Yeah, humanity was better off burning wood and whale oil. The average live expectancy was was also in the mid 30's. Get rid of fossil fuels, take nuclear energy off the table and then we will return to those times. Sorry. Wind and solar will never do.
What mostly increased life expectancy was the acceptance of the germ theory of (some) disease, a theory that was actively resisted by the establishment as unscientific, along with the introduction of antibiotics. At this point I doubt we'll forget the benefits of washing and sterilizing, unluckily antibiotics aren't currently profitable so new ones aren't being developed as fast as bacteria are evolving and that may lead back to life expectancies of 30 years. Nothing to do with replacing wood with coal or whale oil with coal oil and petroleum.
One example is Canada where one huge improvement is splitting up the elections so federal is separate from provincial and separate from municipal. This allows the electorate to focus on various levels of government, allows different political parties at different levels and allows different parties to grow. Compare to voters being overwhelmed with a huge list ranging from dog catcher to president and all the way being only 2 parties. Any country without a first past the post system,. Any country with an actual constitutional court that can review laws without needing someone with standing to work their way up from the lowest court. Bonus if the constitutional court is not appointed by the national government. In America's case the court could be appointed in some manner by the States. Any country with a realistic bill of rights. eg the first amendment is pretty well impossible to obey and have a functioning country as it prevents congress from passing laws to do with national security and even having armed forces where the grunts can't talk back to their superiours as the uniform military code would be unconstitutional as limits speech. Once a government goes down the course of interpreting rights like free speech by stating only some speech is protected speech they can interpret all the other rights how they like. Those are just improvements that have been implemented by various countries.
You were claiming that the American system was the best ever while the truth is that there are quite a few systems that are at least as good if not better. You just have to look at how the American system has evolved to see that it has serious problems.
The thing with the American system is there only seems to be minor consequences for all this shit. When was the last time a political party got wiped out due to their bullshit? In a sane system the republicans would have been wiped out after the Bush years and next election the same with the democrats due to the great disappointment of Obama. And what the fuck, the legislature even considering the need to pass a law saying the President (or any official) has to obey the law? That is seriously wrong.
Are you getting confused between herbicides and insecticides? They engineer plants to be more resistant to herbicides such as round-up so they can go nuts spraying it to kill weeds which leads to a similar problem as in the article where weeds become round-up resistant but while similar and bad, is a different problem.
You are joking aren't you? Or perhaps you really believe a system of government invented close to 250 years ago and barely tweeked since then is perfect and there has been no advances in government since then? There are serious problems with the American government leading to the current inverted totalitarian state, a state with 1% of its population in prison, a state that removes basic rights from those incarcerated people so they can never take part in regular society, a state with 2 parties that are basically 2 wings of one party, a party of the rich (how much money does it take to run for office and how do they acquire that money), a government that treats its constitution as toilet paper as it is too hard to change or follow, a government with the best propaganda machine ever seen, even though it has been out sourced to private industry, a government that strives to have a population who are not into politics, a government that can produce people like you who parrot talking points like "having the best government ever invented" without knowing anything about other forms of democracies and probably just internally comparing to various regular totalitarian states.
WTF? A four step start procedure? I have a 4 stroke Stihl (fs130) and you just pump the bubble a couple of times, choke and pull the cord. Don't even need those steps on a hot day. Runs mix as well so no engine oil to change. Buddy has a Husky which is actually a Honda. Same thing except it runs straight gas and needs the oil changed now and again. Both weedeaters are nicer then the 2 strokes, maximum torque at lower rpms and quieter.
Chainsaws are still 2 stroke and come in quite large models, much more power then your lawnmower. http://www.husqvarna.com/us/fo... is close to 120 CC and Stihl has the 880 which IIRC is also over a 100 CC.
