar, schitzoaffective, a few others) in the house you can't store a gun there.
ANY gun. This talk of assault rifles is stupid, half a dozen automatic pistols in his trenchcoat pockets would have resulted in as many deaths -- maybe more, since his rifle jammed.
This is what he's talking about.
About fifteen years ago one of the PC (politically correct) clowns ragged my boss at a lunch for saying something about reverse polish notation because she thought it was a pollack joke! He and I had a good laugh about that one.
The stock market is a zero-sum game. Whatever money you make will be taken out of other investors, thus draining mankind's industrial capacity.
Bullshit, almost all real wealth starts with a shovel or a chain saw or a plow. The wealth is the minerals and other resources, which are simply magnified in value when used in manufacturing.
Money is NOT wealth, it's simply a means of counting and managing wealth.
What you actually want to do is create new wealth by introducing future technology.
New technology creates no new wealth, it amplifies the old wealth. It's still just dollars going from hand to hand. Planting a field of corn? That's creating wealth. Digging a mine? That's uncovering wealth. Selling something? That's transfer of wealth. The wealth owned by the McDonald's corporation comes from the farms the "food" is grown on, amplified by the workers who turn that raw wealth into an enhansed product that someone will buy, or in other words, a transfer of wealth.
Are you kidding? he's no nerd, he's an Anonym...
Wait, what??
I wouldn't want to go on a 1200 year trip. Chances are I'd be beat there by another ship launched from Earth years later.
There's a novel about that, starting off with time dialation and other artifacts of near light speed. But in the novel (can't remember the name or author, I think it was either Heinlein or Niven), had the first bunch not gone, they wouldn't have discovered the mechanism by which they could overcome the speed of light limitation.
So even if you were overtaken, it still might not be a loss (as it was on one of the ships in the story that crashed or got eaten or something, been a while since I read it).
You should read Doctorow. It won't cost you a dime, he puts his books on boingboing for free and credits that for his standing as a best selling author. IINM "Makers" is the one with a good explanation for teh worth of piracy, but I could be wrong. Hell, read them all, they're free. You might wind up with a few copies on your shelf and him with an extra buck or two.
I wonder why libraries never put print authors out of business? I wonder why I have a dozen Asimov books on my shelf, when every single one of them is or was available at the library? After all the library is a monstrous pirate haven, with all those people getting books, CDs, and DVDs for no cost whatever! The horror! Close down all the libraries!
Nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many talented artists have starved from obscurity. And IMO anyone who can't understand that is not very intelligent.
Communication is challenging because Chinese and English are completely different.
Indeed, I had no trouble at all learning Spanish, but after a year in Thailand I still spoke only a smattering, the least amount necessary to get by there. Oh, and if you are travelling to another country, learn the language! Knowing how to speak Thai saved my life once when a dope dealer's pistol was aimed at my face after I stumbled on his cache.
I don't see any point in learning a second language unless going to have an opportunity to use it for real - or you're never actually going to become fluent in it.
Indeed. Language is like every other thing you've learned -- use it or lose it. I was told by South American tourists when I worked for Disney World in the early '80s that I spoke Spanish very well; some thought I was a native speaker from a different country than them.
Today? If somebody dropped me in Acapulco I'd never be able to communicate with the natives.
Then there is no such thing as art.