I suspect that in the recordings there were things said which, while completely irrelevant to the facts of the case or any sense of innocence or guilt, were so offensive and unacceptable that there was concern the jury would find the defendants guilty regardless of the relevant evidence. alternatively, they might have discussed the thoughtful and generous gifts they would give to their grandparents with the mad phat loot they were gonna make on that big rock deal (sorry). Either way, it would be creating a bias that has nothing to do with guilt or innocence of the crime in question, and therefore impermissible.
Then stop playing in tournaments with rules that only allow new cards. Types 1 & 2 are both widely played, and have very liberal restrictions on what cards you can use. Granted, they're expensive to get into, but I've seen some pretty brutal decks that don't actually cost too much to build (read: no Black lotus, no Mox, no Timewalk, etc...).
"There really are no alternative to public roads. Private roads, as in "500 evil big business companies neglecting 500 duplicate roads to everywhere and nowhere" is a strawman favored for those who oppose private anything."
Incidentally, this is not a strawman that I've ever heard used to oppose private sector public services.
"The private alternative to public roads is private maintenance of public roads. There are dozens of construction companies listed in my local yellow pages alone. It took at least 14 years for my city to fill a large pothole (it was there since before I was born) despite it being off a main thoroughfair. I'm pretty sure ABC Building Co. or ZZ Thomlinson Inc. could've done as good a job or better."
You do understand that, in theory, this is already what we do for the bulk of public construction and maintenance projects, right? The DPW guys who fix potholes are basically just community handymen. At least in my area (Western Massachusetts), it is nearly as common to see private contractors doing repairs on public roads as it is to see DPW guys doing it. That said, the system you described is subject to extreme corruption and requires a huge amount of administrative overhead to actually implement... sound familiar?
"Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
Why? Private schools do not perform universally better, and the ones that do significantly outperform public schools cost a great deal more per student than public ones. Even here, with our supposedly dire public education problems, places where public schools are supported and respected are almost never the places cited as problem areas... chronically underfund and neglect your schools, and you have no right to be outraged that they suck. Besides, your vouchers don't even lower the tax burden, so what's the point?
"What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools."
Again, why? Public education can and does work just fine in other Western industrialized nations, and even works just fine in those parts of this one where people who want it to work are able to do so. Beyond that, I'm pretty sure you would just see private schools adopt a base price of (in this example) $5687 in order to maximize profits, $5687 that comes directly from tax revenues... so much for your cost saving measure.
"Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start."
How about health care instead? According to the WHO (whose opinion on international health care, I think we can all agree, is going to be much better informed than any American lawyer or businessman) our health care system is outright worse than virtually any other industrial nation and also one of the least socialized in the industrial West. They also find that Americans, on average, spend 56% of income on health care, a figure that dwarves virtually all other industrial nations' expenditures. In fact, I went through the WHO's top 10 health care systems and found that Singapore is the only non-socialized health care system in the top 12 (I got tired of researching it and stopped after Norway... I don't see any nations above Saudi Arabia on the list that would would guess aren't socialized as well).
As for Amtrak... we're too focused on automobiles, long range train transit is just anathema to most Americans, and any deficiency in Amtrak's service (which, in my experience, isn't actually that terrible) is both inconsequential to and perhaps a result of that focus. As with schools, other nations can do it just fine, so there is no reason to believe that we can't make it work too.
Call me crazy, but helping retirees to pay bills and afford medical care just doesn't seem like such a bad idea compared to killing people and breaking things at the behest of a tiny clique of extremely wealthy and well-connected military contractors and oil companies who intend to give virtually nothing back to the community or even cut their profit margin n response to a tremendous increase in volume.
I think that tearing a hole in the space-time continuum to allow for infinite single-vector movement through a small area is quite a bit harder to explain then that gravity is a constant force. It just seems odd that you (and the GP) are taking issue with breaking that particular law of physics, but ignoring the non-trivial breakage of dimensional locality that allows it to be broken.
He must be famous for being a shitty biologist: there's no biological foundation for the social institution of race. Over a century of famous post-Darwin biologists conducting research trying to prove that race is real and scientifically significant has proven only that the entire concept is completely meaningless.
No, revoke their memberships and place them on some sort of probation should they decide to rejoin. No country should be locked out of the ISO forever simply because a previous regime decided to sell out.
