@Sutherlands said:
Truly worse than failure.Note to all the Americans on this list: everybody outside the USA hates the Republicans. And if you vote for them, we hate you too.
Just so that you know.
@Sutherlands said:
Truly worse than failure.Note to all the Americans on this list: everybody outside the USA hates the Republicans. And if you vote for them, we hate you too.
Just so that you know.
I can't imagine trying to put a shirt and tie on a cat. I'm surprised the shirt isn't covered in the blood of the poor soul tasked with that.
@morbiuswilters said:
[...] or Maltese adults are midgets.That's a pretty accurate description, in my view at least.
Good grief, don't tell me you also say "truck" or "semi", instead of the proper word, "lorry", like God and the Queen intend English to be spoken.
It's way bigger than it looks. Up to a height of about six feet 1.85m you have enough leg and head room, although you probably wouldn't want to sit three abreast then, except for short distances. I tried it myself and yes, as an average-height Dutchman I'm 1.85m. No problem sitting in the back.
Getting in and out of the car, that's a different issue, though. Although yesterday I drove my 77-year old mother-in-law and she managed, so hey.
@witchdoctor said:
@El_Heffe said:You could always outsource it. There are probably some areas in your town/city where this service is offered for a reasonable fee. But don't offshore it, because then the, um, let's call it "project", would get delayed considerably.Yes.I'm going with the less murderous option and started looking for something else. Better for my sanity that way.Shooting people solves the problem.
It fits three adults in the back and a supermarket trolley full of shopping in the boot (or 'trunk', as some misguided people call it). If it weren't remarkably practical for the kind of car that it is, I don't think my wife would have let me buy it.
Yes, people asked me, why don't you get a Nissan Juke? Because it looks like shit, that's why.
Ah yes, the Multipla. Apparently, it's a very well thought-out car. Unfortunately, they forgot that clever design doesn't equate visually pleasing design. Not even advertising with Michael Schumacher (six times Formula 1 champion) could help that. That Pontiac... I'd rather not comment.
Right now I'm driving this:
But with smaller alloys; mine are "only" 18". Looks a lot faster than it is, but seriously fun to drive.
@Snooder said:
I can never quite understand how europe can make the best looking sports cars in the world AND the ugliest POS "city cars" ever inflicted upon the eyes of an unsuspecting populace.Yeah, because Europe is this place where all car design is the same. No real difference between a Czechoslovakian Škoda and an Italian Alfa Romeo.
Strictly speaking, a Porsche 911 is a flattened Volkswagen Beetle. Both were designed by the same guy, and only relatively recently has the style of the headlights changed from the typical Beetle-look.
And designers go through phases. At the beginning of the century, for example, Renault had clearly lost the plot. The design of the 2003 Mégane was one of those love-it-or-hate-it things, but the Vel Satis was simply ugly from every angle. And until a few years ago, almost the entire BMW range was just ugly.
But if I look around, I can't really say that small European cars are ugly. That I wouldn't want to be seen dead in one is another issue, but really ugly? For ugly cars, I think the USA is still your prime destination (Hummer for example), closely followed by some of the weirder Japanese designs. With the exception of sports/muscle cars such as Corvettes and Mustangs, which look very nice indeed, I find American designs immediately forgettable.
@Douglasac said:
And poorly made vehicles.They built the best steam locomotive in the world. Which, in typical fashion, was highly embarrassing to the politicians and bosses, and so it remained just a single unit during its short lifetime.
We're all engineers here, but few of people can match the genius of André Chapelon. His life story would be very suitable for this site, in fact.
@dkf said:
@Severity One said:There have been a couple. The one from Halifax looks like the oldest one, although they had them in Ireland, Scotland and the Papel States (part of present-day Italy) as well.Actually, a lot of them got guillotined (one of the few French inventions that people remember these days).I thought that was a British invention (though later revised by the frogs).
The French, however, improved it considerably (and the Germans further perfected it), allowing executions on an industrial scale.
@morbiuswilters said:
Instead, you're the douchebag in the 18th century who was like "Why aren't you wearing a powdered wig? Powdered wigs show your status and are the right thing to wear." And those people all ended up tarred and feathered and shot in the face.Actually, a lot of them got guillotined (one of the few French inventions that people remember these days).
