Are you out of your fucking mind ?

Can you name any major political change that happened through normal democratic methods without widespread protests ?

Getting rid of the monarchy, getting rid of slavery, votes for women, civil rights, whatever. None of these happen through people simply going through the motions of voting. "Change must come through the barrel of a gun ..." might be an exaggeration, but it is not far off. Non-violent protest is sometimes sufficient, I hope that this is all it will take to reduce the current "government by Goldman Sachs" but sitting on your backside righting letters to congress or voting for a particular candidate definitely is not going to do it.

Governments always ask for more than they need with bills like this, then the revised version seems reasonable. As always, Calvin and Hobbes explains it best:
http://bestofcalvinandhobbes.com/2012/04/mom-can-i-set-fire-to-my-bed-mattress/

except the electorate isn't as smart as Calvin's mom.

> In fact, very few of those interned in Guantanamo have been waterboarded, too

How do you know ? So, there was a CIA statement where they admit that it was used on 3 people. Nowhere does it state that it was *only* used on 3 people, it's just a statement saying we hardly ever torture people from someone with an interest in having you think that.

Actually, when the code is idiomatic, it is a reflection on that language/frameworks that go with it. Having spent a bad 5 years in enterprise java trenches I can vouch for the realism of that code. It gave me flashbacks. I'm still fucking shivering.

google catleap on ebay: affordable 27" 2560x1440, they rock

The people running the program understood this stuff at least as well as you. The girls picking out the balls would have been working with exceptionally clear and inflexible rules.

or braveheart ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybQCNb4AuW4 )

God yes, well put. I blocked Jon for a while after he made me throw up in my mouth a little bit, but I had to come back for more. It was like reading love-sick teenage poetry - you always thought this is bad as writing can possibly get and then he would outdo himself again . If the first few posts from him hadn't been relatively sane I would never have believed that his preposterously self-obsessed, patronising, cloying and presumptuous drivel wasn't a fabulous wind up. All his crying for the emo victims following the columbine event must surely have been displaced self-pity for the times when he was bullied at school because it made so little sense otherwise. Knowing that the whiny little fuck must have been terribly abused at some stage gave me warm glow inside. Pre-emptive punishment for inflicting his god-awful crap on the world.

Here's two reasons:

1. Helmets give the cyclist a false sense of security.
2. Helmets give drivers a false sense of security.

You may think [1] does not apply to you, and possibly it doesn't but people are incredibly bad at judging that kind of thing. It's very likely that you take more risks when wearing a helment.

The second point is far more important and it's not something you as a cyclist can do anything about. Studies have shown that cars pass closer and faster to bikes when the cyclist is wearing a helmet. On some subconscious level they see the cyclist as being less vulnerable and hence they drive more dangerously around them.

For these reasons I discourage my three daughters from riding helmets when they cycle and I don't wear them myself.

However, even if one discounted both these reasons, mandatory helmets are horrible on principle. Its my own life I may be putting in danger, so if you want to wear a helmet, go ahead, if you want to tell other people to wear a helmet, go fuck yourself.

I'm an employer in the UK but lived in US for 5 years. UK's pretty good for employers really. You have to provide more time off (minimum of 5.5 weeks off per year) but that's offset by not having to provide health insurance. You have to be a bit more careful about firing people (if they've been with you more than a year) than fire-at-will states, but you're less likely to be sued for some random bullshit because people just don't pull that crap as much here. Compared to the rest of Europe -Italy:paperwork and regulations are horrendous, france:everyone is on holiday all the time, hungary: tax doubles your costs, etc.. the UK is very employer friendly.

I'd buy a new PC if I could be bothered installing everything and getting my environment/drivers/etc right, and that's on Linux... for windows it was 3 times worse (except thunderbird which is worse than anything windows threw at me. I genuinely found it easier to move continents than cleanly migrate thunderbird.)

These days, its not the price but the pain of migration that stops most people from buying a new PC.

I'll bother when the speed etc improvements are worth the grief. Dumb software slows hardware upgrades.

sweet, while you're there could you register some domain names for me.. i think sex.com might be available. thanks...

"ML, also developed by MSR" ... is only remotely true if one reads "developed by" as "worked on at some stage" rather than the implied "invented" by which is patently false (ML was invented at Edinburgh university in the 70s). Its sentences like that which make me doubt the honesty of this post: there's far too much spin in it.

You need http://geomagic.com/en/ - good software, also happens to be run by one of the most fascinating people on the planet.

Its the old pointy click interface that is endangered. The command line is coming back because language is a fundamentally more powerful paradigm. Its just that the input device is switching from keyboard to voice.