Really? Better tell that to Wikipedia. Of course, It's beyond me why they felt the need to name it the "International Organization for Standardization" rather than the much more succinct, much less toolish, and properly ordered to their own acronym "International Standards Organization."
Er, no, not really. Falling forever does not violate conservation of energy in the slightest. Actually, every single piece of matter in the universe is in a constant state of falling, it's just a matter of whether or not it's falling into something else.
A certain percentage of the US population is black, therefore it is expected that an equivalent percentage of American game developers are too. If they are not, it indicates some sort confounding variable that might (and in this case almost certainly does) indicate some sort of social inequity that needs to be addressed. The importance is not, in this case, the statistical anomaly itself, but rather in the reason for it.
As far as I know, "black" is acceptable most of the time, but a little on the blunt side. I use it, and despite being a scrawny white guy I've never gotten my ass kicked for saying it or even gotten a dirty look.
Pretty decent ones, too. I managed to pick up a 1gb Zen Stone for under $10, and the only complaint I have is that it won't play ogg and there isn't a Rockbox port out there for it (yet). Since I dislike iTunes anyway (it has too many "features" that serve only to piss me off, and any UI that treats me like 5 year old just sets me on edge) it pretty much does everything that I want an mp3 player to do.
Plus, as an added bonus, I don't have to pretend that I'm hip or trendy while I listen to it; if people think i'm cool, I want it to be because I am, not because I paid double for a piece of small electronics with lowercase "i"s.
Beat it at what? Being right? Sure. Changing it? I've seen precious little in these parts to suggest our lawmakers are even remotely swayed by things like "facts" or "common fucking sense".
Sorry, but I do know what hubris means; explain how I don't, please, I need a laugh.
As for your "smart people" quotes... OSX is neither simpler or smaller than any other modern OS, nor easier to use. It just has bigger shinier buttons and elegant packaging (literally, I'm talking about the box it comes in here). Apple telling people what's easier to use aside, those of us who don't drink the Kool-Aid aren't blinded to the fact that it's all the same shit with a slightly different GUI and no actual advantage in usability.
Frankly, I tried it, found it to be the most frustrating OS to figure out that I'd ever encountered (including several flavors of Linux and every MS OS from DOS something.something through to XP, Vista was still called Longhorn at the time), and all I ever hear from the fanbois is "you must be lying nobody who uses it for more than a few minutes finds it to be anything less than the most perfect piece of software ever conceived of." I'm not, it's not, and maybe one day when you find the right nerosurgery/proctology team you'll realize what a sap you were.
I think that the GP was referring not to Comcast's quality (which sucks, I'm with you there) but to the fact that, shit or not, they at least provide some semblance of a service that people want. People are unhappy with Comcast not because they don't want the services they offer, but because they are unhappy that they have to pay through the nose for those services and competitors who offer cheaper and better service are almost always locked out of doing so in a given market.
Contrast that to e360, who provide a "service" that nobody wants at all. nobody wants e360 gone so that they can get service from a a different spammer, they want them gone because they don't want to be harassed by any spammers at all. Comparatively speaking, Comcast are saints.
To use a non-vehicular analogy, Comcast is a shitty hospital that provides poor service to the community but is operated and staffed by people with huge community interests and friends in high places, while e360 is a group of frat boys who are paid to steal stop signs so that (outstandingly) sleazy injury litigators can stir up more business in the area.
Yeah, it has all the suck of BSD, and all the hubris of Windows. Remember kids, using an OS that is easier for non-tech savvy people to use doesn't make you more tech savvy or smarter, it just means you're completely full of shit.
Which makes it a "smaller city". In my experience, people from cities like Los Angeles or New York just assume that everyone else does too, and that if they don't they're a) some kind of freak and b) have all the same problems and options. I'm pretty sure that there are many, many/.ers out there who simply can't comprehend the fact that most Americans have absolutely no choice in who provides their broadband.
Really? I'm pretty sure that Bush has used signing statements to indicate that his administration is, in fact, above the law. I'm not sure what else a document that essentially reads "I don't like what Congress is telling me to do, and I'm not doing it" attached to laws that are being signed into effect can possibly mean.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
Because Pokemon is a crappy CCG with poor card balance and a devoted following comprised almost entirely of 12 year olds?
