More blaming the victim garbage (though bonus points for pretending the victims were the perpetrators). There are plenty of other cities out there that would and, as it turned out, did treat the people or businesses formerly of Detroit well.

You can spin these ridiculous fantasies about "con artists" and "fixing their mess" (said mess not actually being theirs), but the bottom line is that in a free world, other people aren't forced to deal with your shit. When you treat them like crap, they leave.

Yea, those are pretty scarce resources and near impossible to find in any city. Or as the other replier noted, they could always use humans. Those always seem to be present in every city for some reason.

And I read your response to that replier:

I imagine it'd be something you could do in a lab ... which could be put in a cave or anywhere else they happen to be.

I love it. Very easy to route cables, great cooling, and it is shorter than a normal case (wider, but shorter). It is a great, great choice in my opinion.

If pot becomes legal in all states, I hope there are warnings on the marijana cigarettes like there are on tobacco cigarettes.

Is that as likely to cause cancer? It does seem like smoking anything is a bad idea, but perhaps tobacco has something that makes it more likely to develop issues...

However there's also another way to get MJ into your system, edibles. If you were using it for medical purposes a medicinal brownie seems like a more appealing application than does smoking...

They handle them fine, detecting when you use hand signals to indicate intentions

So, a driverless car that can't handle rain or snow or recognize a pothole is going to be perfectly safe around pedestrians and bicyclists?

O-kay....

Stop yourself. Nobody reading Slashdot today will live to see ubiquitous driverless cars.

I wouldn't exactly call it voluntary. For one thing, Qu'ran is pretty harsh on people who refuse to pay it when they have the means, to the point of calling such munafiq. For another, a state-administered system of collecting it (which was not voluntary) was in place from a very early time, since the second Caliph.

But, yes, the original intent was charity, and specifically a form of guaranteed basic income.

With jizya, yes, it was positioned as a monetary compensation for lack of armed service. On the other hand, the reason why armed service was not expected was also telling: non-Muslims were prohibited from owning and bearing weapons in general.

The Palestinian demands are to end the blockade and recognize them as a state.

No, the demands of Hamas (who runs Palestine now) are that every Jew be killed (it's in the written charter, that is not hyperbole). They include the right to keep all arms, including rockets, so they can continue to fire them at Israel.

Also in the demands are that Israel not be recognized as a star (they do not currently). If it's reasonable to recognize someone else as a state, then Hamas not doing so with Israel is obviously unreasonable - by your own definition.

It's just a shame that people like you do not actually look deeper to see what is going on. In now way is allowing Hamas to gather far more arms to attack Israel reasonable. That is the only thing that lifting the blockade would cause to occur. Food and medicine and other relief is already allowed to enter the country freely.

Actually false.

Well Actually We're Talking About This Year You Moron.

Are you seriously so stupid as to try and debunk something so widely reported???

If you call giving you simple facts "brainwashing" you don't understand what the word means. I'm the one with real links to real reports - the UN schools holding missiles was also well documented.

I really, *really* liked my late 1970's-era 6809 system. 64k of RAM, custom graphics and sound cards of my design, timers, serial port, multiple floppies. I thought it was getting old in the tooth (it wasn't, it still works, should have had more faith I suppose), so I wrote an emulator for it -- the entire system, hardware, software, a front panel (which the original didn't even have) everything. Still works great, but due to the increase in CPU power over the years, the emulator is one heck of a lot faster than the original hardware. You can use it too, if you're so inclined and you're running some version of Windows, XP or later (might still work under Windows 95 and/or 98 for that matter.) Includes various compilers (Dugger's c compiler, for instance), forth, assembler, cross-assemblers, linkers, basics, some arcade video games that used the graphics hardware, and probably the vast majority of the commands that were available for the DOS, which was FLEX09. Percom PSYMON monitor. If you ever wanted to play in a nice, safe assembler sandbox, it doesn't get any better than the 6809. It just gets faster and wider.

For linux, the answer is Midnight Commander. Between the very nice editor and the dual-pane do-lots-of-things text mode interface, it's still my go-to under linux, I even use it on the Mac. Thankfully, they've kept it reasonably up to date, although making a native mac version without inflicting a much broader *nix ports package on the system is a real pain in the butt.

For the Mac, I use both of the above, MC natively and my emulator under a VM running a network-isolated XP, and I still run a PPC version of my HP-48G, which, I'm afraid, has made any other calculator use not only pointless, but nearly impossible. I also have two of these calculators in hardware, both of which still work fine. Because Apple dropped PPC support at OSX 10.7, my daily driver machine still runs OSX 10.6 and is likely to continue to do so unless I can find a native version of the HP emulator for Mavericks. When I decided to move past OSX 10.6 (Mavericks is actually quite nice, finally), I bought a new machine and plopped it down in my ham shack.

