So, yes, this whole debate is about whether or not we can affect the earth's climate to an extent that we no longer can survive here.
And even if we're not the most important species on the earth, um, climate change tends to, you know, kill other animals also.
There's no logical reason that us undoing something we did to the earth, which will kill us and a bunch of other life, could ever be considered us claiming we're 'the most important species'. This is an argument made by total morons who want to look like they're contributing to the conversation.
We need a list of threads posted somewhere that are automatically redundant. Talking about how we can't really 'destroy' the earth (When of course no one has suggested we can) when talking about climate change would be near the top of that list.
The joke is, they're probably going to die too. Massive changes like this wipe out huge sections of life.
Sure, some life make it, and that life eventually re-expands to cover the world, including evolving into new species if needed.
But that doesn't change the fact it's not only people at risk. In fact, it's not really 'people' at risk at all. We are so adaptable, we already live in so many niches and have so many different supplies of food, that it's pretty damn good odds we'll make it through this.
Sadly, we'll make it thought this like other life will...by having 80% of us die off, and the other 20% eventually adapting and filling back up the earth.
I don't like that plan.
I, and the rest of the US, shouldn't like that plan for entirely selfish reasons...the US is pretty homogeneous in food and diet and midrange in climate and a lot of stuff is balanced on the knife's edge. The US is going to one of the worse hard hit by any variations.
Hell, apparently we now get repeated snowstorms here in Georgia, which has totally blown up our universe. We can't deal with snow! What's going to happen when the US has snap cold wipe out corn or something?
I don't know why it gets any special advantages at all.
It should have to physically push a buzzer. And write out the daily double. I'm okay with it being bolted into place or something, and it doesn't have to entirely fit behind the podium, but that's all.
Also, it should have to watch the board itself. It should have no electronic linkages to any outside information.
It has to be able to parse the physical environment of Jeopardy, and interact with the physical environment of Jeopardy (At least while the show it running, it doesn't have to enter or leave under its own power.)
Until then, it's not really 'playing Jeopardy', is it?
Both ME1 and ME2 do a pretty good job of railroading you along the plot while allowing you free choice.
They can do this because, fundamentally, you are 'good guy' either way, which is a hell of a lot easier then games that let you play as 'evil' and then try to have you save everyone for no explicable reason.
You just have the choice of saving the world as Captain Picard or Jack Bauer.
This extends to your bosses. You can either believe them and attempt to follow orders or you can just ignore whatever they say and either do what's 'right', or ignore them and do what's 'efficient'. And said orders can vary from reasonable to political asscovering nonsense in the first game, and from reasonable to clearly corporate corrupt in the second. But they are also both 'good guys', at least for the main goals they send you on. (Although you can get rather morally dubious side missions from both, although you can do whatever you want on them with no repercussions, because your bosses can't afford to 'punish' you in any way without risking your failure.)
Well, a saner system might be to have 'get a small amount of data' function and a 'get a large amount of data' function. Where the first, by default, works over 3G and wifi, while the second is only on wifi by default.
And then have a per-app config option (and a phone level one to override it) that lets the user change either of those.
And you could even put code-level constraints in those...if the app tries to download more than 100k in ten minutes, or whatever, over the 'small amount of data' function, the OS complains.
It would also be nice if the app could register types, so that magically more config options for that app could show up that explain exactly what they're for. I.e, if you have three accounts, the app could 'export' them all, and at the OS level you could say 'Do this account entirely over 3G if no wifi, do this account checking over 3G but download over wifi, and don't do this account at all on 3G.'
Or one for 'background download' and one for 'foreground download', it would have an option for both to configure, if you see what I'm saying.
The problem with the app store isn't with the rules about the app store. It's just package management, and I've long argued that OSes need something exactly like that, even for commercial apps. Linux distros should take a page from Apple's book and put a commercial purchasing ability in their package management. Apple, meanwhile, should pull some of the less useful apps.
The store itself is fine, the fact everything has to be okayed by Apple before going in the app store is fine. It's their app store, they want to present a nice shiny interface of tested and working apps with secure purchasing, I'm fine with that. Frankly, that's a hell of a lot better than, oh, Windows software purchasing.
The fact that every single app has to be okayed by Apple before going in the phone (Because the app store is the only way into the phone) is the problem.
It makes development very hard, it totally locks out OSS, etc, etc.
Apple does not have to support apps that you (hypothetically) drag into iTune and past some warning prompts about unsupported software. In that, the iPhone could have a 'tainted' mode, the same way that the Linux kernel does. If it's tainted you have to reboot into 'only supported software' mode before getting support.
Substitute, say, Huffington Post in place of Fox and you get the same result.
I don't know why people use Huffington Post in this analogy. Huffington Post is incredibly erratic in their tilt, and is not really a new agency at all. It's is, essentially, a blogging site with some paid contributors that pretends to be a news agency. (Hence the random tilt, thanks to random contributors.)
