anthonyb

(tl;dr: if it's easy to script your game and win, your game design is busted)

Or basic arithmetic. 30,000 miles in a year is about 3 x 30 mile trips per day, every day.

"Libertarian or people pointing guns at you" is a false dichotomy.

Bullshit.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/civil-d...

Of course, shooting people over "legal action" sounds crazy, so to make yourself sound better you'd better keep talking about guns.

Edit: Here's a good example of the alternative to shooting people, from Bob Brown, former leader of the Greens here in Australia:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/as-...

a) it works, and b) if you can't find 1000 people who are also willing to come and protest, perhaps your cause isn't that worthwhile?

It's very much an i-win-you-lose mindset, I don't think it's really based much in reality and I'd rather not live anywhere near a society based on those principles.

Most people are not very even handed when they feel that their rights have been violated, so it tends to lead to escalation, and tribal/gang style violence, tit-for-tat.

It's much better IMO for a society to deal with disputes by legal means, not by stalking, harassing and killing each other, eg. if I shoot you in self defence, then that's 1 person's worth of productivity lost to the world, similarly if I harass you and threaten you at your home address (0.5 x PP?).

And yes, if you consistently violate other people's rights, or act with poor judgement, then you should lose rights. For example, if you're in the US and threaten people with a gun, you should lose the right to carry a gun, or the right to not be searched.

What you're ultimately talking about is terrorism - if you're a government employee, don't do bad things* or we might "predict" your death. The choice they're presenting seems to be either bad, violent actors in government, or bad, violent lynch mobs.

*Where "bad things" might be anything from "invading Iraq" to "free healthcare".

Public infrastructure was never particularly invested in, even under Labour, but now that the Liberals are back in (I'm in Victoria, so double Liberal for me) it's "jobs for the boys", more roads, more private health insurance, etc, etc.

http://abbotsinternet.com.au/ gives a good idea of just how bad the offerings over here are. And that doesn't show half of it. My internet drops on a regular basis, and if you call out a technician you will typically get slugged with a callout fee of $100 or so regardless. From... Telstra, because they run all of the phone lines, even though I want to get as far away from them as possible.

I set up a minefold instance for my daughter and her friends to play on, having previously spent time setting up and maintaining a custom server for her and her friends. Unfortunately, disputes between kids tend to escalate into all out war unless you can monitor and keep a lid on things, so Minefold wasn't the answer either.

  Some also caution that on the Verizon network, my 
  Nexus 7 will connect only if LTE is available; it 
  will not be able to fail down to slower speeds 
  as it could on other networks. True; that is how 
  my Chromebook Pixel works and I am willing to live
  with the limitation for the price.

Their point is that many children don't have that opportunity, since they're already well behind by the time that they start school. And a large part of the difference in school performance can be explained by differences in the students economic background and family life.

This doesn't square with the equal opportunity / everyone's equal that the US seems to be so fond of.

Which, thinking about it, is an even more condensed version of my argument above.

Competition is all very well, but if you're talking about the education of a country, you can't very well just chuck out half the students and/or schools because they failed the competition, particularly when the competition is "rigged" from the start:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/...

The basic issue for me is that western democracies and the US are founded on principles of equality (qv. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal).

If public education is left to rot (as well as transport and healthcare and everything else), but the rich are allowed to buy their way out, surely this is a subversion of the principles that your country is founded on?

Edit: wow, you've added a hundred links since I replied. Perhaps you could condense your point down into a couple of paragraphs?

There's a fairly large incentive for the US military / intelligence and its supporters to demonstrate that the leaks have killed people, or otherwise caused damage. If there were casualties, wouldn't we have heard about them by now?

Of course, I could be wrong, and there have been, but in operations which are classified, but I suspect that it's unlikely that there have only been casualties which are classified.

Compare that to the first-past-the-post systems of the UK and US, where there are essentially no minor parties with any hope of having a say.

As far as the Australian preference system goes, you have a choice when voting in the lower house: You can pick one box above the line, in which case your preferences will get distributed by the party that you voted for, or you can vote "below the line", in which case you get to vote however you like.

It seems odd to me too - I put it down to Australian laziness, ie. why number 60-odd boxes when you could back to the BBQ sucking back a few cold ones? :)

...

Er, is this supposed to be a news site? There's not a lot of actual news, but I can go and see what's happening at "Propwash Junction". Which isn't actually a real place but a Disney ad. Real news is at least two clicks deep.

Doomed!