Can you name a single place in the US that isn't prone to some natural disaster? Earthquakes in California, hurricanes and tsunamis (remember, most of hese floods are worse than anything in over 100 years) on the coasts, tornados in the midwest, floods near rivers. No US citizen is safe from natural disasters.
Because our constitution doesn't permit government to have that kind of power over people's lives. Also note, that population rises are starting to level off without it. For the first time in US history, white babies are a minority. When brown people become more affluent, their numbers will likewise not increase so fast and possibly decrease.
My mother had seven siblings, I had only one sister, I only have two kids myself. When your kids are likely to die before adulthood, you need more of them.
The saying is a lot older than that, I remember hearing it in grade school, and I'm 59. Also, you misquoted the saying (which is probably older than I am): "he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day".
But there's an even older saying: He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
At best, it is yet another lesson in how using weapons solves nothing.
As Salvor Hardin (Foundation, Asimov) said, "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". But that could read that it's the first refuge of the competent; it's a poor atom blaster that won't point both ways.
That said, Vietnam was indeed a clusterfuck we should not have been involved in. Afghanistan was only a clusterfuck when we kept fighting after we'd defeated the enemy.
Vietnam was actually a good example of what he said. We won the battles but lost the war (and I need no history books, I know men who fought there, and I hauled aerospace ground equipment to the B-52a in Thailand toward the end of the war).
I'd be willing to bet that they'll regroup under another name.
No, not the point at all. LulzSec is (was?) a vigilante group fighting organizations they perceive as evil. What they did to Sony was exactly the same thing Sony did to me, and Sony did it with no repercussions at all. The banks have been stealing from all of us for decades, and the government rewarded them with bailouts for it. I'm not sure I agree with the Arizona breaches, but most of what they did were good things.
I don't think it's a matter of self-reliance, more of a matter of being intelligent enough to realize that the TSA is completely useless, a waste of tax dollars, and (as you said) rapes your constitutional rights.
However, I think most slashdotters are intelligent enough to realize that government is necessary. Nobody is or can be completely self-reliant. Good luck getting from California to New York without roads and bridges or airplanes, for example.
Most intelligent people realize that regulation is necessary. I see the occasional railing against the EPA, but these people are obviously too young to remember a US without the EPA. You young people can't imagine how dirty the air and public waterways were before the EPA. The air around a Monsanto plant was so toxic you literally could not breathe driving past one with your windows down (and few had AC in their cars back in those primitive times). Rivers and streams literally caught fire!
Government is necessary (but don't trust it). The TSA isn't.
The competent person is capable of feeding and housing himself
Not without help. You need land and tools to grow food, tools, labor, and materials to build a house on that land. You need society, and societies need governments. Anarchy results in monarchy.
I think you underestimate biological evolutions some. 200,000 years ago dogs didn't exists, now they range from chihuahuas to great danes. 6,000 years ago when agriculture started we started bonding to cats. Why dos a cat's purr evoke positive emotions in humans? Both species must have evolved in the last 6,000 years.
As to "having practically the same genes", chimpanzees share 95% of our genes.
I think you completely missed his point, which was that those of us with brains and know-how are helping make people's lives better no matter how rich or poor they are, or where they live..
Me, too. I like taking broken computers that people are ready to throw away and build new ones out of the parts, and give them to poor folks (especially old poor folks). And there seem to be a hell of a lot more poor folks than there were ten years ago. I urge all my fellow nerds and hardware hackers to do the same.
Sorry, but I disagree. I think these kids are doing good work that needs doing. Not sure about the Arizona crhacks, but I certainly am for bringing Sony down. What they did to Sony was karma, payback for thousands of us who Sony crhacked with their XCP trojan.
I'd like to see them (or somebody) go after the Delaware cell phone telemarketing spammers at 302-394-6964. Those bastards called my cell phone ten times Friday and 12 timed Thursday. It was just an annoyance to me, as I have a flat fee plan, but it undoubtedly cost most people they robocalled money. A google search showed that there are a lot of people affected by these sociopaths, but I haven't heard about any law enforcement or government action against them. Vigilante action is warranted, since any more the US and state governments don't seem to care what kind of evil corporations do as long as they get their campaign bribes.
