Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:The states... (Score 1) 421

Another wall of text. Don't you tire of hearing yourself talk? Here's an English word for you to research: brevity.

Just because you are too fucking lazy or incompetent to read more than 3 paragraphs at a time, doesn't mean there's something wrong with the content.

To recap, you and another person took cheap thread hijacking shots at people who think it's more appropriate to regulate certain items at the State level. The original post was informative and apolitical, adding value to the headline story. You two hijacked it in order to share an unrelated and ill-informed political opinion.

When confronted with that opinion I simply pointed out what American law actually says about the regulation of alcohol. You then dismissed this simple fact as "irrelevant" and accused me of contributing noise to the thread that you hijacked.

You are hilarious. You recognize and dismiss the concept of thread hijacking, yet completely fail to see how that is exactly what my initial reply in this thread was about and what I've been accusing you of all along.

Go away, you clearly have nothing interesting to add to this discussion.

Comment Re:The states... (Score 1) 421

The 21st Amendment is hardly irrelevant in a conversation about the regulation of alcohol in the United States. Why don't you go read it?

Because it is irrelevant. You changed the subject from 'the hypocrisy of ostensibly libertarian conservatives in drug regulation' to 'this is what the Constitution says about the level at which alcohol should be regulated'.

It's like talking about morning dew when somebody says "rain makes you wet" and then argues that rain is very relevant to wetness.

At what level should the Chinese, the Russians or the Europeans regulate drugs?

That's not for me to decide.

I wasn't asking you to decide anything, dickwad. I was making the point that your wat of thinking is extremely limited and therefore ultimately useless.

I don't interject myself into the domestic political debate of other countries. Why don't you show me the same courtesy?

Because I am not intellectually lazy. I compare and criticize the systems employed by countries on their merits and reasoning instead of limiting my view to my own little island.
Also, technically that was a loaded question (fallacy) and a straw man, considering that you implied that it is a courtesy to 'not interject yourself into a domestic political debate of other countries', which it isn't.

Do you even understand the meaning of the word arbitrary?

Yes I do. Amazingly enough, English is my native language. Do you understand the concept of Federalism in the United States of America? That's a rhetorical question, obviously you don't, if you did you would not claim that the States are an "arbitrary level" of Government.

Your grasp of the English language is saddening. I'll explain it in simple terms:

Consider an elevator in a building with five floors.
Is floor two in itself an 'arbitrary floor'?
No, no, it is not.

Now imagine that you have to lay carpet on all floors. Which floor do you go to first? Which one second?
That, my friend, is arbitrary.
Unless there is sensible reasoning to make a distinction, for the decision at hand the individual choices are equivalent. Comparing floor 1 to floor 3 is as irrelevant as comparing floor 2 to floor 3. You can choose an arbitrary floor and compare it to another arbitrary floor.

Get it yet?

Protip: "It's in the 21st Amendment" is not sensible reasoning. It is an appeal to authority (fallacy).

Comment Re:The states... (Score 1) 421

Nice wall of text. I stopped reading around the second paragraph.

Sentences like these really put your ignorance on display.

Government control on [arbitrary level] == TYRANNY
Government control on [slightly lower arbitrary level] == THE WAY IT IS AND WAS ALWAYS MEANT TO BE

On the issue at hand, i.e., the regulation of alcohol, this is the way that it is and was always meant to be.

Do you even understand the meaning of the word arbitrary?
Are you able to think outside of your national box? At what level should the Chinese, the Russians or the Europeans regulate drugs?

You see, the issue of whether to regulate drugs at all and to what extent is something the entire fucking planet struggles with. Along comes somebody who notes that so called 'small government' conservatives hypocritically want to regulate the shit out of drug consumption and inevitably some Constitution-beating asshole like yourself feels the need to derail the thread by injecting irrelevant shortsighted crap about said Constitution into it, precluding any chance of a meaningful and constructive discussion on the virtues and vices of drug regulation in general.

Which is still the most interesting part here. Do you believe drugs should be government regulated? Please don't say: 'yes, at the state level', or I will be forced to weep uncontrollably for this world.
If you do believe they should be, based on what criteria? Also which limitations should there be?

I'm sorry that you can't understand that. Why don't you bugger off and join a political conversation about whatever shit hole country it is that you call home?

Weak. Notice how I haven't slammed the USA at any point in this thread. If you want to talk shit, direct it at me, not my country. Also: you might believe in American Exceptionalism, but apart from military power the USA hasn't exactly been the number one in many positive lists for a while now. I would definitely not call the USA a shit hole, but let's just say there are at least 20 countries I'd rather live in than in the USA.

You obviously can't be bothered to learn about mine.

False and a straw man. Whether I wish to learn about the USA has no influence on the fact that your contribution to this thread was irrelevant and thus noise. For the record: I probably know more about the judicial system of the USA than its average inhabitant (which is mostly a sad reality).

Comment Re:The states... (Score 2) 421

Firstly: Nice reasoning there, asshole. Progressives championed the Prohibition. Whoopty-fucking-doo. That completely and definitively proves that 'small government' Conservatives don't want to regulate more than they claim. Because fuck logic.
(It's called a 'tu quoque', a fallacy most commonly committed on school playgrounds)

I'll explain it to you: even if 'Progressives' were or are the evilest, nastiest scum-sucking Nazi bastards that have ever existed, that says nothing about conservative people.

Let me make it even clearer: If I say 'You have a tiny dick' and you say 'Well, your dick is smaller', your dick will not have grown. It is still tiny.

