El Mamerro

You guys really think you're the only people on the internet wondering about/discussing these questions?

A friend of mine with Libyan roots sent emailed this a few days ago, some interesting resources to check out:

Hypothetically speaking, would a company/factory be allowed to offer property owners incentives (rebates on products, committing to build town infrastructure, etc.) if they are granted permission to pollute their property?

That Dead Island trailer, regardless of the game itself, is a fucking masterpiece of a short film. Holy shit.

After unplugging and replugging everything, pointlessly rearranging things, and praying to baby jesus, I no longer get a RRoD. It is, however, freezing up randomly. The only time I hasn't frozen up is when I only had HDMI running out. Problem is I have a computer monitor, so I only get video from the HDMI, and so I still need to use the RCA stereo cables on the tri-cable thingie (which I modified a long time ago to be able to plug in both that and the HDMI) to get sound out. As soon as I plugged those back in after a solid amount of soundless play, it froze. Still holding out a bit for magical recovery.

Smart?

I went on a very long cross country roadtrip two summers ago and made sure to take a little detour to go see these. They were absolutely amazing, but covered in shitty marker graffiti. Blogged about it here, more pictures here.

I found it funny how the piece visually describes a person being high with all these wonderful colors and expressions, which clearly represent the way one feels inside while high, while at the same time avoiding the unpleasant outward appearance that a stoned person sometimes has. But when it comes to someone being drunk, it only shows the person's unpleasant outward appearance, and none of the internal feeling.

Yo I'm looking at pictures of the mountain he fell from and shit doesn't look that hardt. I bet it must've looked like fall in Hot Rod:

Dude just looking at the size of your responses is exhausting. Every single time, it's like oh man, do I wanna keep going back and forth on this? And then eventually say fuck it. One more time though: I know several people who were terrible drivers and had to take the test multiple times until they got it right. And yes, if there are people out there stupid enough to fail a driver's test multiple times and had their license denied, then there are certainly people out there too stupid to handle a gun appropriately and should be denied accordingly. I'll only address this part since what follows is the standard speculative paranoid scenario that picks one possibility out of dozens: Sounds good to me the way it is. Maybe not so silly. PTSD is not well understood and hopefully as we progress better methodologies will emerge that will make it easy to establish "degrees" of PTSD, of which the more benign would probably be able to carry weapons. In the meantime, if you like guns and want to keep that right, I suggest you don't enlist in the military. A person that kills someone else with a kitchen knife or a baseball bat is, in general, gonna be a lot crazier than a person who murders someone with a gun. With a gun, you only need to toe the line a little bit with irrationality, because the process of killing with one is so easy, detached, and clean; plenty of relatively sane people who do not deserve to be in prison are capable of committing murder with a gun. I admit I have no solutions but not that I am operating in hysterics. It's this whole "You just admitted", "This is what you believe" thing you always do that makes it so annoying to argue, cause I have to spend time and effort defending against something I never said but that you wish to ascribe to me to have a straw man to shoot (ha!) against. I'm sure issues between causation and correlation are at play here. This is a very interesting fact, but again, I stand by the belief that this has more to do with cultural development of society and perception of weaponry, which admittedly may have been exacerbated by said restriction of weaponry, elevating its status as a forbidden object of desire. But we are not able to jump back to the cultural mindset we had pre-60's, so shifting things back to where they were will almost certainly not have the results you expect. I'm totally down with pilots packing. A person with a gun in an airplane can only be matched by a person with another gun, raising the stakes considerably in a very narrow, body-dense environment with pressurization issues. A person with a boxcutter or any other form of non-gun weapon can be neutralized with small numbers and contact force. That didn't happen on 9/11, probably due to hesitation, but you sure as hell can be sure it will happen from now on... it already has. Nope. The overall implication of my argument is that a better background system would have lessened the risk of it happening. I'm not sure what you were getting at with the rest of that paragraph. Nope, it doesn't, but I already acknowledged that some cases will always be impossible to catch. This is because the Swiss have an entirely different perception of guns and gun culture. That's my whole point, Americans specifically have a particular relationship with guns that makes them behave differently towards them than other countries do. Of course society is afraid of each other, and giving everyone the ability to inflict hurt (I might get killed, but goddamn I'm gonna make a statement and hurt him first) will tighten the screws. And I'm not thrilled by the thought of 10 dudes trying to play hero at Walmart and multiplying x 10 the amount of bullets in the air. Odds are a few will be bad shots, especially in the fog of it. This is unfortunate, and I agree. If anything this would be a step forward for people to begin establishing guns in their mind as part of civil society. But the feedback loop is already ongoing, people are simply more fascinated by stories of guns in the real world being used for villainy as opposed to heroism, and that's what people now flock to and that's what's gonna be on the big news. That's the free market at work for ya. Sounds abut right to me. With that in place, and a new push to start improving the public perception of guns and reverse the decades of instilled fear, I'd say we'd be on a good path.

