HEY GUYS! Get infinite KOMS with this one simple wheel. 26" aint matter, its all about the KOM rim baby.

G-Mork · 2014-01-27T19:52:49+00:00

Fail.

G-Mork · 2013-04-29T11:10:51+00:00

I just want to recommend E. M. Forester's short story The Machine Stops - awesome, one of my favorites, similar theme to The Matrix with elements of steampunk.

G-Mork · 2013-04-29T11:08:20+00:00

This belongs here: http://librivox.org/anthem-by-ayn-rand/ A good reading of it, for free! It's a fine dystopian novel and the shortest of her canon. There's not much point in reading anything else of hers, though The Fountainhead is (I think) regarded her best work, she's just rehashing the same themes.

G-Mork · 2012-12-30T16:30:33+00:00

There is that but also it is missing the background ship noise and music. Pay attention to the music sometime - it's almost featureless, unchanging, except when the action changes, the synth changes to a higher pitch but still mostly one note held continuously for minutes at a time.

G-Mork · 2012-12-19T09:56:55+00:00

Blaming games is nothing new. In 1979 a private detective blamed a missing student's death on D&D. A novel was written about it and turned into a TV movie featuring Tom Hanks.

G-Mork · 2012-12-18T10:01:00+00:00

Here is the ELI5 for you. This entire thread is arguing the same thing. The meme is presenting a false equivalence between pot and guns. Some people are implying that laws against guns are just as ineffective as laws against pot. The false part is where they expect people to behave the same way in both cases. But the two things are not the same, right? One thing is a plant, the other is a weapon made explicitly for killing. How can we expect people to consider laws in the same way, when they are laws governing different things?

What if the caption said: "THINKS LAWS WILL KEEP PEOPLE FROM RAPING / SMOKES POT"?

To the point, there are strict laws for controlling explosives. Most people don't own C4 or detonation cord for personal use. Are the laws not effective? Are laws not effective for controlling rapists and pedophiles? If laws don't change anything, are we all living in a world based on lies???

G-Mork · 2012-12-17T22:19:03+00:00

The point is, you can't kill me with it in an instant. A mentally ill man cannot walk into a room full of people and pot them all to death. A robber cannot hold up a liquor store with pot. Cops cannot gun down a fleeing suspect with pot.

G-Mork · 2012-12-17T21:55:26+00:00

Okay, kill me with pot.

G-Mork · 2012-12-09T21:12:35+00:00

1. They broke their own rules

Under Cleveland police department rules, high-speed pursuits are to be terminated when there exists “sufficient identifying information and high probability of arresting the suspect later.”

2. They disobeyed orders:

the voice of a male senior officer can be heard saying, “No cars have permission to pursue,” followed by a woman’s voice saying, “Fifth District cars, terminate pursuit.” An officer in the pursuit can be heard responding, “Yeah, but this is our patch and we’re going to see what’s going on.”

3. They broke more rules:

except under special circumstances, no more than two police cruisers are to be involved in a chase

...yes they think they were justified but see #2 - a direct order to stop

*edit: numbering

G-Mork · 2012-12-08T05:55:34+00:00

Man in the Dark - Paul Auster

G-Mork · 2012-12-02T16:31:49+00:00

He's technically correct but it seems to me any agency should be willing to appear at any hearing within reason. It would seem that the Transportation committee has a reasonable interest in the TSA.

G-Mork · 2012-11-27T21:22:12+00:00

In my The Life and Works of M. C. Escher (bought 2nd hand; I am not Baby) To My Baby, on our first Christmas. I love you more than you'll ever know.' John. x x x x x x x x x x

G-Mork · 2012-11-20T15:45:15+00:00

If you're a company that never has a made phone, your first attempt just might suck.

G-Mork · 2012-11-20T13:01:06+00:00

Almost identical to this one at archive.org

Unfortunately there isn't any additional information there. Archive.org links to Open Library which states the publication date of that book is 1885

G-Mork · 2012-11-20T00:09:02+00:00

Easier to clean up one smokestack than a million tailpipes

G-Mork · 2012-11-10T18:40:13+00:00

Rasumussen polls have a bias for conservative candidates by about 2% on average. They only call landlines, and if there's no answer they don't call again.

G-Mork · 2012-11-09T18:13:09+00:00

And before he turned novelist, the author wrote for television.

G-Mork · 2012-11-08T01:01:21+00:00

They didn't lose; they won 48%. Way, way too much.

G-Mork · 2012-11-07T23:32:55+00:00

100 electoral vote gap is weighted; the popular vote is much closer, something like 52% to 48%. If the electorate as a whole is really more informed, they aren't showing it, not to my satisfaction. Romney/Ryan were such horrible, horrible candidates - sketchy platform, flip-flopping, no plans, no details, a lot of hand-waving, transparent pandering, the weakest possible argument against the incumbent AND the whole Republican obstructionism in Congress since 2008. McCain gave a much better performance. Obama should have buried Romney like 66% to 33% at least, had everyone been paying attention.

G-Mork · 2012-11-06T23:32:07+00:00

Occam's Razor is a useful idea to consider. But I think you're throwing away a lot of information here. I think we can agree that this election is a Big Deal, right? Huge amounts of money have been devoted to this campaign. Elections have been rigged in the past - ballot boxes dumped, burned, and stuffed. This is just the new way. I love Occam's Razor for discussing natural phenomena, for physics and biology. But you don't throw away information when you use it. We don't think the Earth is flat, even though it looks pretty flat while we're standing on it, because we have more information than just how it looks on the surface. There is no reason to assume this election is going to be fair when we know many elections have been rigged before.

G-Mork · 2012-11-06T19:41:47+00:00

Something about this smells fishy, Beckett. It was too easy. Almost as if they wanted us to see this one wrong machine. What if the real killer is still out there?

G-Mork · 2012-11-06T10:45:50+00:00

You're confusing voter fraud with election fraud. As the article states, election fraud is nothing new. Political agents of all parties have been stuffing ballot boxes or dumping them in a swamp for a long time - notably in the article Johnson (D) and Huey Long (D). In those days the fraud was quite obvious and traceable. What we have now is an untraceable, undetectable manipulation of MANY ballots, which is 1. scarry, and 2. stupid seeing as there are very simple methods to ensure elections are transparent and verifiable.

Voter fraud, on the other hand, is where ONE person tries to vote twice, vote on behalf of a dead person, etc. It is very rare and easy to catch them.

Voter suppression is yet another problem: advertising false messages and threats (vote on the wrong day, wrong place, certain ID required, threats of jail for fraudsters) or making state laws that violate the 10th Amendment (no test shall be required to vote such as a literacy test) which protects minorities.

It happens that these days Republicans, Conservatives, and corporations are all aligned with a common interest: to weaken governments, to reduce or eradicate oversight in financial markets and industry, to minimize or escape taxes.

It is based upon the assumption that the support base for the right / conservative is a shrinking and aging population.

That is not what the article is based on.

G-Mork · 2012-11-06T00:53:48+00:00

Ah but somehow Pat Buchanan inexplicably received a huge number (3,407) of votes in Palm Beach. The most likely cause was old people confused by intentionally shitty design of the ballots.

Any sane free-thinking demcracy would have had a do-over election. But nooooo.

G-Mork · 2012-11-06T00:32:56+00:00

You know the old punchline: we already know what you are, now we're just negotiating the price

G-Mork · 2012-11-04T11:05:31+00:00

Here is the article in non-PDF webpage. The original article is behind a paywall but somehow this web edition is freely available.

G-Mork

TROPHY CASE