Us geezers (ok, we geezers) are used to professionally written, edited, and proofread text. In the above case, it was an example of somebody trying to look smarter than he is and showing his ignorance. But books have editors, web forums have other readers to substitute for them.
Some illiteracies that annoy me:
"Noone". Is it a typo (unless you're referring to the musician) where you didn't hit the space key hard enough, or a typo where you hit the "e" by mistake? When I see "noone" I read "noon" and it affects my reading comprehension. No-one isn't quite as bad, but the dash is unnecessary.
Worse is "loose" when "lose" is meant. Both "loose" and "lose" are verbs, and they have different meanings. If you want me to get rid of the dog and instead of "lose the dog" you write "loose the dog", he might bite you when I loose him. If you loose your money you're unwise, if you lose your money you're unlucky.
Apostrophe misuse (the Bob's are all here) slows down reading comprehension and just makes you look like an illiterate moron whose opinion I can have no respect for. Same with homophone misuse, the most common not knowing the difference between there, they're, and their. Write "they're cars is over their and there all red" and I'll stop reading then and there.
If you see these mistakes its a kindness to point them out, but check the "no bonus" buttons so that the person who made the error is the only one likely to see it (or just post anonymously so it's a -1). You don't lose karma for modding yourself down, but you will if someone mods you "offtopic". That said, even though this entire subthread is offtopic I'm leaving it at one as I think it's important. Only alliterates make these mistakes, read some books for cryin' out loud!
BTW, alliterate isn't a misspelling. To misquote Twain, an alliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
It's not just "clocks". AC motors' speeds are controlled by the frequency of the current. This will make your furnace's fan run faster -- how badly this will affect the motor's life, I don't know, but it seems to me that the tolerances engineered into the motors are dependent to some degree on the stability of the current's frequency. Cheap electric fans will surely not last as long. I'm wondering how this will affect factories, whose motorized assembly lines' speeds are dependent on a stable frequency. This won't affect DC motors, whose speed is controlled by voltage, so I'm not sure if it will affect your old VCR (which probably has a rectifier circuit and uses a DC motor, but I haven't researched VCRs closely).
This could even affect safety. I know that the ceiling fan in my kitchen isn't perfectly balanced and wobbles a bit when on high, it will wobble a lot more if the current's frequency is raised.
I know that voltage fluctuations can have a big impact on the life of appliances. My dad, who is a retired electrical lineman, noticed that his light bulbs weren't lasting as long as they should and got out his voltmeter and checked the voltage from his wall plugs, and immediately called the power company down in Poplar Bluff where he'd just moved (this was fifteen or twenty years ago). They came out and replaced the transformer, something he'd done many times himself before retiring.
This is a matter of wealth transference, saving the power companies money at the expense of everyone else, including other businesses.
What idiot thought up this hare brained scheme, anyway? Or should I say (since it was obviously the power companies), what ignorant people let them plan on this? EVERYONE but the power industry should be against this.
That life as we know it is carbon based and needs water and oxygen is far more than just "theory". So far, fact fits theory. Even extremophiles are carbon based. When and if the facts prove theory wrong, the theory is modified or discarded.
Science is always changing. That's how it works. If science didn't work, engineering wouldn't work and that computer you're typing on wouldn't exist.
Space is big. REALLY big. I mean, you can't imagine how amazingly big it is (or how microscopically insignifigant we are). Asimov wrote "pebble in the sky", he should have named it "dust mote in the sky". Niven and Pournelle were closer with "The mote in God''s eye", as far as sci fi titles were concerned, but that's still far bigger than the reality of a star (let alone a planet) compared to the universe.
Someone please mod parent up some more! Interesting, insightful, AND informative (informative to most here anyway, considering some of the other comments).
I saw one of those labels on a dessicant inside a computer I was building that said "do not eat". Two weeks later I was hospitalized for malnutrition! "No, doctor, I'm not anorexic, I was just following the directions on the warning label!"
Slashdot Mirror
Can you name a single place in the US that isn't prone to some natural disaster? Earthquakes in California, hurricanes and tsunamis (remember, most of hese floods are worse than anything in over 100 years) on the coasts, tornados in the midwest, floods near rivers. No US citizen is safe from natural disasters.