Not sure who you're talking about, possibly Lord Mountbatten who did work his way up from midshipman to the head of the armed forces though he was never that close to being in line to the UK throne (he was the son of a German Prince and Great Grandson of Queen Victoria IIRC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... Most of the Royals start at the bottom (as officers though) in the armed forces and are expected to perform much as anyone else, eg Prince William who will probably be King one day, served in combat in Afghanistan as a helicopter pilot and afterwards in search and rescue. His combat phase was shorter then he and his family really wanted but being heir to the throne means having a big target painted on you. I like the idea of royalty actually serving in the forces and getting first hand experience in the horrors of war. As for the influence of the Queen on politics, she has weekly meetings with the Prime Minister and sort of serves as a senior non-partison adviser to the government.
Google came up with a very good search engine and financed it with small unobtrusive ads. That is why I started using Google along with most other people. You can say that wasn't a good contribution to society all you want but the numbers say you're wrong.
And how would going back to a 14+14 year copyright term hurt the average artist? They'd still get paid, just have to produce something new more regularly. Even the one hit wonders would make good money and if they sensibly invest it they still might never need to work. In your case as a programmer for hire, it would mean that your Boss would be more motivated to keep you around and happy instead of taking your code (for a price) and milking it forever.
So. I have numerous books on one shelf and pick which ever I want to read. I have numerous partitions on my computers hard drive and pick which ever I want to use. Just like the books are partitioned by their covers, the operating systems on my computer are separated by logical partitions. Just like someone could sell me a pre-populated bookshelf or box of books, they should be able to sell me a pre-populated computer.
Totally eliminating copyright seems a bit extreme though it really needs to be massively shortened and simplified. Be a good starting point in negotiations though. Unluckily elected governments always seem more interested in supporting business then the people. As much as people don't like the idea of an unelected house such as the House of Lords, it was them who originally forced the original copyright terms to be reasonable (14+14yrs) with works then entering the public domain for "The Advancement of Learning" instead of the infinite copyright that the elected house defaulted to.
MS has a history of breaking dual booting systems. I had OS/2 which included the IBM Bootmanager to allow dual booting. Installed Win95 (and same with Win98, never tried ME) and at the end of the install it informed the user that the OS/2 partition was no more. No warning to back up your data or anything. I was knowledgeable enough to use fdisk to set the active partition to the Bootmanager partition and was back in business as the OS/2 partition was still there. How many people didn't know the fix and lost everything? And people wonder why some of us hate Microsoft. Win2k had a different problem which killed Bootmanager and was harder to fix, involving hex editing the boot sector if I remember (perhaps a different sector) and may have been just lack of testing, though hard to believe, by Win2k service pack 2, the first I tried, it actually did tell the user how to re-enable the Bootmanager. I did like that about IBM, OS/2 came with 2 methods of dual booting and could be installed on any partition though had to be installed on C: for one type of dual booting with DOS. There are also numerous reports of MS overwriting the boot sector therefore breaking Linux, especially in the LILO days.
It would be like packaging Lord of the Rings along with the Dark Tower and Huckleberry Finn. As long as the Tolkien and King books were purchased legally and the packaging didn't use artwork and such, what would be the problem? .
I live in a country with single payer health care and the only legislating that has been done has been banning what is available in government buildings including schools where vending machines have to have healthy foods and Coca Cola etc aren't allowed to sponsor unhealthy foods. There has been government funded campaigns to encourage people to live healthy, things like pushing people to exercise through advertising and policies like encouraging smokers to quit including making freely available quit smoking aids such as nicotine gum. Compare to a system like Americas where private industry is allowed to indoctrinate kids to live on junk food by giving schools money with strings. And many people believing in getting rid of regulations which could lead to tobacco companies advertising in schools as "the government has no place regulating what people do"
Funny thing, as far as I know there are only 2 countries that practice direct democracy, one of which is a Republic, namely Switzerland and one has a monarch, namely the Principality of Liechtenstein. Both are very successful countries that have not gone down the path of financial ruin, at that the exact opposite has happened with the Swiss considered one of the most financially stable countries on Earth. BTW, all republic really means is not having a sovereign and lots of monarchies have representative governments and some are even federal laid out unions of sovereign states or provinces. There are also lots of republics that are totalitarian dictatorships.