I suspect that in the recordings there were things said which, while completely irrelevant to the facts of the case or any sense of innocence or guilt, were so offensive and unacceptable that there was concern the jury would find the defendants guilty regardless of the relevant evidence. alternatively, they might have discussed the thoughtful and generous gifts they would give to their grandparents with the mad phat loot they were gonna make on that big rock deal (sorry). Either way, it would be creating a bias that has nothing to do with guilt or innocence of the crime in question, and therefore impermissible.
Then stop playing in tournaments with rules that only allow new cards. Types 1 & 2 are both widely played, and have very liberal restrictions on what cards you can use. Granted, they're expensive to get into, but I've seen some pretty brutal decks that don't actually cost too much to build (read: no Black lotus, no Mox, no Timewalk, etc...).
"There really are no alternative to public roads. Private roads, as in "500 evil big business companies neglecting 500 duplicate roads to everywhere and nowhere" is a strawman favored for those who oppose private anything."
Incidentally, this is not a strawman that I've ever heard used to oppose private sector public services.
"The private alternative to public roads is private maintenance of public roads. There are dozens of construction companies listed in my local yellow pages alone. It took at least 14 years for my city to fill a large pothole (it was there since before I was born) despite it being off a main thoroughfair. I'm pretty sure ABC Building Co. or ZZ Thomlinson Inc. could've done as good a job or better."
You do understand that, in theory, this is already what we do for the bulk of public construction and maintenance projects, right? The DPW guys who fix potholes are basically just community handymen. At least in my area (Western Massachusetts), it is nearly as common to see private contractors doing repairs on public roads as it is to see DPW guys doing it. That said, the system you described is subject to extreme corruption and requires a huge amount of administrative overhead to actually implement... sound familiar?
"Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
Why? Private schools do not perform universally better, and the ones that do significantly outperform public schools cost a great deal more per student than public ones. Even here, with our supposedly dire public education problems, places where public schools are supported and respected are almost never the places cited as problem areas... chronically underfund and neglect your schools, and you have no right to be outraged that they suck. Besides, your vouchers don't even lower the tax burden, so what's the point?
"What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools."
Again, why? Public education can and does work just fine in other Western industrialized nations, and even works just fine in those parts of this one where people who want it to work are able to do so. Beyond that, I'm pretty sure you would just see private schools adopt a base price of (in this example) $5687 in order to maximize profits, $5687 that comes directly from tax revenues... so much for your cost saving measure.
"Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start."
How about health care instead? According to the WHO (whose opinion on international health care, I think we can all agree, is going to be much better informed than any American lawyer or businessman) our health care system is outright worse than virtually any other industrial nation and also one of the least socialized in the industrial West. They also find that Americans, on average, spend 56% of income on health care, a figure that dwarves virtually all other industrial nations' expenditures. In fact, I went through the WHO's top 10 health care systems and found that Singapore is the only non-socialized health care system in the top 12 (I got tired of researching it and stopped after Norway... I don't see any nations above Saudi Arabia on the list that would would guess aren't socialized as well).
As for Amtrak... we're too focused on automobiles, long range train transit is just anathema to most Americans, and any deficiency in Amtrak's service (which, in my experience, isn't actually that terrible) is both inconsequential to and perhaps a result of that focus. As with schools, other nations can do it just fine, so there is no reason to believe that we can't make it work too.
Call me crazy, but helping retirees to pay bills and afford medical care just doesn't seem like such a bad idea compared to killing people and breaking things at the behest of a tiny clique of extremely wealthy and well-connected military contractors and oil companies who intend to give virtually nothing back to the community or even cut their profit margin n response to a tremendous increase in volume.
I think that tearing a hole in the space-time continuum to allow for infinite single-vector movement through a small area is quite a bit harder to explain then that gravity is a constant force. It just seems odd that you (and the GP) are taking issue with breaking that particular law of physics, but ignoring the non-trivial breakage of dimensional locality that allows it to be broken.
He must be famous for being a shitty biologist: there's no biological foundation for the social institution of race. Over a century of famous post-Darwin biologists conducting research trying to prove that race is real and scientifically significant has proven only that the entire concept is completely meaningless.
No, revoke their memberships and place them on some sort of probation should they decide to rejoin. No country should be locked out of the ISO forever simply because a previous regime decided to sell out.
Really? Better tell that to Wikipedia. Of course, It's beyond me why they felt the need to name it the "International Organization for Standardization" rather than the much more succinct, much less toolish, and properly ordered to their own acronym "International Standards Organization."
