Was the Soviet Union worse then Czarist Russia? From what I know it was mostly an improvement for the average person and if Stalin hadn't entered the equation the police state stuff would have been close to how things were under the Czars. Shit the Soviets went from a feudal based agricultural system to a space capable industrial system in less then 50 years with a war that killed 10s of millions of Russians in that period of time as well. Just as the Soviet Union reflected what came before, a progressive America would reflect the previous America. The danger for any system is a Stalin getting into power. It has happened with left and right leaning movements.
It isn't that much closer to the Sun, much less then Mercury which is cooler then Venus. There's a reason that Venus was expected to be inhabitable until the temperature was first measured by radar in '59 or so and it was so surprising how hot Venus is.
Put Venus in the same orbit as Earth and see what the temperature is.
Close enough to what it currently is. The greenhouse effect is pretty powerful, even the Earth is 40 Kelvins hotter then it would be without an atmosphere and Venus is more like 400 Kelvins hotter even with it's very high albedo.
Works really well for Venus. Coolest planet in the solar system due to all those clouds. On Earth you can go out on a cloudy night vs a clear night and feel the effect.
They made it harder for non-Americans to pretend to be Americans and subscribe to things like netflix. Lots of people want to pay for content, content that is not available in their country or content that is much cheaper in the States so they get a VPN to pretend that they're somewhere else.
Hard to believe that mining tar and refining it into gasoline by burning tar is much better then mining coal and directly burning it. As easy oil runs out, gasoline gets much more dirty to produce.
You also need to factor in the hundreds or thousands of square miles of land ruined by mining the tar sands in Alberta as well as all the rivers being polluted (not too bad yet but the amount of polluted water in weak settling ponds that are ready to break...). Other tar sand mining is probably the same and as easy oil runs out, more difficult to extract oil will be mined. Shipping the bitumen also is more hazardous due to it being heavy and diluted with some toxic stuff. See the recent Kalamazoo spill. Even things like fracking has at least the negativity of using up a lot of water leading to water shortages at least in N. BC.
In 1816 summer never showed up, at least partially caused by the eruption of Mount Tamboura, perhaps amplified by a solar minimum and it being the tail end of the little ice age. Frost and snow at the beginning of June in New England and New York, ice on the rivers in Pennsylvania and swings in temperatures from the 90's to below freezing. Farming was devastated with prices rising extremely, oats went from 12 cents to 92 cents a bushel ($1.51 to $12.45 in to-days money). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_Summer A bunch of nukes along with the associated fire storms could well do similar, a couple of years with very low agriculture output would be very hard on many of the worlds peoples.
I'm mostly going by personal knowledge and could well be wrong as I'm not an expert. Not counting revolutions that are really about independence and peaceful revolutions it seems to me that many historical revolutions have come about when populations have been lacking though you make a good point that another factor is wealth inequality, especially when the rich have a bad attitude and come out with things like "let them eat cake" when people are protesting the lack of bread. The recent Arab spring is an example where due to food shortages and/or way too high prices, the population revolted.
Do you really think that they wouldn't have shot more then 3 people with a semi-automatic weapon? Especially if they chose a defend-able position. Also if everyone was armed, how would they know who to shoot? Seems to me that with bullets flying there'd be a tendency to shoot at who ever was shooting including other people trying to shoot the shooter. In a crowd where everyone looks similar it is hard to pick the correct target.
The American Revolution was really a War of Secession which was why it was a success. I (not American) believe that 13 colonial governments were for secession with the other colonies remaining in the Empire and the revolutionaries were quite happy to stop well short of marching on London to overthrow the government, instead settling for independence. They didn't even try too hard to force the colonies that were unwilling to revolt to join the new independent nation, just a standing invitation in the Articles of Confederation. You're right about most revolutions though perhaps it should be stated as violent revolutions. If the American population revolted by just sitting down instead of getting violent, the outcome might not be too bad.
When I load slashdot.org, the window title is "Slashdot:News for nerds, stuff that matters - Mozilla Firefox. Hovering over the tab gives a similar title minus the Mozilla Firefox and the window list also gives a similar title with Firefox as the prefix. Perhaps it depends on the browser
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Don't forget what your Founding Fathers practiced, owning other men including removing their rights, stealing other peoples land and such.
The American colonists were also Englishmen. The first time a King tried that divine shit, the English took him out back and chopped of his head. When his grandson tried the same shit a hundred years before the American Constitution they were more civilized, waited till he left town and declared he'd quit and invited someone from a democratic background and his wife to take over if they agreed to a Bill of Rights (Bill of Rights of 1689) The American Founding Fathers were pissed that the King tried to say that everyone was equal, even the American Indian (Royal Proclamation of 1763 IIRC) and even the worst, the English courts were granting habeus corpus to black slaves. As the American Founding Fathers believed that only some people had rights and others were for buying and owning, they didn't like the idea that everyone had Rights, just the chosen.