In fact, right now ECB doesn't print _enough_ money - inflation is way under the targeted level, threatening to go into outright deflation.
Have you been shopping for food in the last few years? All the important stuff like food, gas, heat and shelter sure seems to be going up faster then claimed. Or perhaps it is offset by the luxury goods that many or most can't afford or need to buy very often. I don't care if yachts and big screen TVs are getting cheaper. I do care that my income is flat and groceries keep going up.
What makes you think that China can't use the same means as the oil companies to manipulate the government and people. They aren't stupid and must know that both the government and media are for sale and they have lots of dollars. All I can think of a defence is diversity and not depending on any powerful entity too much.
The Canadian governing Conservative party is currently about to pass the "Fair Elections Act" which is going to disenfranchise many voters, stop Elections Canada from even advertising elections including telling people where they vote, stop Elections Canada from prosecuting campaign overspending and various other irregularities and put in massive loopholes on the political contributions limitations. They already removed all tax funded political funding. Along with many of their other moves they're totally changing Canada character including making us much more aggressive.
You can use celluloids (sp?) to make plastics using plants such as hemp, just have to do something about the laws that have been passed to support the buggy whip manufactures (actually pulp paper).
Since I started looking at web pages with JPEG images, my internet connection has almost doubled in speed and now there are pages that are basically unviewable. Many locations don't have any other option then dial up and many more have various caps on the amount you're allowed to download before charges increase.
So, you're saying it's immoral, unacceptable, or unaccepted for me to kill John while in public on the streets of Washington DC and tell you about it? I think what you're calling for is a fundamental change to the constitution to recognize an intrinsic right to life in public.
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Yeah, humanity was better off burning wood and whale oil. The average live expectancy was was also in the mid 30's. Get rid of fossil fuels, take nuclear energy off the table and then we will return to those times. Sorry. Wind and solar will never do.
What mostly increased life expectancy was the acceptance of the germ theory of (some) disease, a theory that was actively resisted by the establishment as unscientific, along with the introduction of antibiotics.
At this point I doubt we'll forget the benefits of washing and sterilizing, unluckily antibiotics aren't currently profitable so new ones aren't being developed as fast as bacteria are evolving and that may lead back to life expectancies of 30 years.
Nothing to do with replacing wood with coal or whale oil with coal oil and petroleum.
One example is Canada where one huge improvement is splitting up the elections so federal is separate from provincial and separate from municipal. This allows the electorate to focus on various levels of government, allows different political parties at different levels and allows different parties to grow. Compare to voters being overwhelmed with a huge list ranging from dog catcher to president and all the way being only 2 parties.
Any country without a first past the post system,.
Any country with an actual constitutional court that can review laws without needing someone with standing to work their way up from the lowest court. Bonus if the constitutional court is not appointed by the national government. In America's case the court could be appointed in some manner by the States.
Any country with a realistic bill of rights. eg the first amendment is pretty well impossible to obey and have a functioning country as it prevents congress from passing laws to do with national security and even having armed forces where the grunts can't talk back to their superiours as the uniform military code would be unconstitutional as limits speech. Once a government goes down the course of interpreting rights like free speech by stating only some speech is protected speech they can interpret all the other rights how they like.
Those are just improvements that have been implemented by various countries.
You were claiming that the American system was the best ever while the truth is that there are quite a few systems that are at least as good if not better. You just have to look at how the American system has evolved to see that it has serious problems.
The thing with the American system is there only seems to be minor consequences for all this shit. When was the last time a political party got wiped out due to their bullshit? In a sane system the republicans would have been wiped out after the Bush years and next election the same with the democrats due to the great disappointment of Obama.
And what the fuck, the legislature even considering the need to pass a law saying the President (or any official) has to obey the law? That is seriously wrong.