Slashdot works a little differently -- but it's the same result. More potent in fact, because the feedback loop is much more immediate and direct.
Some of the slashdot tilts are explainable, and some are even justifiable, and some are neither.
The anti-MS stuff is explainable, but not justifiable anymore. There are specific problem I have with MS, like their idiotic IE6 Forever! policy that totally fucked over web development for half a decade. But this site was founded right when MS was abusing their monopoly, and, frankly, had the shittiest OS in existence, and people desperate for anything else. Almost none of that is important anymore, but the hate still remains, and that's why.
The love, and then later hate, for Miguel De Icaza, is totally irrational, and I've never been able to figure it out. it's the same thing for the love of Apple. Look, just because someone is standing up to MS doesn't make them God.
The hate for DRM is justifiable and explainable: There's a large minority of people here who are incredibly inconvenienced by DRM, because they are trying to do weird things like play Windows games on Linux or make DVD video libraries or are early adopters who got bitten by HDMI shit or who are people who want to write programs on their phone. And don't like the fact not only is that hard, but often they have to commit a crime to do it, which is insane. Even people who don't do that stuff consider themselves 'nerdy' enough to actually want to do that stuff...I don't run Linux, but I was pissed they made it illegal to play DVDs on Linux, too. (Which, incidentally, is now allowed, thanks to the LoC.)
There's an even larger group of people here who want to use stuff for free and are annoyed they can't do that.
But you'll notice when the DRM is reasonable, and actually works, like Steam or iTunes, the place instantly turns into a flamewar where half the people don't see a problem with _that_ DRM, and the other half claim to have some sort of hypothetical problem or worry that when the seas grind the continents into dust we won't be able to use the software...but really are against any sort of DRM at all, because they want to use copyrighted stuff without paying for it.
Actually, requiring they specify what channel to use would make things better.
That way, if an app is about to get a lot of data, they can just try the wifi connection. Doesn't work, no harm, no foul.
And then they can check their config to see if they should then try the 3G connection.
Having it switch automatically will result in app developers just writing things 'to get data', whereas having to pick a specific connection for data and use it means they have to actually think about first using wifi and then using 3G, or then not using 3G.
Ie, if you don't have to specify, half the programmers will do: f = open();
Whereas if you do, they end up having to do: if (!(f = open(WIFI)) f = open(3G);
And it's a lot more likely at some point that will end up being changed to: if (!(f = open(WIFI) && CONFIG_USE_3G) f = open(3G);
If you make them do one, and then the other, and don't have a way to do both, there's a lot higher chance they'll put a test on the second, instead of having to go back and later split it in half and put a test on the second. If you always have to think about the connection you're using, then you're more likely to say 'wait, we shouldn't do this over 3G, if we don't have wifi, we can hold off'.
Of course, one or two stupid developers are going to just use 3G for everything, but hopefully someone will notice, and it would be fewer than the programmers who just did 'Open a connection' without thinking about which they were using.
Why not point to the actual change of 2009: 6,547.05, 2010: 11585.38?
Which is great for all the money you invested in 2009.
Not great all for the money invested in the previous 20 years if you needed it in 2009.
yes the stock market is a stupid place to invest if you buy 100% of your holding at one random point in time, and sell it all at one other random point in time.
Which is how any sort of required investments work.
You have the completely wrong understanding. I already described how they actually work. But again you don't read.
No, I explained that you used the word 'government pension' to talk about some sort of thing that the poor elderly can get, and I politely pointed out you're using the wrong term and no one in America knows what you're talking about, because only government employees can earn government pensions, so it hardly works as some sort of national solution.
Which is exactly what I said. Did you just not bother reading?
I misread that, because it didn't occur to me that you though a return of $1400 over 11 years was useful! I've make that much interest on my checking account.
I also covered that. You know "dividends"...
Except that dividends on the Dow are, um, about 1.4%.
You know, worse than one year CDs.
Even combining that with the 0.3% interest rate, you can invest in five year CDs and make more. Granted, not over 10 years at a $10,000 a year..but you could probably come out even by investing in the longest possible CD that would be done at the limit each year, with 10, 7, 5, etc as time goes by.
...and "this is the worst case most pathologic strategy possible
I point to the actual change in value: 2009: 11722.98, 2010: 11585.38.
It doesn't matter 'when' the sells happen, it matters that the Dow went down.
Yes, if you were a day trader, you could have made money. That doesn't change anything. People are supposed to be regularly investing via some sort of plan, not day trading the Dow.
over your cherry picked bad timing period".
Ah, yes, the check-picked time period that just happened. Would you rather I use 1960 to 1970? Or 1970 to 1980? Did you know a dollar invested in 1966 and taken out in 1982 would be worth 33 cents after inflation? You're the one trying to cherry pick times.
