And like it or not, they are complete utter shit compared to real equipment.
And while a good photographer can make decent photos with a smartphone if they work within their limitations, "Photographers" is a very generous term for what most people are capable of doing.
Well, you have a plan? Because right now, taking over the bad countries and making them good countries that don't starve their citizens doesn't seem to work.
And never will. This is because humans are mean nasty evil motherfuckers who love to kill or starve each other. As we are about to learn again in Iraq, if we want anything resembling out own governance, we will have to be in a never ending war state in the middle east.
Because the second we pull out, they'll start lopping each others heads off again. And a sizable subset will work to make sure we're involved again, because in a region of the world fueled by hate, you want as many people to hate as possible. And a powerful invading army makes a great hate target for them.
Feed the poor? In many areas of the world, they want to exterminate them.
I suppose we could create a dependent, exponentially growing dependent class of people who need our continued munificence to survive. But last I checked our resources weren't similarly exponentially growing over the rest of eternity.
That would be Iraq, or Israel.
This is not anti-either in the middle east. It's just that the whole area is hell bent on each other's destruction, and will not change, no matter how much money we throw at it. Quite similar to the conditions that fuel poverty.
Humans like to kill each other, humans like to starve each other.
For ever argument you can throw at NASA being a waste of money, I can counter that argument with a reason why NASA improves life.
But the "Feed the poor!" doesn't (shouldn't) even enter into that conversation.
Because it won't happen. Curing world poverty will not happen.
Curing world poverty is a liberal version of "the free market" or "trickle down economics". Ideas that simply don't work.
We could eliminate every science and technical program in the entire world, and put all of the money "saved" into feeding the poor. We would just end up with more poor that need fed. And stagnant technology.
The part where you installed over your vista partition is your own stupid fault.
Absolutely. Every single problem I ever had with Windows was my fault. I supported Windows for years, and not once mind you not once ever was any of the problems that I mentioned with Windows ever anyone's fault but mine. A computer could be sitting in another building, an update bitches it up, and somehow, some way, it was my fault.
I know the drill shillboi. Windows can never fail - only we can fail Windows.
Which is why I switched to Unix like systems, where I'm nowhere near as stupid.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god.
A circular argument.
At that point they are not truly atheists as the term means "without faith". They have instead hijacked the term to now mean "anyone who believes there to not be a god"; indeed it takes just as much faith to believe there to not be a god as it does to believe there to be one.
Yow. So if a person has never heard of a "God" they have faith in something they don't know about? All the word smitihng doesn't convince me that there can be faith in "nothing" if a person is inclined to be an atheist.
And that is the issue I have with the people who do have "faith" in an intelligent entity that created the universe. I am an atheist in "universe creators" Even ones who I've never heard of. Having faith that things I've never heard of that don't exist just seems like dividing by zero.
This is why while I am classically an atheist, I use the term agnostic to describe myself in the modern world.
In that respect, any atheist who is intellectually honest would be classified as agnostic.
I cannot say for certain that when I die, I won't meet the Judeo-Christian God, Dagon, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I consider each an equal possibility, as in near zero.
And it's too bad, I would like to meet Ganesha. That's my idea of what a God should be.
My father was a police officer. My father had guns unattended around the house relatively frequently. As a child, I picked them up. I looked at them. There was zero chance anyone was ever going to get hurt.
Why?
I was taught what guns could could do. I had actually fired guns. I fired my first gun (a rifle) when I was I was 3 years old.
Smart man. Since guns were an integral part of his life, he knew that you were going to be curious, so he taught you respect, and allowing you to sate that curiousity, kept you from being tempted to sneak it out by yourself. Let you know it could do great harm, as well as be a very interesting device, I would bet.
I never had guns in my house when I became an adult. It was not because I was afraid of them, it was because I had children and knew I could not train them like I had been trained. I did take them to the range but only my daughter shot a gun there. My son wanted nothing to do with it.
My son and I are lucky to have a tremendous outdoor range just a few miles from my place. So we hit there every so often to target shoot and relax.
Relying on a gun safe to keep your children out of trouble is insanity. If you love guns so much and need to have them around, train your children.
Now you lost me. Let's make a comparison I also make reflector telescopes as a hobby, and have even silvered my own mirrors. Great fun, and tests your skills at working with chemicals. But there are some seriously nasty chemicals in use. Nitric acid, Ammonium hydroxide which comes in little pellets that look like candy
Until my son was old enough to know Never ever mess with this stuff, you can damn well be assured that it was locked up.
Two other items where a gun safe isn't at all insanity:
If you have visitors with children, are their children going to be properly trained in the safe use of firearms? If I have 'em locked up, I don't have to insist all visitors to the house have passed a firearms safety course.
I also have some friends with a lot of firearms. Collectible stuff, one might have around 100 kilobucks worth of guns. Just leaning really valuables in the corner, isn't that good of an idea, and thieves might find his place a good target. So what do ya do? A dedicated room, and yeah, with locks on the door. I can't state for certain, but I'll bet that is a requirement for insuring the collection
So you can go ahead and think I'm nuts. I'm not about to re-arrange my life around my firearms. I'm not about to screen visitors to the house for gun safety smarts. When My son was a child, I wasn't about to trust his friends with firearms when they visited.
Training young people in firearm safety and locking the things up when you aren't using them is not a mutually exclusive situation.
Why don't you ask your local police department how many of the officers keep their weapons in a safe at night? Or use trigger locks? Include the ones with kids. When you figure out why THEY don't want to do it, you'll figure out why the rest of us don't.
Sorry dude. I do it. If you live in a place where you have to have your gun instanly ready, you need to live in a concrete cage, in a safe room, in a gated community, with 24-7 surveillance. As for the police, I've worked with a number of them and personally know so many of them in my county that I'm almost immune from jury duty.
