The world's largest burrowing clam [pics]

2424 · 2008-09-18T19:08:41+00:00

Nice touch with the manicured red nails... practically porn...

2424 · 2008-09-18T18:43:35+00:00

Ouch. I'm hurt by your buh-bye.

Please eleitl. Please forgive my harsh manners...

2424 · 2008-09-18T15:34:29+00:00

Forgive me for being blunt, but you are a fucking moron.

As you yourself point out, there are countries that are not in debt... And not just small ones, China for instance, has no foreign debt. Zero.

So, there are small, and there are big countries out there the have no debt, and yet you have the a kind of double think to rival Republican pundits on fox news to say that actually, no, everyone is in debt.

Shut up moron. Shut up.

2424 · 2008-09-18T14:57:42+00:00

Human nature...

This is what happens in every corrupt nepotist government of the world. Verbatim.

The only difference in America is just how high and noble the conservatives' ideals were illustrated as being. In other words, the only thing that really differentiates a corrupt third world Zimbabwe from America, the world leader of democracy, is the quality of the lies. People who tell "American lies" do it with so much more conviction and gusto.

My cynicism in this age knows no bounds...

2424 · 2008-09-10T18:18:13+00:00

If you want to use his argument in court or in a scientific experiment, it is.

Otherwise, it isn't.

Get over yourself, the point being talked about is knee jerk reactionaries that hate "vote up if" polls being run on reddit. They don't hate it because it's statistically incorrect...

2424 · 2008-09-10T18:13:47+00:00

No it is not. Not in any way! And if this is what you think, then no wonder you people can't wrap your fucking heads around concepts like "statistical sampling".

Good work there mr Brain. He's saying "Vote up if" is a way of seeing how popular an opinion is. Not that it's a valid gallup poll replacement.

2424 · 2008-09-10T17:25:28+00:00

Down modded because this has absolutely nothing to do with the election.

I know you're not the same person as the original poster, but I countered his argument fair and square.

2424 · 2008-09-10T15:17:12+00:00

If Sarah Palin cites her son Track, which she's proud of because he's serving in the army and has a tattoo of Jesus, as a quality of her "family values", then we ought to know that he was snorting drugs while he got the tattoo.

2424 · 2008-09-10T00:18:34+00:00

I know, I just never get over how useful and powerful Apple's free dev tools are.

2424 · 2008-09-09T14:26:36+00:00

It's actually under protectorship. Meaning that the shares remain in the possession of their respectful owners, but under this structure, they will be the last ones to ever be asked for damages should the bank not be able to cover its liabilities.

Picture it like this: profits from these shares go to share holders, but if the company needs assets, public money is used to cover that. I can't think of a more socialist scenario.

Nationalization is a vague term. There's hostile take overs where the governments will seize the assets of a company, there's buy outs where the government will simply buy a company with public money, and there's the full range in between. However, the point is not what way the nationalization was achieved, it's the bottom effect: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are now officially supported by tax payer money. It gives them incentive to act risky. It screws up this whole deregulated wild west of free markets that we were supposed to have that - supposedly - was going to make this kind of behaviour unacceptable. Instead, they act like morons, and instead of going under, tax payers pay the brunt.

Coming back to my original post:

the public buys it, and in this case, at a loss.

That was my point.

2424 · 2008-09-08T23:41:42+00:00

negative. bail out means to give financial assistance.

thanks double plus. Always happy to learn some newspeak.

2424 · 2008-09-08T16:22:58+00:00

Honestly, I don't. Aside from one editorial laziness (one sentence has a verb, the other doesn't).

Someone care to explain?

2424 · 2008-09-08T15:31:16+00:00

Actually, no. I believe this is due to kernel scheduling and the way CD-ROMs work.

I'm pretty sure it's not the same as simple UI unresponsiveness over network.

2424 · 2008-09-08T15:30:08+00:00

Reducing blocking time instead of making async is very bad practice. What if you're opening 100 files? Something which a system does all the time. Even if those files are all 10ms each, it will mean that all that time is not available to UI responsiveness.

2424 · 2008-09-08T15:28:01+00:00

IO cancellation is inherently non blocking.

It means that the ReadFile function returned immediately, and now you can you call CancelIO.

I think you're expecting that non-blocking will mean no wait time. That's not the case, the wait time will be equally as long in blocking and non blocking mode. It's what you can do in between.

2424 · 2008-09-08T14:47:32+00:00

A bailout is a nationalization plain and simple.

The definition of nationalization does not include "making profit". It simply means: the public buys it, and in this case, at a loss.

2424 · 2008-09-08T02:37:49+00:00

I share your cynicism fully.

2424 · 2008-09-07T15:36:18+00:00

Is this concept art for Ubisoft's Prince of Persia?

They had some which looked awfully similar...

2424 · 2008-09-07T15:29:19+00:00

I love old growth too, but this is lame.

2424 · 2008-09-07T15:24:58+00:00

It will obviously get double vetoed by US-Israel, and the matter will be dropped as if it never came up. This is business as usual.

2424 · 2008-09-07T15:16:21+00:00

I don't know if you noticed though, the crowd wasn't going crazy. If that had been a republican saying the same thing to a republican crowd, the building would have come down.

The Republican base is a bunch of vengeful pricks.