So, I just got my 4th RRoD. That means that if I get a new Xbox it'll be my 5th console. Fuck that shit. Seconds upon tweeting my visible upsetness, I got bombarded by people/robots linking me to sites that claim to show you how to fix this. Some of them did not look as sketchy as expected. Of course, they're all asking for money. Is there actually a way to get in there and fix a common problem, as promised by these guides? If so, how do I find out the info for free?

driving licenses are essentially a joke. its a feel good regulatory hoop you have to jump through... yada yada Everybody I know that has a license has taken the time necessary to prepare for both the written test and the practical test. And at least in my experience in PR, driving tests were pretty strict and I saw a LOT of perfectly decent drivers fail. I barely passed with a 70 with what I thought was a close to perfect performance. In any case, the presence of these tests make people learn and prepare themselves to properly handle the machinery at hand. I like that. what exactly do you mean by 'crazies?' People with mental disabilities that would cast significant doubt on their ability to responsibly manage a deadly weapon. and what exactly do you think the federal background checks should entail? Am I supposed to present you some kind of psychological evaluation test that I have to pull out of a hat? There are people far more capable than you and I are (that you will by definition not trust) with the knowledge of human behavior and the capacity to establish a ground set of rules to define who is and is not capable of handling an device that is made for killing people. how much more background information could they govt check than they already do? Beats the fuck out of me. Probably none. This is just another frequently encountered case of you conveniently manipulating and distorting our arguments to fit a position you're comfortable arguing against. I said "improve our systems", which could mean installing new methodologies, algorithms, and various other means to increase the efficiency and precision of the system, increasing their ability to pinpoint red flags among the data already being asked for. I'm not asking for them to get more background info, I'm fairly happy with the fact that they already ask what they do. A few bad cases slip by, that's too bad but I can deal with it. That scenario you described? No, we'll probably never be able to catch those guys. And there will be really quite few of those cause that's what tends to happen, crime-free dudes don't just usually pick up robbery. Sometimes they do though. Point is, with no background checks, you bet your ass a LOT more bad cases are gonna get through and shit WILL get worse. buying a firearm out of the trunk of a car just like a high school kid buys pot in the school parking lot. This is another one you always keep coming to... dude, I don't know about you, but buying shit from a legit source is in many ways easier, more encouraging, and more convenient than getting into some shady shit. A guy with bad intentions and a noodled head can still have the common sense to go through the most legit path rather than adding more layers of sketchiness to what he wants to go through. How I feel: If you wanna decrease gun crime significantly in America, the obstacles you have to overcome are cultural, not legal. I think it is perfectly natural and OK to be afraid of a product that is designed to end lives. But in America, that fear has for decades been exaggerate, distorted, and glorified in the public mind and guns are now this really scary thing that people are also perversely attracted to. I am of the belief that if you were to allow each and every person in America easy and convenient access to guns, a feedback loop would occur that would cause the vast majority of the population to own a gun. And I believe the prevailing feeling among people will be fear of each other, not respect. And I don't know man, a society where everyone is afraid of each other sounds like it would suck.