@morbiuswilters said:
Of course, who gives a shit? Anyone who decides to work at Apple is such a mouth-breathing dipshit that I hope they end up working in a leaky basement with asbestos walls.Interesting. An old friend of mine works at Apple, and his sarcasm and cynicism remind me of, um, let's say some people that frequest this site.
@Ronald said:
That's a fact, my friend who has TWO PhD from a slightly more prestigious university than the ETH in Zürich told me so.Which university would that be? Because there aren't that many.
@Ronald said:
Also he's not a whiny name-dropping pussy so he's got more credibility than someone with a proven history of not having his own opinions who's expecting that quoting unknown and uninteresting people that he admires will bring any kind of weight to his posts.Well, let me tell you a secret. There are these tools on the internet, called "Google" and "Wikipedia", with which you can read up on the subject, which in fact I did. He helped me on the way, but if you could get your head out of your own arse for a second and look these things up, you'd see that C++ is pretty much the only thing when it comes to HPC.
Not that I'm happy with that; I too hate C++.
@blakeyrat said:
@Severity One said:Well, the PhD is relevant to the subject matter, 3D imaging, if I remember correctly.Said friend has a PhD from the ETH in Zürich, so I trust his word quite a bit more than someone with a proven history of making a fool of himself on this site.Since when do PhD's know how to write software?
@Ronald said:
@Severity One said:Wanker.I've conversed with a friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about the subject, and it comes down to specific compiler optimisations and libraries to use stuff like CUDA.
Hearsay.
Said friend has a PhD from the ETH in Zürich, so I trust his word quite a bit more than someone with a proven history of making a fool of himself on this site.
@morbiuswilters said:
@blakeyrat said:And high-performance computing. I've conversed with a friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about the subject, and it comes down to specific compiler optimisations and libraries to use stuff like CUDA. You're not going to manage that with, say, Java.If you broke ground on a new project in 2013, and chose C++, and were under the age of 75, I'd seriously question your sanity.The one place it seems to make sense is in high-end 3D games.
@Zecc said:
I have mixed feelings about i++.I have mixed feelings about C++. No, actually, that's not true. I hate it with a passion.
Ah, forgot to mention this:
@snoofle said:
On Friday afternoon, [...]
The golden rule in our business is to never, ever, unless forced at gunpoint, do a deployment or task on Friday afternoon.
@snoofle said:
re the 70+TB: it's not just one customer info table; it was a set of very Very VERY large tables, and no, there isn't a way to just pick out individual records from a backup; they need to restore it by table, then pick out what they need from the temp restored table back into the main table. Effectively, they need to restore the whole database just to retrieve one customer's data. The really stupid part is they don't have enough space to restore the whole thing, so they have to do it one table at a time. The means that while the restore is going on, some tables have sensible data and some don't. All while the system is live to customers (all of whom had to be informed that their queries would produce "interesting" results for a week or so until it could be straightened out). A total fiasco.The answer is probably going to be "no", but isn't there someone, somewhere high up, who figures that things aren't really working? That, at a certain point, keeping the mess you have (and from what I understand, the design of the database has quite a few issues) is a bigger liability than starting with a clean sheet and slowly migrate everything to there?
@morbiuswilters said:
For example, put the database on a big SAN and then take periodic snapshots. You can restore one of those in a hurry since it's all online and copy-on-write.Our SAN has gone down a couple of times (and it's not exactly like we bought the system from the DPRK). We're past the stage of cynical jokes; joking about the SAN is a bit like joking about a recently deceased family member (i.e. you'll get some nasty looks).
@edgsousa said:
@snoofle said:That's what I was thinking. From the stories, it would appear that letting a bunch of chimps administer the database would be both cheaper (basically, the cost of installing some trees and giving them daily fresh fruit) and offer superior service.Unfortunately, they already fired the primary DBA for incompetence, and his boss quit in frustration. If they fire this guy, there will only be two DBAs left.Taking in account the wtf's you told us, why is unfortunate to fire DBAs?
@DrPepper said:
Is it just me, or does it seem that TDWTF is becoming more NSW??I'm struggling to think why you believe that this site is becoming more and more like New South Wales.
