StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Wah Wah Wah. I love how Prop 13 is always held up as an evil evil thing; when in reality; it's more expensive than in MD: 0.112 Per $100 Assessment - MD State 0.683 Per $100 Assessment - Montgomery County 0.795 Per $100 Assessment $250,000 under MD Taxes = $1,987.5 $250,000 under CA Prop 13 (1%) = ...

Perhaps it's a case of schadenfreude on the part of states that feel the pain of shitty state budgets more often and with more depth? It's more than that. California is often held up as an object lesson for other states in what not to do. And yet, many other states are either in just as much troubl...

Lets try it this way. My wife just got an Ipod Touch for Christmas. If I have a time machine how far back can I send that Ipod touch and have the America that receives it actually be able to learn anything about it? I am thinking not very far. If you send it to the age before USB then it will only ...

Sending commando teams would most likely result in a situation straight out of Mogadishu, October 1993. The imperative of then extracting those men would result in all the kinds of indiscriminate, high-casualty contingencies -- air strikes, armored incursions, and more -- that the Israelis are righ...

I think that the definition of 'surgical' shifts with the passage of time and the availability of new weapons. There were days when hitting one small urban target meant taking out all of the surrounding structures for blocks. What's your point? This is exactly what the Israelis are doing, and it's ...

I'd like to see the methodology behind calculating the 6:1 terrorist:civilian ratio. Who's a terrorist, exactly? Israel's position is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, so they could very well be defining anyone who works for Hamas as a terrorist. It'd be like bombing the Post Office and claimi...

The courts seem to buy into the bullshit that "God" can mean anything to anybody, even though it's obviously just a wink-wink-nudge-nudge way of saying "the Christian God". So the best they can hope for is the court directing the officiating religious figures to keep their prayer...

Yes, Christianity requires a lifetime of study to "understand". Is that how long it takes to completely abandon all pretense of rational thought?

The Supreme Court will almost certainly not touch this specific issue. They'll find some way to basically say that the pardon was never actually granted due to a clerical issue, like the paperwork not being completely filed by the time Bush had decided to revoke the pardon. If they can't find some r...

I can summarize that whole article as follows. Person 1: "The sky is purple!" Person 2: "No, the sky is blue!" And the author says, "Hey guys, can't you go into a discussion realizing that you can both be wrong?" Wow, what brilliant insight. Wherever would we be as a so...

In the US, I'm sure that a defense attorney would argue that the mosquito was acting as an agent of the state, and the bite constituted an illegal search of his client.

I remember the day I chose to be heterosexual. It involved a Victoria's Secret catalogue.

The California Constitution distinguishes between amendments and revisions. A revision is a substantial change to the entire Constitution and would require approval by 2/3 of the state legislature to make it onto the ballot. An amendment is a substantial change to one or more of the Constitution's p...

I must be the only one still asking why we need a pastor at a presidential inauguration in the first place. If the last eight years and this last election have shown us anything, it's that pastors are bad luck. How about we all just compromise and replace Rick Warren with a giant four-leaf clover?

So I'm watching Robot Chicken , and they've posited an interesting moral dilemma in one of their skits. The skit's plot is that a salesman is getting off a subway train, slips on a banana peel and falls halfway on the tracks. The train gets going again and runs over his lower half and then stops aft...

If you keep the same username and the same drive letter on your new computer, you should be okay. Just be sure to preserve your directory hierarchy when moving your songs.

If so, that's a giant step forward but there's a good chance people would click on it anyway. I guess the Vista malware might detect it and block it silently, but as I said I don't have any commercial experience with Vista. Once you've UAC-authorised an application for xyz (an install, say) does th...

It feels to me like the security features in Windows Vista were slapped on haphazardly, as a bolt-on "feature" rather than a security-minded review of the operating system from the ground up. They did some good things in terms of security. They disabled non-essential services by default, ...

It's defiantly plausible, but if the two explanations are "industry-wide conspiracy" or "money", money is much more likely. Of course it has to do with money. The labels' money. And my argument is that it probably costs Apple more to maintain a DRM infrastructure for its music. ...

My god, a religious institution and it's member expressing disdain and contempt for those not it's members. I'm sure glad you pointed that out because that's totally unacceptable behavior in a religious organization! Protestant churches typically have no problems giving Catholics communion or letti...

One thing I've wanted to do for a while now is go down to the local Scientology center and picket outside, but with utterly silly signs. Like "What if Xenu was aborted?" and "It's a thetan, not a choice."

Come to think of it, there's really no reason I couldn't do it.

If you're arguing that the Catholic Church has more political and financial clout than some random church, you'll get no arguments. However, the mindset you're referring to is no different than that of millions of others; they're just not as popular. And to be blunt, the Pope actually is more hedge...

And damned near every Protestant out there believes that they've got a direct hotline to god. Is the papacy really that different from a Joe Random preacher in Bumfuck, Alabama believing the same thing? There are a whole shitload of people that believe they've some how got a special insight into wh...

I'll second Durandal on what a fucking pain in the ass it is to get people to manage even the very basic things like finding the fucking Windows Start Menu (of whatever Windows version) over the phone, never mind things like right-clicking or anything else. To Microsoft's credit, they stopped calli...

And beyond all that, I have very deep intellectual suspicions of anyone who is a Catholic without the excuse of years of brainwashing from birth. Why anyone would actually voluntarily convert to that particular brand of Christianity is completely lost on me. This guy actually looked at the teaching...