The cops showing up at your "target's" door because you rang the cops and claimed they were waving a gun around, or whatever, is not an "indirect" result of your statement.
It's a direct, predictable, and intended result. This is why the appropriate punishment would be attempted murder.
That the police in the US are a dangerous force that may be abused in this manner is an entirely orthogonal issue.
Some time around the same time that normal* police activity became referred to as a "war", I suspect.
* Not that I consider the current attitude towards drugs 'normal', but that's another story.
I'm a very experienced sysadmin
Not anymore. Things change.
terse, bloated
Terse _and_ bloated?
Buying a soldering iron and some comics is somehow not going shopping? Or it's a better kind of shopping because it's a tool and a comic book? Geek elitism strikes again girls! You're nothing if you're not soldering and reading about super-heroes!
Mattel shouldn't be listening in to children's playtime conversations for any reason - but this doesn't mean that there's something wrong with playing with barbie and talking about nice shoes. This does not make you a "brainless bimbo". It makes you a child.
They're creepy too. It's worse when you're bugging children's playtimes, but we shouldn't accept any of those things in our lives.
So the State, having decided that murder is illegal, resorts to murder as "punishment". That is hypocrisy of the highest order.
That's a weak argument, and I even agree with you. The State is sanctioned to exact forms of punishment that individuals may not - imprisonment is illegal too you know.
Those are some pretty reasonable points, and the cables do seem to be more fragile than I would like. That said, micro USB cables are a bit worse, and the lightning socket is a great deal more robust than micro USB.
The circuitry in the charging cable isn't the problem anyway - the problem is Apple's business practice of charging companies a licensing fee to use it. This is something that should probably be prohibited by law, but since it's not you can certainly see Apple's point of view (more $$$, yes please...). The IC probably costs about 10 cents.
So where are these circuits in USB, FireWire,or typical display port cables?
Well, USB has all the smarts at the other end of course. Display port cables do contain circuitry - or at least some do. USB to serial, or VGA, or audio, or whatever most certainly do contain circuitry. I don't disagree that it seems unnecessary to put an IC in the charging cable, but if you don't abuse the thing they do last.
Explain why they need multiple circuit boards in the cable? Dynamic redefining of the pins on the lightning?
Er, yes? It makes engineering sense too, put some smarts in the cable and then you don't need to include (for instance) line out amplifiers, or HDMI output, or whatever, in the device itself. Seems reasonable enough to me.
the ability to just grab files from my local NAS, work with them, move them, that's something sorely missing on the iPad.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remote-file-manager/id608738784?mt=8
The average Joe wants to avoid thinking
This bears examination. Leaving aside the geek-elitism in this statement, could it not be the case that the average Joe wants to avoid thinking about his computer? The average Joe probably doesn't especially want to think too hard about his microwave oven, or his car, or his TV either. Perhaps the average Joe would instead prefer to think about something else? Something he actually wants to do, instead?
There are any number of stories of people walking again or regaining their eyesight when given a placebo.
Really? Any number?
I guess that you would consider therapeutic foot massage establishments unethical as well.
This seems like a pretty silly straw man to me. If the foot massage outfit is claiming to cure disease by rubbing your feet, then yes they should be shut down. If the foot massage outfit is just claiming to make your feet feel nice, then everyone's happy.
testing positive for X with a 90% accurate test does NOT mean you have a 90% chance of having X, unless X is so common that most people have it.
Yes thanks, we all know that. Doctors know that too. I believe that it would be covered in medical school. The average incidence of X is important too. If one out of ten people have X, then your 90% hit-rate test means that you have a 50/50 chance of having the deadly X. I think.
We've known dogs and rats can readily detect lung and many other cancers just by smelling a person's breath since at least the 50s (or was it 20s),- there's no profit in it.
What rubbish. There would be plenty of money in it, training dogs isn't cheap you know. Might be more difficult to train the rats though.
What I really don't get is why people reject the idea that the mind can heal.
They don't. The role of a healthy mind in the maintenance of a healthy body is fairly well understood by the medical community - which isn't to say that anyone really knows how it works, but doctors understand that happier people get better faster.
Why is it then that the role of the mind in healing is always denigrated as "placebo" (must be bad) instead of acknowledged as perfectly valid and important?
No-one, anywhere, is saying that the placebo effect is bad. What they are saying is that homeopathic remedies are no more effective than sugar pills. Which is perfectly true. It is, therefore, dishonest to sell homeopathic remedies and claim that they cure people.
You seem to be arguing against a position that does not exist.
It will be alot faster in java though....
And it will be compiled, and (somewhat) typesafe (ok... but more so than python at least).
Which of course wasn't your point. But if your point is that your boss is an idiot and doesn't listen to technical direction from the knowledgeable people that he employs, then you simply need to get a different job.
No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.