@dhromed said:
Moments like that are when I put my hands on the desk, push myself back, and don my thousand-mile stare all the way to the coffee machine and back.That's a serious distance to go for just a bit of coffee. Can't they move it a bit closer; say, in the next state?
@blakeyrat said:
I mean, people criticize Microsoft for not productizing their R&D programs very well, but at least Microsoft DOES EVENTUALLY GET AROUND TO IT. Most of the time.I'm still waiting for the Kinect/Office/IE integration, so I can literally give you guys the finger without having to type something rude. Maybe one day.
@TGV said:
Did the conspiracy to slowly introduce Y2k1 problems already start?At a guess, all of use would be either dead or at the very least retired, so it's not a huge problem. For us at least.
"Gramps! Gramps! You have to fix the Y2k1 problem! The world will come to an end!"
"Huh? What's that? You have to speak up, junior. My ears are not what they used to be."
[Cue:horrified looks as outside, mushroom clouds start rising into the sky]
@The_Assimilator said:
[...] originally written when Hibernate was still new and cool.Does that mean it's no longer cool? Every man and his dog appears to be using it. Well, that would kind of make it no longer cool, I suppose.
@GNU Pepper said:
There needs to be a book about programming [...]I've been thinking of writing such a book for years. A book that doesn't go into such things like polymorphism, recursion or other such complex subjects, but instead focusses on common sense, which unfortunately is very uncommon when it comes to programming.
How's your grandmother, by the way?
@Zemm said:
For some reason the print "Content-type: image/png\n\n" is being output after the image data even though it's the first thing in that file.That's because ou're doing it wrong.
It wouldn't have anything to do with flushing buffers, right?
@realmerlyn said:
Sadly, in a workshop, I saw Guido van Rossum doing precisely this... testing the class of an object, then calling a distinct method based on that.Actually, I'm doing something very similar in my code. SImilar, but not the same.
This is a library that scans an interface with getter methods, and returns an object that extends BaseProperty
. There is an IntProperty
, StringProperty
, QNameProperty
, and even an EnumProperty
. Then there's an InvocationHandler
that returns the value of the property, read from a properties file. If you invoke a method on the interface, the InvocationHandler
kicks in and returns the value of the property, stored in a Map
.
I don't think that there's an elegant work-around with polymorphism, because I'm using Class
objects that come directly from the return type of a method and have nothing to do with instances of objects, or with primitives.
@morbiuswilters said:
@Severity One said:Actually, the guy is very smart, and did some pretty interesting things in libraries. But only with things that interested him, and actual work wasn't one of them.Arguably, you can return an error message in an exception, explaining perhaps why he chose that.since he was also too lazy to returnnull
if an object was not found, and instead threwjava.lang.Exception
return null;
is less work thanthrow new Exception("blah blah blah blah");
. So arguably, he wasn't lazy, just incredibly dumb.
One particular library I'm thinking about accessed a database that had
absolutely no constraints, whether integrity constraints or check
constraints. Let's call it unfamiliarity with SQL.
He was also fond of static structures, because -you guessed it- they're less work to use. That they create a whole of of other issues, well, tough. I'm still trying to eradicate static structures from our code... because we've also had developers who grouped methods based on neatness, in other words how nicely they looked next to one another, and got around the inevitable mess of dependencies by using statics.
I think I'll stop now; I find it difficult to talk about these issues.
@snoofle said:
[...], so they prioritized everything.This is what we say at work: if everything is high priority, nothing is high priority. The non-engineers find this concept a bit difficult tro grasp; they think that if something is made high priority, we start working harder, or time moves slower, or something of he sort, so that it gets finished earlier.
It takes a while to explain that we're really can't devote more time to development, what with having to check Facebook and play Candy Crush, and we also haven't found a way to bend time without significantly raising the budget.
@zelmak said:
How often have you had to put up with this kind of crap?You can do the same with exceptions. We've had a developer who simply was too lazy to use any other exception than
java.lang.Exception
. (He was also too lazy to use Subversion. Guess who's maintaining his code these days. Wheee!)The result is that you end up with instanceof
in an exception handler, or parsing the detail message (since he was also too lazy to return null
if an object was not found, and instead threw java.lang.Exception
).
So how often exactly, I don't know. But more often than I care to remember.