Are you getting confused between herbicides and insecticides? They engineer plants to be more resistant to herbicides such as round-up so they can go nuts spraying it to kill weeds which leads to a similar problem as in the article where weeds become round-up resistant but while similar and bad, is a different problem.
Our government is the best system yet implemented
You are joking aren't you? Or perhaps you really believe a system of government invented close to 250 years ago and barely tweeked since then is perfect and there has been no advances in government since then?
There are serious problems with the American government leading to the current inverted totalitarian state, a state with 1% of its population in prison, a state that removes basic rights from those incarcerated people so they can never take part in regular society, a state with 2 parties that are basically 2 wings of one party, a party of the rich (how much money does it take to run for office and how do they acquire that money), a government that treats its constitution as toilet paper as it is too hard to change or follow, a government with the best propaganda machine ever seen, even though it has been out sourced to private industry, a government that strives to have a population who are not into politics, a government that can produce people like you who parrot talking points like "having the best government ever invented" without knowing anything about other forms of democracies and probably just internally comparing to various regular totalitarian states.
WTF? A four step start procedure? I have a 4 stroke Stihl (fs130) and you just pump the bubble a couple of times, choke and pull the cord. Don't even need those steps on a hot day. Runs mix as well so no engine oil to change. Buddy has a Husky which is actually a Honda. Same thing except it runs straight gas and needs the oil changed now and again.
Both weedeaters are nicer then the 2 strokes, maximum torque at lower rpms and quieter.
Chainsaws are still 2 stroke and come in quite large models, much more power then your lawnmower. http://www.husqvarna.com/us/fo... is close to 120 CC and Stihl has the 880 which IIRC is also over a 100 CC.
Yes, looks like I misremembered.
Not sure who you're talking about, possibly Lord Mountbatten who did work his way up from midshipman to the head of the armed forces though he was never that close to being in line to the UK throne (he was the son of a German Prince and Great Grandson of Queen Victoria IIRC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Most of the Royals start at the bottom (as officers though) in the armed forces and are expected to perform much as anyone else, eg Prince William who will probably be King one day, served in combat in Afghanistan as a helicopter pilot and afterwards in search and rescue. His combat phase was shorter then he and his family really wanted but being heir to the throne means having a big target painted on you.
I like the idea of royalty actually serving in the forces and getting first hand experience in the horrors of war.
As for the influence of the Queen on politics, she has weekly meetings with the Prime Minister and sort of serves as a senior non-partison adviser to the government.
Google came up with a very good search engine and financed it with small unobtrusive ads. That is why I started using Google along with most other people. You can say that wasn't a good contribution to society all you want but the numbers say you're wrong.
And how would going back to a 14+14 year copyright term hurt the average artist? They'd still get paid, just have to produce something new more regularly. Even the one hit wonders would make good money and if they sensibly invest it they still might never need to work.
In your case as a programmer for hire, it would mean that your Boss would be more motivated to keep you around and happy instead of taking your code (for a price) and milking it forever.
So. I have numerous books on one shelf and pick which ever I want to read. I have numerous partitions on my computers hard drive and pick which ever I want to use. Just like the books are partitioned by their covers, the operating systems on my computer are separated by logical partitions.
Just like someone could sell me a pre-populated bookshelf or box of books, they should be able to sell me a pre-populated computer.
Totally eliminating copyright seems a bit extreme though it really needs to be massively shortened and simplified.
Be a good starting point in negotiations though. Unluckily elected governments always seem more interested in supporting business then the people. As much as people don't like the idea of an unelected house such as the House of Lords, it was them who originally forced the original copyright terms to be reasonable (14+14yrs) with works then entering the public domain for "The Advancement of Learning" instead of the infinite copyright that the elected house defaulted to.