Because our constitution doesn't permit government to have that kind of power over people's lives. Also note, that population rises are starting to level off without it. For the first time in US history, white babies are a minority. When brown people become more affluent, their numbers will likewise not increase so fast and possibly decrease.
My mother had seven siblings, I had only one sister, I only have two kids myself. When your kids are likely to die before adulthood, you need more of them.
We must be, since we have more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world (*hangs head in shame*)
The saying is a lot older than that, I remember hearing it in grade school, and I'm 59. Also, you misquoted the saying (which is probably older than I am): "he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day".
But there's an even older saying: He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
At best, it is yet another lesson in how using weapons solves nothing.
As Salvor Hardin (Foundation, Asimov) said, "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". But that could read that it's the first refuge of the competent; it's a poor atom blaster that won't point both ways.
That said, Vietnam was indeed a clusterfuck we should not have been involved in. Afghanistan was only a clusterfuck when we kept fighting after we'd defeated the enemy.
The "Lulz" part is in their motto: laughing at your security.
Vietnam was actually a good example of what he said. We won the battles but lost the war (and I need no history books, I know men who fought there, and I hauled aerospace ground equipment to the B-52a in Thailand toward the end of the war).
I'd be willing to bet that they'll regroup under another name.
LulzSeX: Laughing at your virginity! =)
No, not the point at all. LulzSec is (was?) a vigilante group fighting organizations they perceive as evil. What they did to Sony was exactly the same thing Sony did to me, and Sony did it with no repercussions at all. The banks have been stealing from all of us for decades, and the government rewarded them with bailouts for it. I'm not sure I agree with the Arizona breaches, but most of what they did were good things.
Cops are like lawyers -- the bad ones give the 1% of the good ones a bad name.
I don't think it's a matter of self-reliance, more of a matter of being intelligent enough to realize that the TSA is completely useless, a waste of tax dollars, and (as you said) rapes your constitutional rights.
However, I think most slashdotters are intelligent enough to realize that government is necessary. Nobody is or can be completely self-reliant. Good luck getting from California to New York without roads and bridges or airplanes, for example.
Most intelligent people realize that regulation is necessary. I see the occasional railing against the EPA, but these people are obviously too young to remember a US without the EPA. You young people can't imagine how dirty the air and public waterways were before the EPA. The air around a Monsanto plant was so toxic you literally could not breathe driving past one with your windows down (and few had AC in their cars back in those primitive times). Rivers and streams literally caught fire!
Government is necessary (but don't trust it). The TSA isn't.
The competent person is capable of feeding and housing himself
Not without help. You need land and tools to grow food, tools, labor, and materials to build a house on that land. You need society, and societies need governments. Anarchy results in monarchy.
Thirty years ago a "portable" was bigger and heavier than today's desktop.
I think you underestimate biological evolutions some. 200,000 years ago dogs didn't exists, now they range from chihuahuas to great danes. 6,000 years ago when agriculture started we started bonding to cats. Why dos a cat's purr evoke positive emotions in humans? Both species must have evolved in the last 6,000 years.
As to "having practically the same genes", chimpanzees share 95% of our genes.
I think you completely missed his point, which was that those of us with brains and know-how are helping make people's lives better no matter how rich or poor they are, or where they live..
Me, too. I like taking broken computers that people are ready to throw away and build new ones out of the parts, and give them to poor folks (especially old poor folks). And there seem to be a hell of a lot more poor folks than there were ten years ago. I urge all my fellow nerds and hardware hackers to do the same.
Sorry, but I disagree. I think these kids are doing good work that needs doing. Not sure about the Arizona crhacks, but I certainly am for bringing Sony down. What they did to Sony was karma, payback for thousands of us who Sony crhacked with their XCP trojan.
I'd like to see them (or somebody) go after the Delaware cell phone telemarketing spammers at 302-394-6964. Those bastards called my cell phone ten times Friday and 12 timed Thursday. It was just an annoyance to me, as I have a flat fee plan, but it undoubtedly cost most people they robocalled money. A google search showed that there are a lot of people affected by these sociopaths, but I haven't heard about any law enforcement or government action against them. Vigilante action is warranted, since any more the US and state governments don't seem to care what kind of evil corporations do as long as they get their campaign bribes.
LulSec gone? That's a shame, they're needed.