@morbiuswilters said:
So if people were suicide bombing your home, launching rockets into your cities and trying to murder you, your reaction would be? To walk over and ask them to be nice? Yeah, they've sent in tanks, because it's a dangerous fucking situation and because they shouldn't have to risk their lives any more than necessary to stop someone who is assaulting them. And if someone is dumb enough to throw rocks at a tank when that tank is there to hunt down terrorists, they fucking deserve to be blown to fucking hell.The little detail that you're forgetting is that people had been living in Palestine (the historical region) for nearly 2000 years when the Jews came and kicked them out of their villages. It's not like there was an Jewish majority; the Romans took care of that. Jews lived all over the world after 70 AD, particularly in eastern Europe, where they were more or less systematically persecuted. Until 1939 and Operation Reinhard began, and the progroms of old all of a suddenly looked relatively benign.
I am continually amazed by the restraint the Israelis have shown in the face of overwhelming violence, aggression and terrorism. If it was me, after the first round of terrorism I would have given 48 hours notice to get the fuck out, then bombed the whole fucking shithole until it was nothing but dust.
What you're claiming is that the European settlers into the New World were absolutely right to kill the natives, because land-grabbing is absolutely no reason to get all upset about. Just move your village up the mountain, right?
As for the restraint, Palestinian casualty figures tend to be a factor of 20 to 40 higher than Israeli ones, so this "restraint" you're mentioning isn't all that obvious.
Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. Israel does not, however, have the right to continue grabbing areas on the West Bank, just because it's written in their Holy Book. Once they stop doing that, there might be a chance of normalising relations somewhat.
Oh, and they must hope that there won't be another Arab Spring. Because that would be very bad for them.
@maja said:
The code is equivalent to:No it isn't.public LogRecorder startLogRecording() { assert recorder==null : "recorder was already started..."; recorder = new LogRecorder(); return recorder; }
@morbiuswilters said:
Until then, Europe can shut their fucking hypocritical mouths.Huh? Remind me again which country has invaded the most other countries since WW2. Let's see... the Sovier Union invaded Afghanistan, but then again, so did the rest of the world. And several countries in Asia, Africa and the Balkans invaded one another, but nobody really cares about those. Most recently, Russia invaded Georgia.
And of course, the USA invaded several Carribean micro-nations (which was generally a success, given the imbalance of power) and several larger nations such as Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan (which would be a bit more difficult to be called a success).
The main difference between Europe and the USA is that we don't have a powerful Jewish lobby here. The reasons for that are simple: about half of the Jews were exterminated during WW2, and a lot of them migrated to Israel after the war. So there aren't that many left.
Also, the sympathy of Europeans was squarely with Israel, until about the time of the first Intifada. It started shifting after that. Because it had become clear that yes, we had been very mean to the Jews during the war, but now we saw tanks against teenagers throwing rocks. Somehow, the fight didnt seem fair, and we all know who gets the sympathy in an unfair fight.
The Palestinians were clever enough to move away from terrorism (devoiding them of any sympathy) to portray themselves as victims. Whether this is accurate or not isn't even that relevant: it's what the general public believes. Israel did its part to become the bogeyman, such as pulling down the houses of the families of suicide bombers. In other words, collective punishment. There's a word for it: Sippenhaft. Three guesses from what language that word comes, and when last it was widely employed.
What kind of screwed it all up for the Palestinians was al-Qaida and other fundamentalist terrorism. It gave Muslims in general a bad name, and the image of some Palestinians celebrating after 9/11 didn't do their cause a lot of good either. So now we're in a situation where we're not supposed to like the Palestinians, we're not supposed to like the Israelis either, and this is all terribly confusing.
I don't expect people like you or Boomzilla, who've repeatedly shown to have entrenched opinions about this, that, and the other, to change your point of view. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a very complex one, and can't be brushed off with "these are the good guys and those are the bad guys". You may choose a side, sure, but you'll accomplish nothing.
The Europeans don't choose a side in the conflict. They maintain close ties to Israel (certain countries closer than other) and try to maintain good relationships with the Palestinians. The general view in Europe is also that the constant deprivation of and land-grabbing from Palestinians by the Israelis in occupied territories makes a peaceful solution to the conflict increasingly difficult. And that's why you'll see those labels, because nobody recognises the land-grabbing – not even the USA under various administrations.