Er, no, not really. Falling forever does not violate conservation of energy in the slightest. Actually, every single piece of matter in the universe is in a constant state of falling, it's just a matter of whether or not it's falling into something else.
A certain percentage of the US population is black, therefore it is expected that an equivalent percentage of American game developers are too. If they are not, it indicates some sort confounding variable that might (and in this case almost certainly does) indicate some sort of social inequity that needs to be addressed. The importance is not, in this case, the statistical anomaly itself, but rather in the reason for it.
As far as I know, "black" is acceptable most of the time, but a little on the blunt side. I use it, and despite being a scrawny white guy I've never gotten my ass kicked for saying it or even gotten a dirty look.
Pretty decent ones, too. I managed to pick up a 1gb Zen Stone for under $10, and the only complaint I have is that it won't play ogg and there isn't a Rockbox port out there for it (yet). Since I dislike iTunes anyway (it has too many "features" that serve only to piss me off, and any UI that treats me like 5 year old just sets me on edge) it pretty much does everything that I want an mp3 player to do.
Plus, as an added bonus, I don't have to pretend that I'm hip or trendy while I listen to it; if people think i'm cool, I want it to be because I am, not because I paid double for a piece of small electronics with lowercase "i"s.
Beat it at what? Being right? Sure. Changing it? I've seen precious little in these parts to suggest our lawmakers are even remotely swayed by things like "facts" or "common fucking sense".
Umm... care to enlighten us all as to how they DO work, then?
How original, what's next, an "in Soviet Russia..." joke?
For those who don't get it, Randall, the guy on the left, writes XKCD, and the guy on the right is me (check out the name badge, infidels).
Sorry, but I do know what hubris means; explain how I don't, please, I need a laugh.
As for your "smart people" quotes... OSX is neither simpler or smaller than any other modern OS, nor easier to use. It just has bigger shinier buttons and elegant packaging (literally, I'm talking about the box it comes in here). Apple telling people what's easier to use aside, those of us who don't drink the Kool-Aid aren't blinded to the fact that it's all the same shit with a slightly different GUI and no actual advantage in usability.
Frankly, I tried it, found it to be the most frustrating OS to figure out that I'd ever encountered (including several flavors of Linux and every MS OS from DOS something.something through to XP, Vista was still called Longhorn at the time), and all I ever hear from the fanbois is "you must be lying nobody who uses it for more than a few minutes finds it to be anything less than the most perfect piece of software ever conceived of." I'm not, it's not, and maybe one day when you find the right nerosurgery/proctology team you'll realize what a sap you were.
I think that the GP was referring not to Comcast's quality (which sucks, I'm with you there) but to the fact that, shit or not, they at least provide some semblance of a service that people want. People are unhappy with Comcast not because they don't want the services they offer, but because they are unhappy that they have to pay through the nose for those services and competitors who offer cheaper and better service are almost always locked out of doing so in a given market.
Contrast that to e360, who provide a "service" that nobody wants at all. nobody wants e360 gone so that they can get service from a a different spammer, they want them gone because they don't want to be harassed by any spammers at all. Comparatively speaking, Comcast are saints.
To use a non-vehicular analogy, Comcast is a shitty hospital that provides poor service to the community but is operated and staffed by people with huge community interests and friends in high places, while e360 is a group of frat boys who are paid to steal stop signs so that (outstandingly) sleazy injury litigators can stir up more business in the area.
Yeah, it has all the suck of BSD, and all the hubris of Windows. Remember kids, using an OS that is easier for non-tech savvy people to use doesn't make you more tech savvy or smarter, it just means you're completely full of shit.
Of course, this case is hardly a shining example of that last sentence... it's hard to call 30 years "fast" change for a working relationship.
But if our schools teach basic fiscal responsibility and planning, the entire economy will collapse!
Which makes it a "smaller city". In my experience, people from cities like Los Angeles or New York just assume that everyone else does too, and that if they don't they're a) some kind of freak and b) have all the same problems and options. I'm pretty sure that there are many, many /.ers out there who simply can't comprehend the fact that most Americans have absolutely no choice in who provides their broadband.
Really? I'm pretty sure that Bush has used signing statements to indicate that his administration is, in fact, above the law. I'm not sure what else a document that essentially reads "I don't like what Congress is telling me to do, and I'm not doing it" attached to laws that are being signed into effect can possibly mean.
Compared to most other western nations, it IS an epidemic...