For who the bell tolls? Whom gives a damn? My grammar died in 2003, I miss her.
Us geezers (ok, we geezers) are used to professionally written, edited, and proofread text. In the above case, it was an example of somebody trying to look smarter than he is and showing his ignorance. But books have editors, web forums have other readers to substitute for them.
Some illiteracies that annoy me:
"Noone". Is it a typo (unless you're referring to the musician) where you didn't hit the space key hard enough, or a typo where you hit the "e" by mistake? When I see "noone" I read "noon" and it affects my reading comprehension. No-one isn't quite as bad, but the dash is unnecessary.
Worse is "loose" when "lose" is meant. Both "loose" and "lose" are verbs, and they have different meanings. If you want me to get rid of the dog and instead of "lose the dog" you write "loose the dog", he might bite you when I loose him. If you loose your money you're unwise, if you lose your money you're unlucky.
Apostrophe misuse (the Bob's are all here) slows down reading comprehension and just makes you look like an illiterate moron whose opinion I can have no respect for. Same with homophone misuse, the most common not knowing the difference between there, they're, and their. Write "they're cars is over their and there all red" and I'll stop reading then and there.
If you see these mistakes its a kindness to point them out, but check the "no bonus" buttons so that the person who made the error is the only one likely to see it (or just post anonymously so it's a -1). You don't lose karma for modding yourself down, but you will if someone mods you "offtopic". That said, even though this entire subthread is offtopic I'm leaving it at one as I think it's important. Only alliterates make these mistakes, read some books for cryin' out loud!
BTW, alliterate isn't a misspelling. To misquote Twain, an alliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
It's not just "clocks". AC motors' speeds are controlled by the frequency of the current. This will make your furnace's fan run faster -- how badly this will affect the motor's life, I don't know, but it seems to me that the tolerances engineered into the motors are dependent to some degree on the stability of the current's frequency. Cheap electric fans will surely not last as long. I'm wondering how this will affect factories, whose motorized assembly lines' speeds are dependent on a stable frequency. This won't affect DC motors, whose speed is controlled by voltage, so I'm not sure if it will affect your old VCR (which probably has a rectifier circuit and uses a DC motor, but I haven't researched VCRs closely).
This could even affect safety. I know that the ceiling fan in my kitchen isn't perfectly balanced and wobbles a bit when on high, it will wobble a lot more if the current's frequency is raised.
I know that voltage fluctuations can have a big impact on the life of appliances. My dad, who is a retired electrical lineman, noticed that his light bulbs weren't lasting as long as they should and got out his voltmeter and checked the voltage from his wall plugs, and immediately called the power company down in Poplar Bluff where he'd just moved (this was fifteen or twenty years ago). They came out and replaced the transformer, something he'd done many times himself before retiring.
This is a matter of wealth transference, saving the power companies money at the expense of everyone else, including other businesses.
What idiot thought up this hare brained scheme, anyway? Or should I say (since it was obviously the power companies), what ignorant people let them plan on this? EVERYONE but the power industry should be against this.
That life as we know it is carbon based and needs water and oxygen is far more than just "theory". So far, fact fits theory. Even extremophiles are carbon based. When and if the facts prove theory wrong, the theory is modified or discarded.
Science is always changing. That's how it works. If science didn't work, engineering wouldn't work and that computer you're typing on wouldn't exist.
Space is big. REALLY big. I mean, you can't imagine how amazingly big it is (or how microscopically insignifigant we are). Asimov wrote "pebble in the sky", he should have named it "dust mote in the sky". Niven and Pournelle were closer with "The mote in God''s eye", as far as sci fi titles were concerned, but that's still far bigger than the reality of a star (let alone a planet) compared to the universe.
Someone please mod parent up some more! Interesting, insightful, AND informative (informative to most here anyway, considering some of the other comments).
Time is an illusion. Especially lunch time.
Looks like the Vogons decided to reroute that hyperspace bypass! Phew!
I saw one of those labels on a dessicant inside a computer I was building that said "do not eat". Two weeks later I was hospitalized for malnutrition! "No, doctor, I'm not anorexic, I was just following the directions on the warning label!"
Unless it's a class action suit*, the lawyers represent the victims. When you need a lawyer, you NEED a lawyer.
*RTFA? Ewe muss bee knew hear!