I wonder how much higher that number would be if we didn't need licenses to drive... Nobody's answering your question because it has already been said by several that we are far too down the path to really do something about significantly reducing gun crime. I do think however we can keep it under control and prevent it from increasing dramatically by maintaining and constantly improving the current background check system. It may be flawed and the unfit can sometimes get through, but I am completely sure it's already keeping a significant amount of guns out of the hands of crazies everywhere. I believe without it we'd be in a worse situation than we are right now.

Maybe, maybe not. And stop calling me Shirley.

FWIW: Americans Can't Agree on Guns? Wrong. Michael R. Bloomberg 108th Mayor of the City of New York Posted: January 18, 2011 10:52 AM The shooting in Tucson, Arizona has affected our entire country. In the days since, as we have prayed for the victims and survivors, we have also reflected on the lessons we might learn. Yesterday, again, many of us contemplated the tragedy of gun violence as we came together to mark the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a champion of peace who was taken from us by a gun assassin. Mass shootings and assassinations are shocking, and the sad truth is that America's history of gun murders is as repetitive as it is tragic. And what's more, much of its enormous toll never makes it into the national headlines: 34 Americans are murdered with guns each and every day. As we remember those we have lost, we know that honoring their memory requires renewing our effort to overcome the threat of guns in the wrong hands. The aftermath of this tragedy is our nation's chance to challenge old assumptions about the politics of guns in this country. One of the major old assumptions in the media and in Washington is that the gun issue is one that hopelessly divides Americans: Red versus Blue, urban versus rural, gun-owners versus those who don't own guns. But a new poll shows a remarkable consensus among Americans on gun issues. The poll, conducted jointly by a Democratic and Republican polling firm, was released today by the bi-partisan coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Among its key findings: Americans overwhelmingly believe the Second Amendment protects the rights of law-abding individuals to buy guns: 79% of Americans believe that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns and only 17% would support a proposal to ban all handgun sales. Americans overwhelmingly believe that felons, drug abusers, and the mentally ill should not have access to guns and that more needs to be done to ensure that their records are in the federal background check system: 90% of Americans and 90% of gun owners support fixing gaps in government databases that are meant to prevent the mentally ill, drug abusers and others from buying guns. Likewise, 89% of Americans and 89% of gun owners support full funding of the law a unanimous Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed after the Virginia Tech massacre to put more records in the background check database. Americans overwhelmingly believe that its time to close the loopholes that make it possible for people to buy guns without background checks: 86% of Americans and 81% of gun owners support requiring all gun buyers to pass a background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter who they buy it from. See the full results for yourself. It turns out there is a broad consensus on guns in America. Just consider that in less than five years, Mayors Against Illegal Guns has grown to include more than 550 mayors from across the country. We have come together around a simple idea: it's possible to respects the rights of responsible, law-abiding Americans and do more to keep guns from criminals, the mentally ill, and other dangerous people. It is the job of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns to alert Washington that the conventional wisdom about guns is just not true. Washington: are you listening? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-bloomberg/americans-cant-agree-on-g_b_810282.html

I assume you read and learn knowledge on the internet while standing up then?

I mean, nobody's really holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to fly and get scanned, right? I believe I've heard that argument before on different topics round these parts.

Anybody ever thought, you know... "Fuck, we gotta get in there and search through the rubble, but there's all these fucking crazy sketchy beams all over the place that might break off and kill us any second... we should probably cut off the dangerous sections for safety reasons while we dig in."

In order to win this war, we must read more things on the internet and believe in them.

This fucking guy.

Ok.

killuminati, just shut the fuck up dude, no one gives a shit. I'm gonna continue deleting your bullshit until I get tired and then you'll get banned, so if you wanna stick around and do what you wanna do on other forum sections go ahead, just don't bother coming into this one.

http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Collapse/70123600