One of the constants that I see in all the gun nuts is that they are some of the most fearful people I have ever met. It takes a whole lot of fear to have to have a loaded gun at the ready 24/7.
Let me get this straight - irresponsible gun owners result in a statistically insignificant number of child deaths every year. Your solution is to create a new technology that not only defeats the purpose of owning the gun for many people in the first place, it also doesn't prevent any of the above mentioned deaths.
So let me get this straight. You are okay with people getting killed for basically nothing? And most very sincerely, if you think that some sort of biometric defeats hte very purpose of having a gun, you also don't have ignition key or locks on your doors. They control access. But a gun? Completely differnt matter.
So does a safety defeat the purpose of owning a gun?
And we should focus billions of dollars on this initiative in place of focusing on things that could, you know, actually save a significant number of lives? Makes sense to me.
Explain how this is going to cost billions of dollars.
Explain what you want to spend billions of dollars on to save lives.
You'll have a difficult time, because you are trying to argue about "number of lives", when you are actually afraid that any change, any tiny thing you do, is going to allow the guvmint to take your guns away.
Anyhow, I expect an answer on the billions it will cost, and how many billions you suppport to be applied to the deaths that you actually give a fuck about.
It's better to die fighting the crowd than to offer either the guests or your pre-pubescent daughters (unmarried girls at the time were generally unmarried because they hadn't had their first period yet) up for gang rape.
A thousand times THIS!
I don't have daughters, but I would die long before I would offer them as pedophilic rape objects.
"Are you trying to say that without a belif in some God, that it is not possible to understand what is good for a society, or an individual, or a collection of individuals?" Your points about Sodom are interesting.
And your acceptance of it all is exactly why I find Fundamentalists morally evil.
Odd, that in your mind, you are of high moral character, doing God's work, and to be rewarded upon your demise with everlasting life.
And I think you are an immoral prevert.
" but the important thing is that you have faith, not to be shaken, no need of proof, just faith." -WHY is it important to have "have faith". Placing importance on the non-rational is the problem, not a thing to be proud of
Re-read my post. I wasn't claiming faith for myself, but the person I was responding to.
The fundamental problem is you're confusing a mention of the near universal trait of humans to believe in some sort of "powerful other" controlling the universe. Some people are more prone to that "need" than others, but it *is* present in the vast majority of humanity,
I'm not confused of anything. You want belief to be translated as faith. Many people also want theory translated as conjecture. But that's not what it is. And you don't get to define it.
That's the problem. You don't get to tell me that what are two different things is only one thing.
Rather, it is you who confuse "faith" with a fundamental urge to believe in something, whatever that something may be.
I believe that you insist on defining words for other people, the insisting that they agree with your definition. I don't go around telling you what you think.
One can have faith in processes,
So when was the last time you prayed to a process?
in kitschy homilies and phrases, and other such "wisdom" with no more "proof" of their validity than a theory of there being some form of god out there.
I'm not even close to following you. The closest I can get is that you think if I say "Common sense is uncommon", or "The early bird gets the worm", I have faith in that, and therefore religion? That is pretty bizarre.
Of course those who have such faith are far more inclined to call it "knowledge", and to consider it to be beyond reproach.
So in your world, now those kitschy needlepoint signs saying "Home is where the Heart is" is evidence of atheists having a religion? Good grief man, I see a simple statement of comfort with familiar surroundings and loved family members, and you see it as faith. Your definition of faith is spreading to encompass everything in the universe.
Faith and belief are not the same thing. Faith is acceptance of something as "fact" without evidence. Belief is acceptance of something because all prior experience has demonstrated the "fact" to be so.
Not specifically "fact" I I noted before, I believe the earth will rotate in it's travel around the sun, and we will experience a sunrise. That's belief. Seasons will come and go in large part because of the way the earth is tilted as it travels aroud it's orbit. I believe all that.
Once upon a time and well before celestial mechanics were known, people prayed that the Sun would "rise" and that the seasons would happen as they wanted. They had faith that th esun god would return and ride across the sky. But they had to do everything right in order for him to do it. That's why they were so frightened during eclipses. But that's all based on faith in a deity. No proof needed.
Google teenager dies in car crash. Google child dies in car crash. Outside of the fact that it makes for sensational headlines, why the focus on guns? The number of kids who shoot their siblings a year isn't even a blip on the radar of causes of death of young children. Try expending your efforts on something that will actually make a difference.
But kind sir, are you keeping track, and if people bing killed aren't on say the top two, it's just fine that they are killed? No problem? I don't want people killed in car accidents either, or being strangled by an anaconda or ripped apart by a deranged chimpanzee. Not many killed by wild animals kept as pets, but we have laws against keeping dangerous wild animals in many places for that reason. And I'm not even arguing about anyone's rights to have firearms, I use and enjoy them myself. I just think irresponsible people should bear the responsibility when their stupidity kills other people. But in some people's world, even prosecution of willful negligence is apparenlty off limits when it involves a firearm.
You see, you ask "Why the focus on guns?" I might ask why some people don't want any focus at all on guns.
But in easily preventable accidents, it would seem like a great way to cut down on some deaths. Firearms are really cool, and a lot of fun. But they are designed to kill things, so maybe we should make certain everyone is careful with them.
As a responsible gun owner, I have 1 additional modification to make to this statement: Use a single shot
Very good point, and I should have remembered that. When I was in Boy Scouts back in a more sane age, was my introduction to firearms. Single shots, and
Our instructor was severely no bullshit, and if you weren't paying attention, you had no chance of getting a Marksmanship badge until next year, because that was the next timw you were allowed on the range.
I enjoyed that so much that there was no way I was going to take a chance of getting kicked off the range.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