Ham radio: Easy. My Palomar loop antenna. This tiny (about a cubic foot) antenna system has pluggable loops for 150-500 khz, 500-1700 khz, 1700-4000 khz, and 4000-15000 khz. I like to drag it out into the unimproved areas a few tens of miles from here where there are zero power lines, telephone cables carrying data, neon and other signage, plasma TVs, buildings and so on, and enjoy amazingly good, noise-free SW and amateur radio reception on the radio in my truck without having to set up a physically large and cumbersome antenna. I also have a Panasonic RF-2200 portable analog radio that I take on trips. Both of these are pretty old, tech-wise, but both remain in regular use and have stood the test of time very well indeed.

Music: A Marantz 2325 stereo receiver and a pair of Marantz HD-880 speakers. Not only does this setup sound nothing less than awesome, it eliminates the tedious menu surfing that more modern gear forces upon us. Everything's on a front panel knob. Everything. I have (very) modern gear in the home theater, but in my office, the old Marantz blue face remains king.

Lastly, I still have, and continue to play, a 1950's Fender Stratocaster guitar. I have a fair collection of more modern guitars, but the strat's neck is still the best of all of them. Luckily, for most of my life I've been a casual enough musician, and have spent enough time on other guitars, that I've not had to have the thing re-fretted. I don't look forward to that. I can't imagine it'll be the same. Of all the old stuff I have, this is the thing that has not only kept its value, but appreciated far beyond any dollar figure I could ever have anticipated. Not selling it, though. Ever. :)

Since I saw the Trade Center fall in person (not on screen) I am unable to go "La la la they can't strike us here" and believe myself. Nor do I believe that recent history predicts the future. The main players in Islamic State are far more radical than Osama ever was. Osama was one nasty piece of work who deserved killing, but he wasn't pure evil. His main goal was a "purer" Saudi Arabia without so much US influence. These fucks have as their goal an Earth purified of all who don't share their exact beliefs. Osama was dependent on funding primarily from his friends among the Saudi princes, who insisted on some degree of moderation especailly after 9/11 when they got back-channel messages that we'd come after them next if not; these fucks control their own oil fields, and depend on no other nation as long as they have markets for their oil.

We're can obliterate them now, while they're relatively local, or nuke 'em later, by which time they'll have cells trained and equipped throughout the First World. Our Iraq experience is not what we should be learning from. Iraq needed to be successfully occupied and turned around. We were terrible at that. Islamic State merely needs to be utterly destroyed. That's within our scope. Osama wasn't the threat we thought he was; these fucks are the threat we thought he was. We must abstain from restraint in their obliteration, unless we're ready to tolerate far worse in terms of terrorist attacks than 9/11 ever was.

I say this as a left-wing, pro-Palestinian admirer of Ghandi and MLK. The US might have done well to stay out of WW I, but if we'd stayed out of WW II the world would have been ruined. The US would have done well not to start Iraq War II, but if we hold back from a strategy for full victory over the Islamic State, civilization's odds are not good. If we leave them intact for long enough to attack us here - which they will - say goodbye to what's left of our civil liberties.

If you do that, you're just giving Russia the justification they needed to turn that kinda-sorta-cold-but-lukewarm war into a full out one.

The problem when calling bluff is that the other one can do it too. Do you thing you will get the necessary popular support for a war against Russia over some country most people never heard of? You still need some kind of Pearl Harbor to convince the people that this war needs to be fought. And after the 9/11 ruse, I think being convincing could be a tad bit difficult.

So the new cold war ain't democracy vs. communism but corporate state vs. national socialist dictatorship?

I wonder which is the lesser of the two evils...

Of all people, experts of the disease take precautions to avoid catching it themselves, when they do, its not a good sign.

Maybe. Then again, where I work it's the new guys who follow safety guidelines religiously, while those who have been there for a while can't be bothered because, after all, nothing's happened this far so it must be safe.

Experts are humans, and humans are notoriously bad at keeping their guard up with familiar things.

Drugs like this are what meddle in the affairs of intelligent parasites trying to shape and control populations.

Virii are not the least bit intelligent by any reasonable definition. And Ebola doesn't seem to be causing any evolutionary pressure except for a resistance to itself.

However, it seems this epidemic has exposed the lingering traces of Social Darwinism exemplified by your post, as well as - once again - demonstrated how they could be a fatal weakness if allowed to remain operative.