And you're wrong. The pathological worse time period would be from 2000-2009.
But let's not use the worse case scenarios. I would take the first day of the year, but that day is weird for the market. So let's do it fair and roll a dice for the day to invest. The first year Dow was 11722 for a random value, and 11722 mod 365 is 42. (Seriously? 42?) The 42th day of the year is, what, February 11?
Everyone invested 10,000 on Feb 11, starting in 2000 and moving it to some other account (bonds?) in Feb 11, 2010. (Thank goodness they didn't move it in Feb 11 2009.)
Treasuries, munis, and corporate bonds ratios dependant on how far away retirement is and current prices.
You do realize that muni bonds are threatened now, right? Because so many local governments are bankrupt? And the Republicans want to repeal the law disallowing state governments from declaring bankrupcy, so even state bonds are in danger? (Local governments can or can't, depending on the state, but states can't.)
And I will again point out that investing in government bonds is just a roundabout and insane way of the government providing retirement, instead, you know, actually having payouts indexed to things like social security. It provides no discernible benefit to anyone.
So you've left corporate bonds...rated by the same bond rating industry we've discovered does nothing at all.
I'm not American, I'm from a country with both forced retirement savings in personal accounts and government pensions for those that need them.
You keep using the phrase 'government pensions'. I don't think you know what that means in the US, or you don't know what social security is.
Pensions, in America, are things employers provide. Employers include 'the government', but no one gets a 'government pension' if they didn't work for the government.
Government 'pensions' in other places, from what I understand, are essentially an account that people pay into through taxes and collect later. This is what social security is. We just do not call it a 'pension'. We call it 'insurance' for some utterly inexplicably reason.
Granted, you said 'if they need it', which is what we mean by 'means testing', giving it only to people who have no retirement income (aka, a pension) from previous employers. We don't currently do that for social security, but has been proposed as one of the fixes. (We don't do it mainly because almost no one gets any sort of retirement pension anymore, so it's a lot of work to means test for almost no net gain.)
In fact, pointing out that it was a bad time economically sorta makes my point more. The only time we've had taxes this low are during in economic problems. (Yes, yes, we're also in economic problems now...but we had taxes this low for a decade, well before any problems.)
I just said that it and the Great Depression were the only times that 'grandparents' could be adults that we had a lower tax rate than now.
That is, assume we don't have 60 year olds wandering around here talking about their grandparents or something. Specially, to see lower taxes and not be in an economic disaster, from age 20-30, these 'grandparents' would have to be born before 1900, to be an adult from 1920-1930. (And then they probably lost their house and investments in the 1929 crash, so that seems like a really bad example.)
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD! Only Gold can SAVE US NOW!
Seriously, you know what would a fuckload better than stupid gold in an actual economic collapse?
Some sort of power generator, preferably a renewable one. As an added bonus, you don't have to wait until then to use it. I'm sure the people who actually were smart enough to get those would be willing to trade the power for lumps of metal they can't do anything with. Or not.
Hell, the Boy Scout Handbook will, literally, be worth its weight in gold. When makes the gold a pretty dumb investment instead of just buying the book.
Not that I do think there's going to be any sort of 'collapse' (Although I think the bank problems are just getting started.), but it's very telling what sort of stupid shit people think is important.
I bet 90% of the gold hoarding morons don't even have a plan to get drinkable water if everything blows up. Or own a hand-cranked battery charger. I wonder how many of them realize you need water to grow these 'seeds' they have? Seeds in quotes because they probably are all dead.
Remember when survivalism used to be done by people who were paranoid, yes, but who were smart and well prepared? They'd have basement stocked with canned goods and generators and supplies of gasoline that they'd carefully top off? With rows of car batteries and a hand crank in case the gas ran out? Remember those guys? (I'm sure they're still out there.)
Sure, they were classic example of 'craziness is taking an incorrect premise to the logical ends', but at least you could fucking respect those guys and they got starring roles in apocalyptic stories.
Instead we now get paranoid people who are idiots who think you, apparently, can live off gold.
The DJIA closed at 11,674.76 last week, so our investment is worth $111,487.51. So basically unchanged (up $1,487.51 over what we invested), with the absolutly worst case investment plan (buy the yearly high).
Fencepost error. You invested eleven years in there. You invested in 2000, and in 2010, and all the years in the middle. That's 11 deposits of $10000, which is $110,000 invested.
You got a return of $1487, which is under 0.3% interest rate. (Technically, I don't know what day you started, so the investment could have been slightly longer than 10 years, or slightly short than 11, or somewhere in the middle, so the rate varies.)
Inflation, meanwhile, was 3.8% over that period.
The DOW: Doing ten times worse than inflation. Put all your money in it tomorrow!
Yes the bond-rating agencies were being fraud, still anyone who bothered to look could see that real estate was in a bubble and avoid those.