I think you're reading too much into the parents wishes. He never said anything about forcing the end of the 2 party system, just wishing. I wish lots of things that aren't practical as they'd infringe on peoples rights, but it would be nice if people voluntarily changed in some ways. Besides, there are constitutional things that can be done to encourage more parties, splitting up the elections would go a long ways. If a State elects its legislature at a different time as the Federals do it, State issues would be more important and alternative parties might appear. Same with municipal elections being divorced from the parent governments. I think that is one of the reasons that Canada has more parties, a provincial election is not tied in any way to a federal election and new parties appear at the provincial level quite often. Of course our constitution doesn't have fixed elections, just maximums and if a government doesn't pass a budget, they fall, usually leading to an election even if there was just one. The voters get pissed off if there are too many elections which encourages the government to actually have a budget unlike the States where not passing a budget doesn't seem to have much in the way of repercussions.
When I first was using OS/2 (v3), I didn't use the WPS, instead using alternate shells such as filebar or mdesk and it was fine with 4 MBs. Now I have a Gigabyte of ram and yesterday it crashed with a swap file is full error, actually the swap file can only grow to 2 GBs which was huge in 1990.
They did eventually lower the price. Redbox Warp 3 was being sold at London drugs (Canadian store) for $50 around '95. No manual but it was a refreshed build so supported IDE CDROMs and PPP and was much more likely to install. At least here it installed with minimal problems (had to do it again to get sound support). Currently the price is comparable to Windows boxed, I paid about $100 for the upgrade.
For a while around the release of Warp v3 there was quite a few commercials. Better DOS then DOS, better Windows then Windows type of ads are what I remember. The local drugstore even had a bin of Warp CDs for $50 apiece. Unluckily they screwed up by claiming it would work decently with 4MBs of ram.
It was IBMs bad luck that ram prices stayed so high as it did really need 8MB. I ran it in 4MBs by not loading the WPS and it worked very well. It was easier to run those DOS apps that needed more then 1MB of memory and due to a better file system, they ran faster. Warp V3 shipped with DIVE and DART for game support, Microsoft copied the idea and called it DirectX. IBM was interested in supporting games for a while.
Still doesn't work with disks bigger then 2 TB (and OS/2 needs special partitioning to see over 500 GB) and doesn't work with Win 7s default of using 2 primaries. Bootmanager showed the difference in philosophies between MS and IBM. IBM made inter-operation easy while MS did every thing they could to lock you in.
That was the the thing with Microsoft, they could have behaved fairly ethically and between IBM shooting themselves and the luck of ram prices staying high they would have won the desktop but they still behaved very unethically. With IE vs Netscape, Microsoft making IE free meant that Netscape couldn't sell their browser and with no income coming in they obviously couldn't compete and fell behind the company that could afford to spend lots of money on a freebie.
Yea, I have a F150 and it not only has an idiot oil gauge but also an idiot voltmeter. Both permanently read about 60% when the truck is running. Someone said they did this because too many people would complain about low oil pressure at idle (normal) and I guess the same with the voltage including it dropping when the fan is on. People shouldn't be allowed to drive without being able to read the basic instruments.
Actually be definition the amendments are in a sort of priority list, at least in the sense that later amendments trump earlier ones and the original constitution. Doesn't matter with the original 10 as none conflict but for example (I'm not American so don't remember the actual numbers) you can have an amendment prohibiting alcohol, then a later one repealing the first one. You could also have a new amendment that changes one of the earlier ones, eg an amendment that allowed government to legislate against certain types of speech such as child porn or speech not in the interests of national security. Strictly speaking that is how it should have been done rather then a court ruling that "Congress will pass no law" actually meaning "Congress can only pass these laws" that restrict speech. I find that the proposed Corwin amendment is interesting as to quote
It would forbid subsequent attempts to amend the Constitution to empower the Congress to "abolish or interfere" with the "domestic institutions" of the states, including "persons held to labor or service"
I don't let people come into my house and say whatever they want either,
Be better to phrase it as my home as the problem is if you are a renter and the house owner, aka landlord, tries to censor what you say in his house. Same with your ISP controlling what they allow your web server to say, especially if there is only very limited choices in ISPs (web hosts). There has to be a balance beyond saying it is only censorship if the government is doing the censoring without infringing too heavily on private rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the Soviet Union worse then Czarist Russia? From what I know it was mostly an improvement for the average person and if Stalin hadn't entered the equation the police state stuff would have been close to how things were under the Czars. Shit the Soviets went from a feudal based agricultural system to a space capable industrial system in less then 50 years with a war that killed 10s of millions of Russians in that period of time as well.
