bluedanieru

Replace the Internet with a wireless meshnet. Problem solved.

How about the both of you rub those brain cells together and see if you can organize a cogent point. Otherwise, piss off.

Does it matter? I'm not debating the principles of the Constitution here, but rather the American focus on the document rather than the principles themselves.

Forget about the Constitution. Rather, they should respect basic human rights and the principles of the Enlightenment. All this focus Americans put on their Constitution makes it easier for their government to become oppressive, because it encourages complacency. As though you could write the perfect set of laws, that you could define the perfect set of operating principles for your government, and in that way free yourself of tyranny forever and guarantee a free and open society for you and all your descendants. No, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

There has never been a better time to be a mouse.

>because there's not enough investment in AAA games about something other than war, cowboys, football, cars. sorry, but it's true

Is that discrimination against women in gaming? It seems out of place.

That's not really in scope for choosing a voting system that best represents the people. But yes, point taken.

Yes, you bought them together, but you still bought them separately in the sense that you were not married to a particular CPU depending on the motherboard you purchased (although it can restrict your option to varying degrees, of course). Now you are stuck.

The bigger worry is if they start to shut out third-party MB manufacturers. I don't get why the author of the article assumes they will, however.

Whoops. Dexen got it. I mean, if you take the same set of criteria as before, less the requirement that they be a successful entrepreneur, what percentage of that larger group is married and with children? Without knowing that figure, the statement "60% of successful entrepreneurs are married and have kids" does not tell the story this (misleading, in my opinion) headline wants to tell you.

I do not mean "what percentage of the population is around 40, educated, and married with children?"

What percentage of people who are not successful entrepreneurs but fit the other criteria i.e. middle or upper-class background, 40 years-old on average, high academic performance, are married and with children? Is it more or less than 60%?

You're getting downvoted for willfully conflating two different terms in a game of semantics in order to muddy the waters in support of your argument, you arrogant little shit.

Because the right lessons are self-evident and if you can't see that then there isn't much point in bashing my head against a wall trying to explain that, no, the reason you failed in Afghanistan and Iraq and, for that matter, Vietnam, isn't because of some failed public relations campaign.

(But I'll give it a go regardless.)

It's because, regardless of intent, war is hell, and eventually everyone will know someone who has had an arm blown off as collateral damage, or they'll read about the fifth wedding ceremony this year to have been accidentally vaporized by a cluster bomb. Everyone will either have been directly affected by, or at least know someone directly affected by, the ongoing civil war instigated and perpetuated by a foreign power. I mean, can you imagine if the Chinese tried to do nation building the US? No matter how bad it were to get in the States, people would resent that and they would be right to.

And it doesn't help that the US has a well-deserved reputation, in the Middle East and elsewhere, of propping up failed states run by ruthless, brutal dictators. You have no moral high ground to claim. None.

But honestly, this is just a basic, common sense thing. Your military should engage the armed forces of other countries when those armed forces pose some existential threat to you. In no other case is it appropriate. If you don't already know this it's because you are willfully ignorant to it. So, please just fuck off.

>If the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people wanted the Taliban gone, and they had U.S. support, and we didn't fuck a bunch of stuff up, then of course we could have rid Afghanistan of the Taliban. If the Afghans legitimately trusted us, and supported us in large enough numbers, the Taliban would have had trouble finding even caves to hide in.

Ugh. I would be nice if Americans could start learning the right lessons from their past mistakes. Listen, I'm rather sorry to tell you this, but just fuck off. Please.

Are you suggesting this in addition to the above, or as an alternative? It is not an alternative.

Counterpoint: New York has a thriving black market in smuggled cigarettes.

When people say 'impossible' there is a mutually understood subtext of 'without going absolutely off the fucking rail to make it happen'. In order to stamp out the drug trade you need to:

* Render extinct-in-the-wild (or just plain extinct) a great many species of plants, fungi, and even a few animals, many of which have a rather large range and are difficult to kill.

* For whatever you miss in step one either because the precursors have legitimate uses we can't do without, or because we find we just can't kill them all, you need to tightly regulate and enforce a strict prohibition on those precursors in order to track who is doing what with what.

* Implementing the above step in a way that will really effectively reduce drug availability to nearly zero would require nothing short of global, endless warfare and a dystopian police state that would make Oceania look like - I don't know, Iceland? This is because some drugs are synthesized with very common materials and as such the only way to be sure no one is making them is to know what everyone is doing, all the time.

* To the extent you can't implement the previous step in full, you need to be sure the punishments meted out for failure to comply are especially harsh, so that enough people who think they can skate by under the radar are deterred.

* If you can do all this, you will drive the prices of drugs so high that the reward for manufacturing even a small quantity of something, provided you have the means to move the product, will definitely motivate people to try anyway. And if they achieve some success, they now have resources to fight you/bribe your allies.

So, doing the War on Drugs 'right', means giving up anything more than a pretense of freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, the cost of just legalizing the shit and treating addiction as a medical issue seems far less dire in comparison. When people say 'impossible' they mean 'impossible to do so in a way consistent with our values'.

Can you say the same for fighting fraud, speeding, and the sale of body organs? I think that you cannot.

He does have a point though, that they may get there eventually.

I don't think the cartels will disappear overnight, either. But they will see a large chuck of funding dry up, and it will then be easier to after them for their previous crimes as well as whatever they get into next.