If only we had some third party agencies that would rate bonds to make sure that they were reasonable investments...oh, FUCK.
Sorry, you lose that argument. People can't do an infinite amount of research on bonds. They're bonds, not stocks. You're not supposed to have to do research to weed out obviously bogus ones. You're supposed to pick your level of risk and go with AA+ or BB, end of story.
Just like you don't get to specify individual stocks, you don't get to specify individual bonds either. The retirement plan you think people should be using has to be automatic, not having people do research every month to figure out where to invest. A computer must be able to do it.
If people can do it wrong because of lack of research and lose all their money, your plan is broken.
Now, if you want to specify only specific types of bonds, like government or commercial real estate, feel free...but you don't get to exclude mortgage backed bonds retroactively solely because that specific market blew up. That's cheating.
So you're an idiot? Obviously government bonds would be part of almost any investment strategy.
If the government provides for retirement, it provides for retirement.
Everyone saying 'We should invest ourselves, not have SS' and then expecting to able to buy nice safe government bonds are actually expecting the government to provide for their retirement...they just don't want the government to provide for other people's retirement.
It's especially ironic as half the idiots wanting to phase out social security claim to be 'deficit hawks' who, if they actually wanted to reduce the deficit, would, you know, be wanting less bonds issued. Instead they want to loan the government money and live off it later at nice high interest rates in a way that only they participate in, as opposed to a standardize government program.(1)
I have nothing against investing in government bonds in the actual real world, but it's the height of dishonesty to assert that social security is a bad idea, and everyone should purchase government bonds instead.
I really don't get why it has to be SS or nothing?
It's not SS or nothing. You can invest additionally wherever you want.
But in the actual world, where 90% of Americans live and work, they do not actually make enough to invest anywhere. They'll have some medical expense or some layoff or lose their house because the bank committed fraud when it sold them to them and then use their retirement principle to recover from that, or declare bankrupcy and lose it anyway, and never managed to recover any savings.
All the people who think we should put the base level of retirement, the thing that keeps people from staving in the streets, in a place where people can access it, have never been in a situation where people actually have no money, and, would, you know, use that money instead if they could get to it. (Of course, no one's been in that circumstances, as we don't let people wipe out their SS money.)
140 m workers investing in the productive capacity of the economy...
...went broke in 2008 when the stock market crashed and now you've got 6 million people attempting to retire on no money.
Don't worry, they could have invested in their house, and lived on reverse mortgages...oh, shit, wait, the value of their house just plummeted and no one's giving out reverse mortgages anymore, are they?
They could have invested in bonds instead. I'm sure the bond-rating agencies weren't just rubber-stamping A++ rating on shitty bonds backed by bad mortgages...no, wait, they were, weren't they?
Do you 'privatize social security' idiots not actually pay attention to the actual news?
Please list anything that someone investing in 'the productive capacity of the economy' could have started investing in 2000 and made money. (No, you don't get to retroactively pick specific companies, but you can pick something like the Dow...although that specially, obviously, is not a good idea.)
It doesn't have to 'make money' every year, but it needs to somewhat predictably increase and never ever plummet, because people will be living off it. Come on, it's got to be somewhere around 4% to beat social security, and let's say it can't ever drop by more than 5% over a year. Please point to it.
Oh, and you don't get to use government bonds. Using government bonds is just having the government pay for it in a slightly stranger way. Duh. Saying 'The government shouldn't be handling retirement, instead, people should loan the government money and live off the interest that the government provides' is utterly surreal, especially from a group of people who uniformly want the government to stop borrowing and live with its mean.
This, of course, doesn't address the problem of some people living to 100 and hence running out of money in their account. I guess we can be charitably and assume that the system just assumes people will pay their own way until age 90 or whatever, and then the government will just cover the few remaining people, but that is going to cost at least some money.
And it's also failing to address the fact that if everyone invested, it would entirely distort the market. If everyone invested in the stock market, well, it would be a very different stock market. if everyone bought bonds the demand for bonds would stay high, which would result in people issuing lower-rate bonds to cover the market. But first let's see if you can find somewhere to invest in the first place, and then we can look at what 140 million people investing in that market would do.
The actual way to fix the system is to raise or even remove the income cap.
Or just raising rates by 2% or whatever. Or means testing.
Idiots looking at the social security system and claiming it's about to be 'broke' and we should give up on it are like idiots looking at a gas gauge in a bus and claiming we're almost out of gas so we should get out and walk.
We're only going to run out of gas only if morons repeating over and over 'social security is broke' actually manage to elect enough navigators to keep us from stopping at a fucking gas station and buying more gas.
The rich, in this analogy, own a taxi service, aka, the stock market, where they wish people would spend their money instead.
Rich people: 'Social security is broken because there's a very minor problem with it that will cause issues in a few decades, we should get rid of it.' