I'm sure the polls are different when their asked to respond to the side effects of the ACA.

The one side effect Americans can't stand is someone getting something better than they deserve. Thus they have the government they deserve and not a tiniest bit better.

It is when it is visible because of the lack of ice that some of the global warming deniers will wake up. Maybe.

Not a chance. The nature of self-delusion is such that it becomes harder to admit the truth the more evidence you've ignored, especially when you've been vocal about it. People who have made fools of themselves by publicly speaking of international climate science conspiracies have a lot of incentive to keep believing in them. And of course there's still whatever reason - usually economic - that led them to start such games in the first place.

The more evidence is found, the more ridiculous assumptions are required to explain it away, and the more desperate the defence will be. It's the same with all communities of true believers. Unfortunately, this issue happens to have some actual impact on the world, so they can't be simply left alone in their fantasies.

we do need a baseline measurement.

Certainly. Then, and only then, will measurement of volume and rate acquire meaning. In the interim, statements like:

Even if it isn't a new development,

...and...

could be destabilising parts of the Antarctic ice shelf immediately around them and speeding up melting

...are no more than alarmist bullshit.

Now, next year (and years), when they measure those streams, if the aggregate volume is up, I'll nod in agreement when someone says "this could be a result of warming." Even more meaningful, if the trend continues upwards, we have an actual indicator. But right now we have the equivalent of "hey, here's a traffic signal" with absolutely no indication of if it's red, green, or broken.

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple

Sure but that idea was a touchscreen desktop computer.

When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs

When Apple announced the iPad there were a TON of pundits who said it was stupid and would never sell, lots saying it was a much worse platform than the Microsoft tablets...

But on shipping them people found they liked how it worked, and sales took off from there.

Kind of sad, really. Apple continues to gain marketshare and is making more money with it's 1 out of 8 people using Apple products than Microsoft is with 7 out of 8 using their OS.

Apple is making more money but still not a lot more than Microsoft, which still has huge revenues. But you have a good point that they are basically been perceived as losing for a while and they have to have been pretty inept to manage that when they could have had the phone and tablet market from the outset if they had done things right.

But I do not think it was possible for a company run by someone like Gates (and later Balmer) to ever really do things right. They just don't understand what right really is and so they wouldn't know how to ship it if they had it.

Lots of people have very expensive watches on their wrists and don't seem to worried about them getting damaged or catching hair.

Yes, those of us who have moved beyond watches have a term for them. It is "Idiot".

Do you like pocket watches?

Yes I do. It's called a "Smart Phone". And here in the 21st century the chain is optional!

If the shutdown is short, it's not a huge deal... but if it drags on, I wonder if her bank will defer her mortgage payments? Likely not...

Why is that likely not? Real banks do in fact do that all the time for people if you just call and explain the situation. Don't be an idiot and let the bank find out by surprise - talk to them early and ask for a deferment of some kind.

The son of a friend is a civilian helicopter mechanic attached to the base. He isn't "essential", so he's currently not working and not bringing in income.

You know what happens to people in real life when they are laid off, even if temporarily? They find another job.

Being a mechanic you'd think he could find some work pretty rapidly if he needed income badly. But possibly he has saved up, like everyone is supposed to (reserve is six months of income), and he's treating it as a break?

I don't feel sorry at all for either of your friends because by now you know what happens if you work for the government, it will shut down from time to time. My own wife works for the federal government too so it's not like I am not personally affected, but currently for her the tradeoff is worth keeping the job... but we are prepared for the shutdowns because we know at this point they will happen with some regularity. If you can't take it find a job in the private sector.

One other difference between the government and real life is that in real life the business usually just goes away, but you know the lumbering beast of the federal government will proceed, perhaps stumbling like now but it's not like the job will ever really go away. And that's why most of the people stay.

Or option c: I have had friends who got involved in the wrong people, and helped to get them out of it, with the help of law enforcement and a lot of time at a law library where, reviewing case after case of drug busts of all varieties searching for a technicality, I may have inadvertently learned a few things as well the good old fashioned way: With primary research.

Or option d: You made shit up earlier, and are now making up more shit to avoid admitting that. And the rest of your posts don't really suggest you have the capability of learning law on the fly. And even if you did, law enforcement isn't exactly famous for helping people get out of drug-related charges, or helping them research technicalities.

Friend Occam, what do you say?

I could not have stated your failure any more succinctly.

Losing to a non-native speaker of your language in eloquence of expression is not exactly something to brag about, now is it?

I have before worked for an employer who said he could not pay me for a while, but I should keep working.

That happened a few times over a few years. Eventually I got my money back but it took a long time and there was a significant back pay that floated for a year.

So knowing that was a pattern, what did I do? I left to find other work.

Government is NO DIFFERENT. If you are going to obviously be screwed over every time the Government needs to figure out a yearly budget (hint: they can't) or bump against the debt ceiling (hint: very often), then you need to LEAVE.

You didn't say if you were enlisted or not but it seems like not. Most people take government jobs because they are easier but if you are not liking this new tradeoff you need to leave, which is what every worker in the private sector would generally do... the mistake is thinking that delayed pay and worse is something that only happens to government workers during a furlough, because in real life it happens to people quite often.

I hope more government workers figure this out, and fast - and that it takes the shine of government work for others also.

I need the military.

The rest of government appears to be do-gooder Marxist social programs parasitically piggybacked onto what were originally good ideas.

And this, here, summarizes perfectly why things keep going to Hell. Emphasis mine.

Unfortunately you are overlooking a key piece of information: his status is determined under the Law of War, not under criminal statue. He can be held indefinitely as a prisoner of war, just as the Germans were in WW2 - at least until the conflict is over. No trial is necessary since it isn't a question of criminal law. That doesn't mean that he can't be tried, either for war crimes or criminal offenses under ordinary criminal law. Perhaps that will happen at some future date.

It is convenient when you can declare wars on abstract concepts and use those an excuse to kidnap and hold people indefinitely, yes. But it doesn't solve the problem: how do you know you're not next? Mere innocence won't protect you, since you'll never get to plead your case. So how will you keep the beast you've unleashed from turning on you?

But, for the sake of the record: The German war prisoners in WW2 were kept without trial for two reasons: 1) they weren't actually guilty of anything besides having lived in a country with conscription and a Nazi regime when said regime decided to go to war, and 2) there were hundreds of thousands of them, so it was not possible to arrange hearings for them all. Also, WW2 had a clearly defined and foreseeable end, after which they were let go - except those held by the Russians, who stayed in the camps for a long, long time. Stalin agrees with you in this too, comrade.

In summary, he can be held indefinitely, and it is perfectly legal and correct to do so.

In that case, it is also legal and correct to hold you indefinitely, should someone with a high enough position decide so. Perhaps you think you'll get lucky, or perhaps you think you'll be rewarded for licking their jackboots from early on. But I wouldn't count on that. A lot of Stalin's fanclub ended up in the gulags, after all.

If it's so 'obvious' that that is rape, as many people believe anyway, then an obvious result should follow.

And that's the problem right there - "many people" believe so. Do you want the conviction depend on whether the jury happens to believe something is morally wrong, or do you want it to depend on whether the law says it's illegal?

This is not hard to understand; prove that rape took place, and you have your conviction.

And that requires you to define exactly what "rape" means. Otherwise, you'll get two people who did the exact same thing with airtight evidence, yet one walks and the other goes to prison because two juries differ not on whether the accused is guilty but on whether what they're accused of is a crime.

I'm not asking for any such thing, and we have enough lynch mobs as it is.

"Asking for", as in "supporting a course of action that will certainly result in them becoming more prevalent".

Illogical pieces of garbage who supposedly want to 'protect' the children constantly try to get politicians to enact laws that infringe upon everyone's freedoms and the mob mentality has never been stronger, so your precious lynch mobs already exist.

And for all that, children still need to be protected. Either the law does so or their parents will, the latter leading to extrajudicial punishment of suspected and actual child molesters by lynch mobs.

Also, you're doing the exact same thing here that allows "think of the children" to be used as an excuse for anything: thinking with your gut instead of your head. No matter how much you hate "illogical pieces of garbage" the expected results of the actions you suggest - removing the concept of age of consent from the law, or leaving it undefined - do not change, and are quite negative.

I'm talking about the age of consent.

Which needs to be defined, for the reasons mentioned above.

Now, the President and both Houses do have some shared responsibility, as they did sign off on it, but that is in the same way that Linus Torvalds is responsible for errors in (say) Linux wireless card device drivers. Ultimately he signs off on the upgrade, but if you want to fix a problem in such low-level code you go to the guy who actually wrote the code in question.

So, how many updates has Linus signed off that, say, improved the scheduler and simultaneously made an unrelated alteration to wireless card drivers?

Now it is only a question of time till protesters start claiming he is innocent and should be released.

Well, if is outside the judicial system, he can't be given a fair trial, which means he can't be proven to be guilty, which means he's innocent as far as the law is concerned. And that, of course, means he should be released.

Alternatively, we could accept that he's guilty if someone powerful says so, but that has an obvious downside: how do you know you're not next?

Oh well. The US gave up due process with the War on Drugs, made it official with the opening of Gitmo, and has now made it the standard procedure. I guess Stalin won the Cold War afterall.

With all that said, yes it does look like an animal with no head or tail is running ass-first.

And now I'm imagining a horde of Goatse-inspired warbots charging the enemy ass first, making a drawn-out farting sound and attempting to entrap them in that gaping maw.

Thanks.

Yeah... because we've never had problems with adding a crapton of floating point and extra decimal places to math with computers before.

Bitcoin doesn't use floating point, it uses fixed point. From the computer's point of view it's all integer math (and the only operations are addition and substraction), which is completely precise, and only gets presented as a floating point number to the user for the sake of convenience. This wouldn't change should the current atomic unit (Satoshi) was replace by, say, nanosatoshis. And indeed, the Qt client allows you to change the unit of display.

Also, please note that traditional currencies do this kind of readjustments occasionally too, to keep the typical amounts in a range convenient to express without needing to use scientific notation. Altough it would had been better if the Bitcoin protocol would had been designed to do so automatically without needing interference - for example, if x% of transactions in the past n blocks are less or greater than some treshold, change the fixed point for the next one - just like difficulty is auto-adjusted.

Some of the greatest financial scams of our time were based on rounding and floating point errors.

Such as?

The idea that the currency can be "infinitely divisible" is not a selling point, it's a structural weakness.

Even if your earlier statement about rounding errors was correct, a more divisible currency would actually make them less severe than one that's limited to two decimal places. A rounding error of 1/100,000,000th gives a lot less room to profit from scamming than 1/100th, after all.