I keep hearing this "meme" being spoken of as a truism and yet in all of my years of voting, I have never had a single chance to vote for an entitlement that would benefit me and take away from my children. I know that my experience may be unique, but I have seen no evidence of that. So where does this come from?

Can you cite any entitlements that I may have been given the chance to vote on? Social Security? No, but that doesn't take away from my children anyways except that the money is being stolen now so that my children will end up paying my benefits... but I have no chance to affect the theft. Health care? I am unsure how this would fit. Please cite chances that I have missed concerning voting entitlements for myself at the expense of my children.

Say WHAT?! Nokia was a FAILING phone company when Microsoft bought them? What planet are you on? They were THE dominant phone company at the time. Samsung and Apple were barely even nudging the market with their offerings yet; although Apple was indeed on a steep rise at the time and the Galaxy S was just released which rocketed Samsung upwards.

No, Nokia had some issues that they needed to work through but they were definitely not a failing phone manufacturing company when Microsoft bought them. Microsoft drove them into the ground at high speed.

And no, I am NOT a Nokia fan boy. I did like an N800 that I had bought but could not stand the resistive rather than capacitive touch screen.

No longer solved, especially if you are classified as Exempt.

AT&T was broken up... and yet it is back again. Microsoft?

The ones that are still more or less enforced are:
child labor
acid rain
slavery (perhaps not with H1B folks not being allowed to switch employers!)
worker safety
consumer protection (payday loans and enforced monopolies like ISPs kind of argue against this)
clean air and water (There was a situation in Texas relatively recently about a company dumping blood into a river but for the most part, correct)

Perhaps you should have told him about the yellow dots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

I am surprised he did not know.

Yeah. That would be best. Them stop lobbing rockets and such; however, that is never going to stop with the current status quo. Something needs to change. What that something is, is totally irrelevant the question that I asked from a personal point of view.

To answer my question to you, I would do it in a Biblical manner: I would kill all males of combat age and slay all non-virgin women. I would keep the rest as slaves.

Not politically correct for this day and age? The whole situation over there is straight out of prehistory and should be solved that way. The Israelis want to tear down Palestinian owned buildings? The Palestinians, as the weaker group, should send rockets back. Should this state of affairs be tolerated? No. One side or the other needs to crush the other side until there is peace. Or, one side has to make zero aggressive moves for long enough (5 years?) that it is demonstrable to anyone who is unbiased that one side is clearly abusing the other. At that point, we get back to the Biblical solution but without fingers being pointed.

I can understand if you do not feel like answering freely in a public forum. It is a highly charged situation and you are in the center of it. I personally do not care in the slightest if everyone assumes that I am a bloodthirsty monster or an asshole. I speak truth instead of hiding behind weasel words so I do not have to defend myself. The situation over there is just insane and political correctness does not seem to solve it.

Hm. I would guess his question should be interpreted as: How accurate do the rockets seem to be?

But on to what I want to ask you:

I have had rockets and mortars fired at and land near enough to me that I could hear the air moving around the outside of the mortar casing and feel the pressure wave from the rocket. Scary stuff. I lasted two and a half years under such a bombardment and I then I had to leave or weird things would have irreversible in my brain. That makes me ask this: How can you sit there and take it without just going over to Gaza and smashing them until they become peaceful? I ask this on a personal level as I know the answer on a political level.

It is even worse than what you think it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

So I happen to not physically be in America and I was not aware that paracetamol and acetaminophen are the same thing when the doctor asks me if I have taken any Panadol (what? Paracetamol)... so I say no and he proceeds to start pumping a thousand milligrams plus directly into my veins. Yeah, but I had taken Tylenol and some cold medications, which combined, had placed over a thousand milligrams of acetaminophen into my system previously. A thousand milligrams of acetaminophen here, a thousand milligrams of paracetamol there. Another thousand in rounding errors and a continuous drip into my veins... Who cares right?

Needless to say, my liver goes, "WTF dude?" and 6 months of hell proceed to occur. Some Milk Thistle and time allowed everything to more or less return to normal.

Yeah. It should be illegal to put that shit into ANY product other than one distinctly labelled as acetaminophen aka paracetamol. It should not be labelled Cold Medicine or Cough Medicine, or Muscle Relaxer or whatever the fuck else. That stuff is DANGEROUS. I do not want to have a liver transplant merely because of differing naming conventions and added ingredients.