Just as the Soviet Union reflected what came before, a progressive America would reflect the previous America. The danger for any system is a Stalin getting into power. It has happened with left and right leaning movements.
Venus is a lot closer to the sun.
It isn't that much closer to the Sun, much less then Mercury which is cooler then Venus. There's a reason that Venus was expected to be inhabitable until the temperature was first measured by radar in '59 or so and it was so surprising how hot Venus is.
Put Venus in the same orbit as Earth and see what the temperature is.
Close enough to what it currently is. The greenhouse effect is pretty powerful, even the Earth is 40 Kelvins hotter then it would be without an atmosphere and Venus is more like 400 Kelvins hotter even with it's very high albedo.
Works really well for Venus. Coolest planet in the solar system due to all those clouds.
On Earth you can go out on a cloudy night vs a clear night and feel the effect.
They made it harder for non-Americans to pretend to be Americans and subscribe to things like netflix. Lots of people want to pay for content, content that is not available in their country or content that is much cheaper in the States so they get a VPN to pretend that they're somewhere else.
Hard to believe that mining tar and refining it into gasoline by burning tar is much better then mining coal and directly burning it. As easy oil runs out, gasoline gets much more dirty to produce.
You also need to factor in the hundreds or thousands of square miles of land ruined by mining the tar sands in Alberta as well as all the rivers being polluted (not too bad yet but the amount of polluted water in weak settling ponds that are ready to break...). Other tar sand mining is probably the same and as easy oil runs out, more difficult to extract oil will be mined. Shipping the bitumen also is more hazardous due to it being heavy and diluted with some toxic stuff. See the recent Kalamazoo spill.
Even things like fracking has at least the negativity of using up a lot of water leading to water shortages at least in N. BC.
In 1816 summer never showed up, at least partially caused by the eruption of Mount Tamboura, perhaps amplified by a solar minimum and it being the tail end of the little ice age. Frost and snow at the beginning of June in New England and New York, ice on the rivers in Pennsylvania and swings in temperatures from the 90's to below freezing. Farming was devastated with prices rising extremely, oats went from 12 cents to 92 cents a bushel ($1.51 to $12.45 in to-days money). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_Summer
A bunch of nukes along with the associated fire storms could well do similar, a couple of years with very low agriculture output would be very hard on many of the worlds peoples.
I'm mostly going by personal knowledge and could well be wrong as I'm not an expert. Not counting revolutions that are really about independence and peaceful revolutions it seems to me that many historical revolutions have come about when populations have been lacking though you make a good point that another factor is wealth inequality, especially when the rich have a bad attitude and come out with things like "let them eat cake" when people are protesting the lack of bread.
The recent Arab spring is an example where due to food shortages and/or way too high prices, the population revolted.
Do you really think that they wouldn't have shot more then 3 people with a semi-automatic weapon? Especially if they chose a defend-able position. Also if everyone was armed, how would they know who to shoot? Seems to me that with bullets flying there'd be a tendency to shoot at who ever was shooting including other people trying to shoot the shooter. In a crowd where everyone looks similar it is hard to pick the correct target.
On the other hand, when populations become too hungry or short on other necessities such as gasoline, revolution is much more likely.
The American Revolution was really a War of Secession which was why it was a success. I (not American) believe that 13 colonial governments were for secession with the other colonies remaining in the Empire and the revolutionaries were quite happy to stop well short of marching on London to overthrow the government, instead settling for independence. They didn't even try too hard to force the colonies that were unwilling to revolt to join the new independent nation, just a standing invitation in the Articles of Confederation.
You're right about most revolutions though perhaps it should be stated as violent revolutions. If the American population revolted by just sitting down instead of getting violent, the outcome might not be too bad.
When I load slashdot.org, the window title is "Slashdot:News for nerds, stuff that matters - Mozilla Firefox. Hovering over the tab gives a similar title minus the Mozilla Firefox and the window list also gives a similar title with Firefox as the prefix.
Perhaps it depends on the browser
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Don't forget what your Founding Fathers practiced, owning other men including removing their rights, stealing other peoples land and such.
The American colonists were also Englishmen. The first time a King tried that divine shit, the English took him out back and chopped of his head. When his grandson tried the same shit a hundred years before the American Constitution they were more civilized, waited till he left town and declared he'd quit and invited someone from a democratic background and his wife to take over if they agreed to a Bill of Rights (Bill of Rights of 1689)
The American Founding Fathers were pissed that the King tried to say that everyone was equal, even the American Indian (Royal Proclamation of 1763 IIRC) and even the worst, the English courts were granting habeus corpus to black slaves. As the American Founding Fathers believed that only some people had rights and others were for buying and owning, they didn't like the idea that everyone had Rights, just the chosen.