MS has a history of breaking dual booting systems. I had OS/2 which included the IBM Bootmanager to allow dual booting. Installed Win95 (and same with Win98, never tried ME) and at the end of the install it informed the user that the OS/2 partition was no more. No warning to back up your data or anything. I was knowledgeable enough to use fdisk to set the active partition to the Bootmanager partition and was back in business as the OS/2 partition was still there. How many people didn't know the fix and lost everything? And people wonder why some of us hate Microsoft.
Win2k had a different problem which killed Bootmanager and was harder to fix, involving hex editing the boot sector if I remember (perhaps a different sector) and may have been just lack of testing, though hard to believe, by Win2k service pack 2, the first I tried, it actually did tell the user how to re-enable the Bootmanager.
I did like that about IBM, OS/2 came with 2 methods of dual booting and could be installed on any partition though had to be installed on C: for one type of dual booting with DOS.
There are also numerous reports of MS overwriting the boot sector therefore breaking Linux, especially in the LILO days.
It would be like packaging Lord of the Rings along with the Dark Tower and Huckleberry Finn. As long as the Tolkien and King books were purchased legally and the packaging didn't use artwork and such, what would be the problem?
.
I live in a country with single payer health care and the only legislating that has been done has been banning what is available in government buildings including schools where vending machines have to have healthy foods and Coca Cola etc aren't allowed to sponsor unhealthy foods.
There has been government funded campaigns to encourage people to live healthy, things like pushing people to exercise through advertising and policies like encouraging smokers to quit including making freely available quit smoking aids such as nicotine gum.
Compare to a system like Americas where private industry is allowed to indoctrinate kids to live on junk food by giving schools money with strings. And many people believing in getting rid of regulations which could lead to tobacco companies advertising in schools as "the government has no place regulating what people do"
Just imagine how much less your employer would have to pay you if your take home pay was increased by that 67% Federal tax drop.
Funny thing, as far as I know there are only 2 countries that practice direct democracy, one of which is a Republic, namely Switzerland and one has a monarch, namely the Principality of Liechtenstein. Both are very successful countries that have not gone down the path of financial ruin, at that the exact opposite has happened with the Swiss considered one of the most financially stable countries on Earth.
BTW, all republic really means is not having a sovereign and lots of monarchies have representative governments and some are even federal laid out unions of sovereign states or provinces. There are also lots of republics that are totalitarian dictatorships.
In fact, right now ECB doesn't print _enough_ money - inflation is way under the targeted level, threatening to go into outright deflation.
Have you been shopping for food in the last few years? All the important stuff like food, gas, heat and shelter sure seems to be going up faster then claimed. Or perhaps it is offset by the luxury goods that many or most can't afford or need to buy very often. I don't care if yachts and big screen TVs are getting cheaper. I do care that my income is flat and groceries keep going up.
What makes you think that China can't use the same means as the oil companies to manipulate the government and people. They aren't stupid and must know that both the government and media are for sale and they have lots of dollars.
All I can think of a defence is diversity and not depending on any powerful entity too much.
The Canadian governing Conservative party is currently about to pass the "Fair Elections Act" which is going to disenfranchise many voters, stop Elections Canada from even advertising elections including telling people where they vote, stop Elections Canada from prosecuting campaign overspending and various other irregularities and put in massive loopholes on the political contributions limitations. They already removed all tax funded political funding.
Along with many of their other moves they're totally changing Canada character including making us much more aggressive.
You can use celluloids (sp?) to make plastics using plants such as hemp, just have to do something about the laws that have been passed to support the buggy whip manufactures (actually pulp paper).
Since I started looking at web pages with JPEG images, my internet connection has almost doubled in speed and now there are pages that are basically unviewable.
Many locations don't have any other option then dial up and many more have various caps on the amount you're allowed to download before charges increase.
So, you're saying it's immoral, unacceptable, or unaccepted for me to kill John while in public on the streets of Washington DC and tell you about it?
I think what you're calling for is a fundamental change to the constitution to recognize an intrinsic right to life in public.