No no no! It was not a comeuppance and you should not feel smitten. It was just a friendly helpful reminder. BTW, your point in your original post was perfectly valid and I agree with it. :)

Hm. I am going to have to disagree with you there. A false sense of security can be gleaned from such data; however, a false sense of security can be had from NO information at all. A false sense of security is a failing in the security practitioner, not a result of the data. For example, let's say someone has done this analysis and thinks they are secure and then reads your comment. They then know the limitations of what their data can expose and can continue to look for more subtle traces leading to discovery of more sophisticated agents operating within their systems.

A false sense of security is in essence another formulation of what I call the arrogance problem. Always keep your mind open to new ideas and interpretations and you can avoid this issue more often than not. I hope you did not get modded down for displaying a potential problem. You were a bit harsh but skins should not be thin here.

To be fair, it is always good to eliminate the obvious first. Stopping there is stupid, but starting there is good.

LOL, I hate to be pedantic but I LOVE cars. Lamborghini is not a car, they are a manufacturer. They have several models, some are over a million, some can be had for slightly under 200k if you look carefully.

Bugatti makes a Veyron, not a Veryon. Current models are going for over 1.5m IIRC. Easy typo to make but it is what put me into pedantic mode. The market share thing with a model and then just a manufacturer is what threw it over the edge. Nothing personal. We all do silly things like that. I probably made a few mistakes that pedants can get me for in my correction of your post. :P

Have a nice day. Heheh. :)

Yup! In 7th grade Geography class. The very first period we covered it started with how to properly unfold and fold it. Then we went on to the symbols and what they meant, etc etc. We also learned that all Interstate Highways that are North/South are odd numbers and East/West are even numbers so if you are in I40, you are heading either in an easterly or westerly direction and if you are on I55, north or south.

Of course that moved on to other map types such as mercator projections, topography maps, and such. What do they teach in schools nowadays? How to install Google Maps onto your Android phone?

Weird. I just asked one of my coworkers who is roughly the same age as me and he never had a Geography class. WTF? I had been under the impression that Geography was common pretty much across America.

No. No they won't. The clueless will think they are in control of the information flow when in fact, they are not. All of that information will leave their house and reside on someone else's (else's is not a word Firefox? Really? Let's check: http://english.stackexchange.c... stupid Firefox telling me I am wrong.) servers. Once it is on someone else's (fuck you Firefox) server, the clueless no longer control their data regardless of what laws are in place. That data will be used.

But being clueless, they won't understand. Just like they do not understand the NSA domestic surveillance.

I lived even further away than you. Denver. We did not feel anything but we ended up having about an eighth of an inch of ash covering our cars. I am certain of this because I had to clean it off.

I can only imagine what Yellowstone going off is going to be like. I suspect cleaning of cars in Denver is going to be the least of the problems there.

This is all funny to me. I have been vaccinated 4 times for smallpox. Once as a child (thank you modern medicine!) and three times in the past decade (thank god for wiped databases :( ).

Every single time it has left a permanent scar as your post says. Every single time in the past decade, it has made me feel like crap for at least a week, sometimes two weeks. Every single time, dealing with a live virus on the skin has been a HUGE pain in the ass. Thankfully, I have never had any actual severe adverse reactions. I will probably get vaccinated again soon though. Wheeeeeee. Here is hoping that incompetence does not kill me through overzealous vaccinations. :P

I guess I should be happy that it is probably literally impossible to kill me with known biological agents... but sometimes, the cure is almost as bad as the disease.

Huh? It is ENTIRELY her boyfriend's fault. He tied her up, pulled off all of her clothes and forced her at gunpoint to pose for those pictures. She has no responsiblity at all in this situation.

See how stupid it looks to try and shoehorn in blame games where they do not belong?

Yes, the boyfriend who shared those pics is a dick. Criminal? I am not a lawyer, but definitely a dick. Guess what? He would have never had those pics if she did not consent to taking them or giving them to him. That implies that she has a part to play in this too. Is defining the parts such a problem for you or is everything a crime against women who are always just helpless victims and deserve all of your stuff when they decide to leave you after a relationship?

Rock on.