If by "this nation" you mean the USA, then lots of people in other countries are scared of your government and have been for quite a while.
I think you're reading too much into the parents wishes. He never said anything about forcing the end of the 2 party system, just wishing. I wish lots of things that aren't practical as they'd infringe on peoples rights, but it would be nice if people voluntarily changed in some ways.
Besides, there are constitutional things that can be done to encourage more parties, splitting up the elections would go a long ways. If a State elects its legislature at a different time as the Federals do it, State issues would be more important and alternative parties might appear. Same with municipal elections being divorced from the parent governments. I think that is one of the reasons that Canada has more parties, a provincial election is not tied in any way to a federal election and new parties appear at the provincial level quite often. Of course our constitution doesn't have fixed elections, just maximums and if a government doesn't pass a budget, they fall, usually leading to an election even if there was just one. The voters get pissed off if there are too many elections which encourages the government to actually have a budget unlike the States where not passing a budget doesn't seem to have much in the way of repercussions.
When I first was using OS/2 (v3), I didn't use the WPS, instead using alternate shells such as filebar or mdesk and it was fine with 4 MBs. Now I have a Gigabyte of ram and yesterday it crashed with a swap file is full error, actually the swap file can only grow to 2 GBs which was huge in 1990.
They did eventually lower the price. Redbox Warp 3 was being sold at London drugs (Canadian store) for $50 around '95. No manual but it was a refreshed build so supported IDE CDROMs and PPP and was much more likely to install. At least here it installed with minimal problems (had to do it again to get sound support). Currently the price is comparable to Windows boxed, I paid about $100 for the upgrade.
For a while around the release of Warp v3 there was quite a few commercials. Better DOS then DOS, better Windows then Windows type of ads are what I remember. The local drugstore even had a bin of Warp CDs for $50 apiece.
Unluckily they screwed up by claiming it would work decently with 4MBs of ram.
It was IBMs bad luck that ram prices stayed so high as it did really need 8MB. I ran it in 4MBs by not loading the WPS and it worked very well. It was easier to run those DOS apps that needed more then 1MB of memory and due to a better file system, they ran faster.
Warp V3 shipped with DIVE and DART for game support, Microsoft copied the idea and called it DirectX. IBM was interested in supporting games for a while.
Still doesn't work with disks bigger then 2 TB (and OS/2 needs special partitioning to see over 500 GB) and doesn't work with Win 7s default of using 2 primaries.
Bootmanager showed the difference in philosophies between MS and IBM. IBM made inter-operation easy while MS did every thing they could to lock you in.
That was the the thing with Microsoft, they could have behaved fairly ethically and between IBM shooting themselves and the luck of ram prices staying high they would have won the desktop but they still behaved very unethically.
With IE vs Netscape, Microsoft making IE free meant that Netscape couldn't sell their browser and with no income coming in they obviously couldn't compete and fell behind the company that could afford to spend lots of money on a freebie.
Yea, I have a F150 and it not only has an idiot oil gauge but also an idiot voltmeter. Both permanently read about 60% when the truck is running. Someone said they did this because too many people would complain about low oil pressure at idle (normal) and I guess the same with the voltage including it dropping when the fan is on.
People shouldn't be allowed to drive without being able to read the basic instruments.
Actually be definition the amendments are in a sort of priority list, at least in the sense that later amendments trump earlier ones and the original constitution. Doesn't matter with the original 10 as none conflict but for example (I'm not American so don't remember the actual numbers) you can have an amendment prohibiting alcohol, then a later one repealing the first one. You could also have a new amendment that changes one of the earlier ones, eg an amendment that allowed government to legislate against certain types of speech such as child porn or speech not in the interests of national security. Strictly speaking that is how it should have been done rather then a court ruling that "Congress will pass no law" actually meaning "Congress can only pass these laws" that restrict speech.
I find that the proposed Corwin amendment is interesting as to quote
It would forbid subsequent attempts to amend the Constitution to empower the Congress to "abolish or interfere" with the "domestic institutions" of the states, including "persons held to labor or service"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_amendment
I don't let people come into my house and say whatever they want either,
Be better to phrase it as my home as the problem is if you are a renter and the house owner, aka landlord, tries to censor what you say in his house.
Same with your ISP controlling what they allow your web server to say, especially if there is only very limited choices in ISPs (web hosts). There has to be a balance beyond saying it is only censorship if the government is doing the censoring without infringing too heavily on private rights.