Secondly: I wasn't equating anything. I was urging you to let go of your knee-jerk 'look-at-my-knowledge-of-the-Holy-Constitution' reaction to the combination of the words 'regulate' and 'state'. Which, again, was a completely irrelevant reaction.

Let's look at this again. Your reaction was this:
"Have you read the 21st Amendment? You don't have to make some theoretical "States rights" argument when it comes to alcohol; the control of "intoxicating liquors" is very clearly delegated to the States."

To this:
"It is always a valid discussion at what level certain executive and legislative decisions should be made, but don't pretend that shifting them a level up or down changes anything meaningful in the appraisal of 'small ~' versus 'big government'."

Your reaction is a complete non sequitur. It supports nor discredits what I said and is thus irrelevant. QED.

The point was and is that many of those who cry for 'small government' show that their clamoring is disingenuous by showing their hypocrisy in wanting to regulate the shit out of the things that do not align with their conservative world view. There are very surely a number of truly libertarian ('liberal' in the rest of the world) people out there to whom this does not apply, but they are quite certainly a small minority.

Comment Re:The states... (Score 1) 421

In this thread, I don't give a shit about the laws in your specific country, because they are irrelevant. interkin3tic was making a point about how those who clamor 'small government' at every fucking turn want to regulate the shit out of a lot of things.

Put in simpler terms, they say: "We don't want to limit your freedom, like those other guys. Well.. Except for your freedom in consuming drugs. Drugs are bad, mmkay. Oh, and abortion. Don't do that. Or love a man if you are one."

Now do you understand that pointing this out says nothing about the governmental level on which such things are regulated? Nothing.

If you still do not understand, replace the word 'States' with the word 'Areas' in interkin3tic's post and then look at how nonsensical the bullshit-replies about the Constitution are.

Comment Re:The states... (Score 2) 421

You people are hilarious.
Government control on [arbitrary level] == TYRANNY
Government control on [slightly lower arbitrary level] == THE WAY IT IS AND WAS ALWAYS MEANT TO BE

Just accept that some things should be dealt with collectively, regardless of the exact level.
It is always a valid discussion at what level certain executive and legislative decisions should be made, but don't pretend that shifting them a level up or down changes anything meaningful in the appraisal of 'small ~' versus 'big government'.

Comment Re:"Unpowered" Energy ;) (Score 1) 128

Also: muscles just aren't amazing as springs.
They're ok, but not as good as proper springs (ask the IAAF and Oscar Pistorius -- Philosoraptor: "Maybe we should give the elderly these blades instead of lower legs? Will old people lead the cybernetic revolution?").

It's like comparing a car with regenerative braking to one without (yes, also a car analogy). It's easy to see that the energetic cost of any added weight is easily offset by the reduced loss of energy to friction.

Comment Re:I agree .. BUT .... (Score 2) 232

The answer is simple and consists of two questions:
1. How stable is the entity behind what you are going to learn? (Protip: Google and Apple are going to be around for a bit longer than most loosely associated groups of hipster developers)
2. Which of the choices has the most answered questions online (yes, probably on stackoverflow)?

(1) can alternatively be written as 'how stable is the framework/language you are learning?'
(2) can also be seen as 'Which of the choices has the most supportive and/or largest community?'
They boil down to the same, though.

My advice: do it native. Android and iOS devving is really quite easy if you don't want to do anything fancy and do it properly. If you do want to do anything fancy, you're going to have to go pretty deep anyway and hybrid frameworks are just going to get in your way.

I (single handedly) spent about 5-6 months creating a PHP backend and a native Android app, whilst the specs were changing. I had to design and implement the structure of the app and that of the backend, etc. I've started working on the iOS version 1 month ago and it is about done (maybe two more weeks). Mind you: this is not because iOS development is easier than Android development (they both have their quirks), but already having a stable backend and a proven structure of the app code allows me to basically translate the Android code to Objective C without much thinking. The core issues in the system design have already been dealt with. It's just implementing a stable design based on stable specs, which we all know is the easiest part of software development.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 209

Maybe that's true for a lot of people, but the frustration, general bad temper inducing, sheer passive-aggressive baulkiness of the damn thing made me very glad I don't have to deal with it regularly.

Maybe there will never be much understanding either way, but the silly finger-pointing name-calling from one camp to the other is childish, tribal and idiotic.

Comment Re:Not just Apple laptops, No drivers for new lapt (Score 2) 209

Developing complex drivers can cost millions, but the testing isn't nearly as costly. Much of it is automated. Do you think that Intel, AMD and Nvidia spend millions of dollars a month just on testing?

No, they just release them as betas and wait for the bug reports to roll in. Why pay for testers if so many people will test for you for free?

I started writing this post going for funny, but this actually sounds pretty insightful.

Comment Re:Popup messages are completely ineffective (Score 1) 79

#1: De managing company should have made sure that the "failure" messages would reach them without the intervention of a human. Maybe by just emailing them.

Exactly, if you need to rely on end users for receiving failure messages for an absolutely essential service, you have failed horribly.

Comment Re:What kind of person did they study? (Score 1) 79

There are more answers: https://github.com/M66B/XPriva...

I've also used PDroid and LBE Privacy Guard: https://play.google.com/store/...
The latter seems to have gone to shit, though. It always was ran at a layer too high to allow it to catch everything reliably anyway.

PDroid was great if your ROM supported it. The original version isn't maintained anymore, but replacements seem to have popped up:
https://play.google.com/store/...

In general though, using a CyanogenMod ROM with privacy features is definitely the easiest route. Which is what I do.

Slashdot Top Deals

HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!

Working...