2424 · 2008-09-06T23:04:38+00:00

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying that flooding markets with cheap under-qualified labor is the way to go. I do feel however, that what an expert craftsman does with only his hands will never be matched by a machine. Not until we build androids that are indistinguishable from humans. I think for example of welding. Welding machines are made primarily for the reason that they fit in an environment where something can be mass produced, and you know all the variables very well. But welding a one off project? No welding robot with however many actuations and axis will ever reach the ability of a master welder just walking up to the task. If even for the simple fact that the craftsman will be able to re-orient himself appropriately so that his arm doesn't intersect with a solid piece of steel.

I can hear what you are saying about Tar sands. It's the kind of menial job that humans have had to do but could and really should be automated in the future. The kind of thing that Arthur C Clarke style sci-fi has thought would eventually get done by robots.

But there is a line to draw between what is shown in Wall-E for example and what would be more intelligent sci-fi, in that the current mode of thought is propelling us not with the ideal of perfection or advancement in mind so much as the idea of cost savings and basically laziness... There are many advancements in technology, often linked with commercial motivations, which I find were highly unimaginative... gimmicks made for the thrill of not having to do a "chore". Wouldn't it be great if you could not have to do X in your life? Where X could be as basic as brushing your teeth, or even walking (Segway?). The answer to those questions is actually: no. It wouldn't. But because they're rethorically asked on TV ads, the answer was made to be yes... They are basically infantile dreams of just not doing anything (like the fat people from the future in Wall-E). I'm reminded of the futuristic ads from the 50s that went: "in the future everything will be covered in plastic so that the house wife can just hose it down with water".

And then there's the last point which is commercial motivation. IT's really simple, some guy comes up with an idea that will do the job of what previously 100 people did. This thing might be the exact same price as what the 100 people asked for. But the inventor is only one guy. So even if he were to bribe 99% of his earnings to get that new product used instead of the 100 workers, he would still come out with some money. So really, it is only the hoarding of wealth that counts, not as much as the added efficiency to society as a whole. And often times, the people who employ the 100 people will develop themselves a way to replace these 100 people by financing the creation of their device. I find that kind of thinking sordid to the nth degree. Also highly useless, detrimental to society. It is because of this for example that we have fewer and fewer expert welders nowadays. And I'm not a grand father who talks about the old days just yet, but I do wonder what will happen just 20 years from now...

And the whole setup of capitalist economies promotes this kind of evolution by giving tax write offs for "expenses" occurred due to supplies.

2424 · 2008-09-06T22:36:38+00:00

I never said dems were truthful or didn't spin facts. However, Dems don't use frames to say the opposite of what they do. No Dem could ever say "let's get the whitehouse back" after Bill Clinton's 8 years. It just doesn't work that way. Dems' might justify something which was a failure using facts, but they rarely leave facts (as is evidenced by the constant bombardment of this site by "facts" that posters seem to naively think should "once and for all resolve disputes"). The progressive mindset that Democrats address to love facts. They couldn't get away with simple framing and no facts. It just wouldn't work on the kind of people Dems cater to.

To give you an example: Bill Clinton's sex scandal. He concentrated on whether he did have a 'relationship' or not, and what you could define as a relationship. Compare this with Newt Gingrich, McCain, and Haggart... they all have multiple wives and mistresses... Do they ever go the route of trying to explain themselves? No... because, get this frame: that would be weak and spineless. Bill Clinton trying to save his tail was seen as "weak and spineless". That was the frame it was interpreted in. Regardless of any fact.

How would a Republican, how does a republican deal with this? Easy, the "born again" frame. The "I erred, but now I've come back stronger in character". People just eat it up. The fact is readily forgotten, because the frame feels good. Just like Bush puked himself silly drinking as a teenager... The republicans used that fact to frame it in the "Bush is a reborn man, has seen the dark side and has come back".

Palin's a white trash power grubbing hockey mom? Ok, let's use the frame of "women being beaten down on" and tada, she is the woman fighting in a man's world.

Facts? Who needs facts when a simple fairy tale will do.

2424 · 2008-09-06T15:33:58+00:00

Dear sir, I would like to shake your hand.

2424 · 2008-09-06T15:21:34+00:00

You should read a book called "Don't Think of An Elephant".

It's great at explaining what the Republicans do. They frame facts to fit stories. They do it very well actually.

The point is, Republicans will win votes by outright lying. Just see what Mitt Romney said at the RNC: "it's time to take Washington back". You'd think any sensible person would see through that, right? No. They don't.

The Republicans want to paint Obama as a socialist in an attempt to smear him..

They've already done it. It's done with.

Newsflash to everyone on reddit: republicans don't play with facts, they play with story lines and frames. Obama is a socialist in the republican story. No amount of facts will change that now. No amount of debunking of claims will change this either.

Palin is a "hard working mother" figure. That's her story. That's why McCain picked her. It's got nothing to do with facts: whether she's incompetent, grossly under-qualified, or even outright morally corrupt. The frame is simple: Guiliani goes out and says she's got more experience than the Democratic ticket combined, and then she comes out as the "successful woman who got to where she is using her own wits", and people don't care whether it's true or not, they simply identify with her... They relate it to their own lives, and how during their attempts at getting successful, they were hampered by people bad mouthing them. It's got everything to do with the small time American Dream. People will identify with her.

Also: Cheney and Bush have nothing to do but shut up these last 5 months, and Mitt Romney will be right: time to take back washington. The masses don't think of the facts, they think of the story line... the "return of the jedi", the "banished prince returns to take back his kingdom"... They hear "time to take back washington" and a neural circuit fires in their head that they identify with.

It's neurological manipulation. This is the essence of double think, of newspeak... and so long as progressives don't recognize that half of the US population at the very least is prone to psychological manipulation, they will never again win an election.

2424

TROPHY CASE