@skotl said:
Just looking at From Three Days to 15 Minutes and wondered whether there have been many cases in the past of the original WTFer recognising his/her code and freaking out on these fine pages?No, but I do recognise certain anti-patterns. Like the Abstractor, I had the tendency a few years back to make everything an interface, and then provide a factory that gave you an implementation of that interface, even if there was no need to abstract. "Future expansion", sure.
Sometimes I still do some seriously complex stuff, like configuration objects that get automagically loaded and parsed from a configuration file, with a lot of reflection under the bonnet. But then it would be in a small library that is used by all of our applications, and it removes the need for configuration file parsing in our applications, and provides a consistent interface for both developers and support teams. The end result is greater overall simplicity.
In my view, software should be simple. If it's not simple, you have to split it into several smaller, simpler parts. If you can't, you have to seriously ask yourself whether you're on the right track.
So now you're complaining that Solaris doesn't use the GNU set of tools? It comes with its standard set of commands, that comply with an older "standard" than GNU. GNU has just added extra flags and alternative ways of writing them (such as "--verbose" vs "-v").
And if this is a problem, you just install the GNU tools, which Sun happily supplies to you.
A more basic problem with the GNU tools as you find them in Linux is that /bin/sh is not the Bourne Shell, but bash (Bourne Again Shell) instead. Which makes people write scripts that have #!/bin/sh as their first line, but are in fact bash scripts. Very nice (not) for portability, for example if you transfer a script to Solaris.
Oh wait, I forgot, it's all Solaris' fault. Right.
@Ronald said:
[...] if you are into weird stuff like bouncing grapes on bosoms while wearing a bugs bunny costume [...]I swear, that photo was a PhotoShop job. It wasn't me.
@morbiuswilters said:
I hate GM, but I do like Germany.Well, even though I ordered a German car (built in the UK; my Renault was built in Turkey, which explains a thing or two), German cars have a bit of an image problem:
@morbiuswilters said:
I really miss my last car. It was extremely reliable and fun to drive. It had weird gas mileage, though: something like 13 MPG city / 30 MPG highway, which is very lop-sided.What car was that?
@morbiuswilters said:
@Severity One said:I was talking about that, yeah. But when we actually went to the dealer/showroom, they were so unprofessional and so rude, that we just left. (The 12 years of terrible service were a factor as well.) Apparently they're the only dealer who are not suffering from the economic crisis, or from the massive imports of second-hand cars from the UK and Japan. Maybe because they're cheap, but that's not surprising given that the only colours you can get are various shades of excrement, the ubiquitous white and black, and "Malta Blue" which is a colour that manages to look bad in the showroom.So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my new car...Was it that Renault you were going on about awhile back?
So instead I got a bright red Opel Astra GTC. It should make you happy: it's a General Motors car designed in Germany.
@morbiuswilters said:
@Severity One said:Indeed. Could be worse: in the Netherlands, it's more like €1.80 a litre. But as said, distances are short, so I don't care that much. I still put in €50 every two weeks.Incidentally, petrol costs around €1.50 per litre here.You son of a bitch, where do you live, Qatar??
Edit: Nevermind, liter.
@TDWTF123 said:
@Severity One said:No no, women love driving small cars, because they're easier to manoeuvre. For men, they prefer cars that put style over practicality, because it reminds them of the clothes they wear and the sacrifices they have to make.If you want a trulyA common
environmentally friendly car, or more accurately, one that harms the
environment the least, you'd have to get a tiny car with a three
cylinder diesel engine, or something of the sort. But you look like a
dork in one, if you fit in it in the first place.
misconception. Women love men in tiny cars. Small cars are cool.
In the case of the woman I'm married to, she loves it, particularly that it's red. And I like it because it isn't bland. Everybody is driving a bland hatch, or crossover, or something really practical. Well, I've driven an extremely practical car for the past 12 years, but that also has the sex appeal of a dead fish. I wanted a car that puts a big smile on my face. Never mind that Opel's sportier models, particularly the Manta, are associated with chavs.
@TDWTF123 said:
@Severity One said:Well, we got rid of the old buses, which were hand-built by shipbuilders on top of old army truck chassis, the oldest actually dating back to the 1930, and replaced them with Arriva buses. Most of the buses are brand new, made in China and of the high quality standard we associate with that country, in Arriva's pleasing colour scheme of Puke Beige and Decomposition Turquoise.So somewhere next week I hope to pick up myI've seen how
new car, which basically had two criteria: (1) full marks in the
EuroNCAP (the European version of NCAP) crash tests
the Maltese drive. That makes perfect sense.It's a long time since I was in Malta, but from what I remember isn't it
actually somewhere that's perfect for public transport, if only you had
a decent system?
The driving is not that bad. There's actually a driving test now that involves more than driving once around the block, and driving style has improved over the past 12 years, not in the least because the infrastructure is so lacking and snaking between the various ever-expanding localities, all built with absolutely no holistic vision, that you can't drive fast anywhere. Fancy that, we even have speed cameras these days.
And with all those cars, and buses stuck in traffic, and the terrible layout of the roads (I'm not talking about the quality, which has improved as well), the one thing that might improve public transport is some sort of mass urban transport system, but the cost of that would easily incrase the national debt by 50%.
But admittedly, my obsession with full marks for crashs tests comes from an incident where someone decided to just drive off and make a U-turn, during rush hour, when I was driving downhill on a road with slippery tarmac. I had been looking at all four spots where a car might come from at that intersection, but alas not at someone who decided to drive off during rush hour without checking his mirrors first. My car was never the same after that.
@cdosrun said:
I'm waiting for someone to jump on me for owning a hybrid, since so many seem so dead set against electric cars.Personally, I have my doubts about hybrids. However, I have absolutely no doubts about electric cars: they suck and they have about as much future as does Zionism in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To give you an idea: I live on an island. If you take it easy, you can drive from one end to the other in less than an hour. On face value, this would be the ideal situation for electric vehicles, since all distances are short. However, even here it's difficult to drive one.
This island has the 7th highest population density in the world, and the 5th highest car ownership ratio. This means that there are really a lot of cars here, and not everybody has a drive with their home (most people haven't), or can even park in front of the house, and therefore it's often not feasible to charge your car overnight. Which kinda makes electric vehicles useless in the one place where they would seem to make most sense.
If you want a truly environmentally friendly car, or more accurately, one that harms the environment the least, you'd have to get a tiny car with a three cylinder diesel engine, or something of the sort. But you look like a dork in one, if you fit in it in the first place.
So somewhere next week I hope to pick up my new car, which basically had two criteria: (1) full marks in the EuroNCAP (the European version of NCAP) crash tests and (2) looks, with an upper price limit of €25,000. Practicality, performance, fuel consumption and other things were important, but not as important as those two.
It's not a hybrid and it's most certainly not an electric. It has a relatively modest 1.4L turbo engine and consumption is reasonable. (Incidentally, petrol costs around €1.50 per litre here. 10 years ago, it was less than half the price.)
I'm pretty sure that my next car (probably 10 years from now) will rn on something other than petrol (gas), but I'll worry about that when it happens. Let's see what the manufacturers manage to come up with, perhaps something with hydrogen.
@morbiuswilters said:
And 99% of holistic healers believe crystals prevent cancer.Well, if I may interject an anecdote... A old friend of mine (we're talking easily 20 years ago) had some health problem affecting him. Doctors couldn't find what it was, and at long last, his girlfriend convinced him to go to a magnetic healer. Now she was probably a lot more into these things than he was; he was the absolute opposite of that. Studied physics at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, to give you an idea.
The magnetic healer waved some little bottles about and declared that my friend was sensitive to sugar. He switched from sugared soft drinks (which he drank in great amounts) to diet ones, and his health problems ceased to be.
The morale of this story is that just because something looks like absolute BS, and just because you don't believe in it, doesn't mean that it's not true. Personally I think that putting hands on people and waving little bottles about is as valid a medical procedure as is bein burned at the stake, but it did solve his problem. Something to think about.
@morbiuswilters said:
No, it's still a fallacy. Your argument should be based on evidence and reproducible results, not an appeal to authority.That's not quite how science works. The scientific method is to come up with a hypothesis, possibly not too outlandish, and then try to disprove it. If you don't manage to disprove it, you might be on to something. Might.
