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Comment Re:Tragedy is not a sufficent reason for liability (Score 2) 111

Judas Priest was sued in 1990 because the parents claimed the band had planted suicidal messages in one of their songs that led to a suicide pact.

Angry grieving parents will often lash out at a convenient external cause, in part so that they don't have to face the reality that the odds are more likely they were an agent in the suicide.

Comment Re:So this is illegal (Score 1) 153

When will people marry his declarations and musings with the fact that he's marching Federally-controlled troops into cities to "fight crime". What the hell does everyone think is going to happen in next year's mid-terms when armed forces loyal specifically to Trump with little or no objection from Congress or the Supreme Court starting "guarantee" a "fair vote".

Everything he and the Republicans have been working towards since the claims of Obama's ineligibility has been preparing for the moment when they move in to seize control of state voting apparatus. He'll do what he's done with everything else and claim it's a "national emergency."

And MAGA will cheer while the Democrats put on their sackcloths and roll around in the dust crying about how they were impotent. The American people have chosen, they want tyrants who rule by fiat, engineer and weaponize crises to entrench their power.

The political system the Framers came up with was always a steaming pile of crap. Bagehot pulled apart deftly in the 1860s, explaining that the only thing that made it work was the "American genius for politics". Well, that's done. The Democrats are frozen in place, the Republicans, ruled by oil barons and sociopathic billionaires, intend on building a dictatorship with the shape of the American republic, but where checks and balances once existed, will be impotent paper tigers.

Comment Re:Government should not own businesses..?? (Score 1) 104

The first stage of the revolution is to keep a cordial relationship with the Mensheviks. We're all on the same team. We're hear to overthrow that rotting edifice of the old order and create a stronger, better society, with a government truly representative of the people. We're all a big tent, and can accommodate differences of opinion.

The second stage of the revolution requires the sidelining of the Mensheviks. Yes, they have their objections, but those objections are mainly spurious, perhaps a little too influenced by moderate opinions. It's understandable, revolutions have casualties, and not everyone has the stomach for the hard fight. Objections will be duly noted and recorded.

The third stage of the revolution requires the expulsion of the Mensheviks. They've become too influenced by counterrevolutionary ideas. The middle ground they try to occupy is the path back to the old order. The revolution cannot afford these divisions, the people must see unity lest they question the revolution. Show the counterrevolutionaries the door, we no longer recognize their standing.

The fourth stage requires the destruction of the Mensheviks. It is not enough that they have been rendered impotent, they are traitors to the revolution, and like the moderates, in the hands of the old order. Some, maybe, can be rehabilitated, others must face more severe punishments. We owe to the people to destroy those who would undo our accomplishments.

The fifth stage has no memory of the Mensheviks at all.

Comment Re:This is so funny (Score 4, Insightful) 373

Only ridiculous if you are fucking stupid.

Cars can be parked on the street, but because the car is longer than the house is wide that means that theres no guaranteed parking outside your house. And often no guaranteed parking on your street

Lamp posts? Perhaps 1 every 100 metres, so sure that solves everything, especially when every other car is vying for the same socket

People like you really dont understand the problem - Im not against EVs, but its going to take a lot of work to make some towns compatible with them. A *lot*.

Comment Re:This is so funny (Score 0) 373

Ive never been an EV hater, and Ive always seen the issue that EV adoption is going to have when you dont have a single family home with a garage.

You simply just have to step outside North America and into Europe to find situations where most of a towns homes arent suitable at all for EVs - terraced housing where the homes width is shorter than a cars length, no off street parking, no assigned parking, a pedestrian walkway between the house and the roadway where are the chargers going to go?

Europe has massive infrastructure issues to overcome before EVs can be considered by a huge part of the population.

Comment Praise the Computer Gods (Score 1) 148

The only Windows I use is the Server 2016 RDP managed service my company pays for, so updates are invisible to me. My two MacBooks and my Ubuntu laptop all have sane update policies which remind me of updates, without endlessly clogging up the works by downloading the updates. Every time I use an actual Windows machine I'm reminded of what an appallingly bothersome workflow-interrupting OS it has become.

Comment Re:Mid-90s just called... (Score 2) 123

Yup. I remember going to an IBM seminar around 1994 or 1995 where they demonstrated a new IDE environment that was going to end traditional programming. They gave a demo of writing some sort of simple application with input, with a library of GUI windows connected via some sort of flow chart. At the time I thought "Fuck me, I'm out of a job", but I never really saw the product again (for some reason I think it used Smalltalk, but it has been thirty years) and when I started using visual tools, it definitely wasn't the connect-a-dot that everyone claimed.

Worse, the stuff that was connect-a-dot, like all those horrible MS-Access applications written with Visual Basic, or the insane Excel sheets using lookups to make spreadsheets behave like RDBMSs, if RDBMSs had been written by victims of errant brain surgery, my career quickly morphed into a series of contracts in the vein of "Please fix the awful system we built in-house and we run all our Accounts Receivable through, but the guy who maintained it got hit by a bus."

(Which isn't actually much of an exaggeration, I had to take over a PHP project that had been half written by a guy who got some sort of serious illness, was taken over by some other guy who had no idea what he was doing, and the company had already sunk $40k into).

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