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Comment Re:Cute asshattery is still asshattery (Score 1) 161

The warrant for Assange's arrest was properly sent through Interpol, and upheld by the English courts. I haven't noticed anybody calling for Assange to be brought over here except for some idiot politicians, and if the US wanted to get him I'd think it would be easier to do so from the UK. Standard legal procedure is that Sweden can't send him to some other country without UK permission, so he'd be in a position where it would take UK and Swedish agreement to be sent to the US, not just UK.

Comment Re:Spoiled child assume skills he didn't have (Score 1) 246

You do realize that you know almost nothing of the 15-year-old and his family, right? It seems to me equally likely that he has low self-esteem and serious boundaries, and the only way he can get approval is by bringing good grades home. Or the situation might be entirely different.

He's a 15-year-old who did something stupid. I can't tell whether he was malicious or simply panicked. BTW, I know of a case of arson, by an adult, that caused a whole lot more damage than this did, and he didn't spend long locked up. I doubt five years is the appropriate amount of time.

Comment Re:More religious whackjobs (Score 1) 286

That's because the government isn't attached to any other churches, in general. There actually were charter schools around here using government funds to teach Islam around here, and that was cut off when it became known. My taxes aren't going to Islam or Buddhism or Shinto. They shouldn't be going to Christianity either.

However, we keep seeing people wanting to spend my tax money on Christian stuff. We keep seeing people wanting to have official government bodies have Christian prayers. A fair number of Christians want to junk that part of the First Amendment and have governments in the US identify as Christian.

Comment Re:I WISH he was a candidate (Score 1) 395

Florida in 2000 is a really bad example of anything. It was so close that there's a whole lot of things that would have changed the outcome. One county put out an illegal butterfly ballot (in a bipartisan decision), and that confused enough Gore supporters into accidentally voting for Buchanan to make Bush win.

Comment Re:Can he win? (Score 1) 395

And, of course, the Democrats won Congress in 2000, so the deficits Bush started up and continued through economic good times are...um, excuse me, the Democrats won congress in 2006, so you need to tell us why Clinton and a Republican Congress got the budget darn near balanced, while Bush and a Republican Congress blew the deficit up so much.

Comment Re:you seem to have left out the parts... (Score 1) 395

Colin Powell wrote an autobiographical book called "It Worked for Me", basically a long and fascinating ramble on important events in his life. Read it. Pay attention to what Powell says about his UN speech about such weapons. Ideally, get the audiobook, which Powell read, so you can get the tone of voice.

Then come back and tell us about what led up to the invasion. It's going to be different.

Comment Re:Sanders amazes me (Score 1) 395

Yup. This is why I consider the FICA contributions to be a particularly regressive tax, and not something like pension contributions. I also consider the deceptively named employer's portion to be a tax, although at least I don't pay income tax on it. It's money coming from the payroll allocation of my employer that the Feds get whether I like it or not. If you've ever been self-employed, you see the full scale of these taxes on your income, and, believe me, it's a shock if you haven't been through it before.

Comment Re:Sanders amazes me (Score 1) 395

Suppose I have $100K. Presumably, I've already paid all necessary taxes on the $100K. Now, I buy stocks with it, and a few years later they're worth $150K, and I sell them. I pay capital gains taxes on the $50K, not the $100K, and I pay no actual income taxes on it. That's the $50K I haven't paid taxes on yet, so unless you have some sort of obscure point you're bad at getting across, you're wrong.

Comment Re:Sanders amazes me (Score 1) 395

Do remember that income taxes are not the only taxes that affect people. They're just the most progressive, which means that people of a certain political persuasion tend to talk about them without talking about other taxes.

Look, my family is well off, and we're open to paying more taxes. However, I keep reading about rich people paying less of their income in taxes than we do, proportionately, and I am not happy about that. (Remember the year Warren Buffett described his taxes as proportionally less than his secretary's? They were ludicrously lower than ours.) It seems that, of all the major ways to make money, actually working for it is the most taxed, which I find ridiculous.

Comment Re:Oh come on. (Score 1) 250

You have to understand the history. C was designed as a machine-independent system implementation language, which meant that it had to have as good performance as possible for commonly used things like integers, and it ran on a much wider range of processors than you'd expect to run into nowadays. The processors could have ones' complement, twos' complement, or signed magnitude for negative integer values. They could be designed to halt execution and raise some sort of signal on integer overflow, or designed to ignore it. Machine-addressible units of memory could range from one bit to 60 bits. Given the variety in what processors would do, any specific behavior would kill performance for processors that didn't match the behavior, so they left it as "undefined".

There were other sorts of incompletely specified behaviors. "Implementation-defined" usually referred to fairly minor differences, such as how long an "int" was. Unspecified behavior usually referred to cases where there would be a few obvious choices, such as order of evaluation of function parameters. Whether or not it was a good idea, C generally labeled more complex potential incompatibilities as undefined. Personally, I'd like to see less "undefined behavior", substituting "implementation-defined" or "unspecified" as much as possible.

Comment Re:Error in headline (Score 1) 301

Or it turns out that only the top 5% of minorities get into a position to apply, and therefore all ten minorities are comparable to the top 5% white. Your assumption that the skill lies on the same bell curve is arbitrary and in general unsupported. To figure out what's likely to happen, you have to know why one group is underrepresented.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 1) 480

This is an experimental result. It means something, and it might even mean something interesting. It should be investigated further until we know what's going on.

If it is a reactionless drive, it violates some very fundamental and well-tested physics. That would be an extraordinary claim, and hence requires extraordinary evidence. I haven't seen extraordinary evidence, and am 99% sure it isn't a reactionless drive.

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