Because you can't prove everything with evidence and reproducible results. One example is the evolution theory, and the difficulty in proving it is what gives the creationists and "intelligent designers" (a misnomer if I ever heard one) their ammo. Same goes for large parts of astronomy. I mean, "dark matter" and "dark energy". It means that because their calculations don't add up, there must be something that they can't measure. So does that means it's all nonsense? Hard to say, really.
When it comes to climate change, again it's difficult to prove. Repeating the experiment is definitely not an option. But just because it's difficult to prove, and because it's almost impossible to predict what the outcome will be (people in Greenland love it; people in low-lying Pacific island states will drown), doesn't mean it's not true.
And what if it is true? People in NewYork wouldn't take kindly to you if their city flooded just because you insisted that you need to drive a 18 foot SUV just to get to the mall and back.
And what definitely isn't helping is the unsubstantiated "it's all nonsense and scientists are wasting my hard-earned money" that has featured quite prominently in this thread.
Every time I see the initials of Richard Matthew Stallman, I think of Royal Mail Ship, as in "RMS Titanic".
@Sutherlands said:
Well, you're certainly correct in that giving guns to bad people makes you less safe. Also, taking them away from good people makes you less safe. And anyway, as boomzilla stated above, this has nothing to do with the gun laws. There are many reasons for our homicide rate (which is declining), the number one factor in my mind being the "War on Drugs." If we legalized some drugs and treated them as a health issue instead of a criminal issue, it would do oh-so-much for our country and our prison population.Yeah, like there aren't any drugs in Europe. And as a Dutchman, I can tell you that the half-legalised status of marijuana has led to an increase in crime, because now every man and his cousin is growing the stuff in his attic (which is illegal) and it's controlled by organised crime. Not that I think that marijuana is dangerous; certainly, less dangerous than alcohol. I still think it should be banned completely, but that's a personal opinion and I have the same stance about tobacco.
@Sutherlands said:
For statisitics and guns, you can't just say "this country has lax gun laws and much more murders than this other country." You have to look at the effect the laws have had. You also can't just look at "gun crime"... you have to look at all the crime. If we got rid of all guns and completely eliminated gun murders, but our number of total murders doubled, it wasn't worth it. So looking at the UK and Austrailia, 2 countries that basically completely banned guns... their crime rate went up. So they were each a safer country when they had guns. Even within the US, you look at all the places that have high murder and crime rates, and they're generally places that have banned guns.But what is the cause, and what is the effect? Were guns banned because of high incidence rates, or is there a lot of violence because of the bans? Without any second thought, you make a link between the two, and choose cause and effect based on your personal preference. There is a connection between private gun ownership and murder rates. And no country have such a proliferation of guns as the USA does.
Also, looking through some articles and statistics to be found on the internet, I find absolutely nothing that corroborates the claim that crime rates in the UK and Australia would have consistently had higher crime rates after abolition. Im fact, one of the first articles you find is that crime has been going down in the UK over the past decade, and that it's safer that most of western Europe.
So I call BS on that.
@boomzilla said:
Alright, you really are that dumb. So what happens when someone decides to violate your life and / or security of person? Who secures that right? Can you tell the difference between initiating the use of force and using it to defend yourself? For that matter, is it also not acceptable for anyone else to use force to defend these rights? Parents defending children? Police defending anyone (not that this is normally what police do)?Is this something typical American, that you need to start insulting people when trying to push a point?
You have the right to defend yourself in Europe. You just don't have the constitutional right to carry weapons. If someone threatens my child, and I grab a nearby brick and beat him to death, I'm guilty of the killing, but am very unlikely to be prosecuted. Under Dutch law at least (I don't know how it is in other countries), you may use disproportionate force if you are under great duress. Like, when someone threatens to murder your child, even with no weapon in evidence.
@boomzilla said:
If someone murders someone else, and you put them in prison, by your logic, this is an unacceptable violation of his right to liberty. Also, it was the murdered person's duty to the murderer to not interfere with the murder's life and security of person.You need to learn to read. What I claimed at first was that "right to life" was not a basic human right, and later corrected that by quoting the relevant article from the UDHR. I was not arguing the point of the UDHR. For someone who complans about logical fallacies, you're making an awful lot of your own.
@boomzilla said:
And if history (ancient and recent) teaches us anything, it's that governments are often the biggest violators of those rights.So... because we can't (or couldn't) trust certain governments, we can't trust any government?
@boomzilla said:
Good lord. The murder rates in America have pretty much always been higher, including when other places had guns. Since legal gun ownership is increasing, and gun crime is going down, how does that work with your theory? Also, the places in the US with stricter gun laws tend to have more gun crime, not less.There are no strict gun laws in the USA. You have a constitutional right to them, after all. "Strict gun law" means that you cannot have a gun, period, unless you come up with a very good reason, get cleared by the police and/or security services, and get personal permission from the relevant minister, or something of the sort.
Please explain why the USA has such higher murder rates than Europe.
@boomzilla said:
If I wanted intelligent discussion, I wouldn't be engaging with people whose brains turn off when they see the word "gun."Well, so far you've been the one resorting to personal attacks, referring to dictatorial regimes, and avoiding to answer questions. But I suppose that intelligent discussion is not required, because the guy with the gun is always right, isn't he?
@Sutherlands said:
@Severity One said:Because all over Europe, spending is cut and taxes are raised.Did you fix the budget yet?Because nobody in Europe is having a budget crisis?
Whether it helps anything, that's another issue. I'm inclined to say "no, because they're the same bunch of incompetent morons as everywhere else".
@BC_Programmer said:
I've always liked how the Arkis like a quarter of the size of the Titanic. I'm not sure you could fit two of every animal on the Titanic either.Well, obviously he wouldn't have to take any fish or aquatic mammals, which already removes a very percentage part of all animals. Insects aren't very big either, which is another big slice.
And finally, he didn't need to take all animals that we know today. Never heard of evolution? Sheez.
@boomzilla said:
@Severity One said:Nah, it's a matter of me not doing my homework:Right to life? That's not a basic human right, at least not in the USA. Because you have the death penalty, whereas all of Europe (with the sorry exception of Belarus) does not.Now you're being stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is deliberate.
https://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Article 3: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."
Still, it's a bit of a stretch of explaining this into needing a gun (with which you can shoot and kill another person) to defend your "security of person". Because you violate the exact same article.
Also, it's typical of Americans not to trust their government, and wanting to have control (or at least, be under the illusion that they have) of their lives.
So let's look at statistics then. In terms of development, you can probably compare the whole of the USA with the whole of Europe, while noting that Europe would have an generally lower level of development. Still, if you compare murder figures between Europe and the USA, you'll see that the USA has a murder figure of around 4.8 per 100,000, eastern Europe (lots of poverty and lawlessness there) 6.5, northern Europe (lax gun laws) 1.5, southern Europe (generally poorer, includes the Balkans) 1.4, and western Europe (rich, highly developed, strict gun laws) 1.0.
I'm not saying to compare South Central to Kensington, or Ukraine to New Hampshire, but you can't explain that pretty huge difference by demographics alone. The lax gun laws and the inevitable proliferation of guns to those who are not honest, upstanding citizens, make your life less safe.
@boomzilla said:
@Severity One said:I have to admit that I really have no idea what point you're trying to make here.I understand the American system of government quite well. And I think it sucks.Clearly, you don't understand it. The original point was to give the government power to do certain things. Unfortunately, much of the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments) reversed this, and are written as explicitly denying government certain powers. This has made many people confused, thinking that the government has the authority to do whatever, so long as the Constitution doesn't forbid it (which has and still is the way most governments are).
@boomzilla said:
@Severity One said:It's a bit sad that you resort to an 'ad hominem' attack, whereas you complain about a 'non sequitur' just a few messages later.So many checks and balances that you never get anything done.That's the whole point. Sadly, they don't always work. I guess you don't care, so long as the trains run on time.
For your information, it's a common myth that Mussolini made the trains run on time. And if you were thinking of Germany, they still don't manage to have their trains run on time to the present day (although arguably not as bad as the Italians).
@boomzilla said:
@Severity One said:I'll let that pass, because it doesn't quite invite to intelligent discussion.Did you fix the budget yet?Nope. There's another case of checks and balances not working. I thought you said we never get anything done. We sure get a lot of spending done. Does the cognitive dissonance hurt much?