The FDA would still exist, and would still have a job to do. You wouldn't be able to just sell literal poison in the supermarket alongside the oatmeal. The FDA currently classes items approved for sale into a broad number of categories: food supplements, medicines, etc., but there is nothing there for recreational psychoactive substances and there would probably need to be. The difference between that and the current regime I imagine would be that the focus is on the purity and relative safety of the product rather than 'does this have any medical use' because often it simply doesn't. And as a result of this some things would still be illegal, but it would be more about selling heroin that is only 20% actual heroin and the rest is who knows what, or selling something as marijuana when it's actually low-quality shit laced with PCP or whatever. Banning an entire class of a substance would be a rare thing, I imagine.

As to your second point, I think it's more likely that existing cartels would, in trying to transition to legal enterprise, find that running an actual business takes a set of skills that your typical pack of thugs just doesn't have, and you'd see some retaliation against legitimate suppliers who are kicking their ass on price and consistency. But unlike now where it's law enforcement taking on organized criminals with a shitload of money, they're taking on a husk of an organization that has seen its primary source of funding evaporate almost overnight. Different set of rules, there.

Honestly though I don't know what the cartels would do. It's hard to say. But one thing they wouldn't be doing is spending billions terrorizing innocent people, because they wouldn't have that kind of coin, anymore.

What you describe is basically what we're doing now, to the extent we're willing to fund it.

But instead of, you know, invading yet another country on the barest of pretenses, how about legalizing the drug trade, thereby depriving these cartels of their funding and, indeed, their very raison d'etre. The addiction problem you can solve within the health care and education systems, at far less cost (and much more effectively!) than waging a global, never-ending war on drugs.

Then, if you're up for it, after the members of the now-defunct cartels are weakened, you can go after them with the bullets. Should be much easier.

I mean, you say it right in your post: "long, ugly, and bloody for all parties involved". In fact what you describe is not a hypothetical at all, it is the existing War on Drugs. But then you just sort of dismiss that and continue on with your insane 'plan'.

>I would not tax them anymore then they are taxed allready.

This is something you hear far too much, as well. "Legalize them and then tax the hell out of them." It's a good way to find ourselves right back where we started: an illegal drug market (where the market is illegal this time rather than the drugs) which drives up crime.

By "drug-related crimes" are you referring to crimes of trafficking, or crimes committed while under the influence (because the perpetrator is under the influence).

For the former, I don't see how it could do anything but decrease. As to the latter, I suspect initially it would go up, but I don't think that would last. And, the drop off in crimes related to trafficking would more than make up the difference. Having said that, crimes related to trafficking do tend to be heavily concentrated into fewer areas, so the typical suburban white fear-loving voter would probably perceive that crime has gone up.

Why would I want a desktop where half of the thing has poor usability and loads of bugs?

Because I'm not an objectivist hack. Shame on HN for all the replies you've received. Your ignorant and wrong opinions do not deserve the air of legitimacy an honest discussion provides (and to be clear the honesty, in this case, is entirely one-sided).

I assume you mean using NZ as an experimental place with a view to then justifying expansion into the US on a larger scale, since you brought up Google specifically. As opposed to the EU or something.

I don't think that would work. Look at health care. There are multitude of good systems and mediocre systems, all around the developed world (and the developing, for that matter). There are plenty of example of what to do, what not to do, etc. And yet, you don't have to look too far to find people who are totally convinced that nationalized health care is a mistake, that it can't work, that it will bankrupt society, which all flies in the face not just of basic policy research and mathematics, but fucking real world examples.

And that is because American society does not give a shit what the rest of the world thinks or does, and they do not believe that the same rules apply to them, or that the experience of, say, the UK or Japan could ever apply to them. Certainly not NZ. You could have self-driving flying cars and ubiquitous networking in NZ and still Americans could give you infinite reasons why it will never work and is too expensive and also probably communism.

Now, for going NZ -> literally anywhere else, you have a good idea.

Vista got better right around the time W7 was released anyway, right? Both in terms of the OS itself as well as better support from third parties. I've always thought that W7, while a great operating system in its own right, also benefited from Vista acting as a sort of beta test for all the new shit they added like UAC and better separation of concerns. FWIW I had a Vista machine from a few months after release until W7 came out and I liked it well enough to consider it at least an improvement on XP.

Silencers in real life aren't like what you see in the movies. They are just enough to prevent hearing loss (usually) but that's it.

If you want to shoot something quietly, use a crossbow.

How the hell are you going to shoot the dog quietly?

>These toilets, known as “washlets”, have many amazing features - the most notable of which is they render toilet paper obsolete.

Uh, no they don't. And if the author is using them that way, that's fucking gross. If they rendered toilet paper obsolete then Japanese bathrooms wouldn't have toilet paper, or Japanese wouldn't use it anyway, but neither statement is true. The 'feature' of Japanese toilets is that your asshole will be clean, regardless of how dire the shit you just took is. And believe me, it's a wonderful thing, but it doesn't render the paper obsolete.

Pardon the pun, but this author is talking out of his ass.

So, Achilles never caught up with that tortoise, after all.

Yeah, and I know what they are, although I wouldn't describe generating a wallet on an offline PC and keeping it offline as 'very clever'. At any rate, after reading it again I think I confused what the parent was insinuating, so nevermind.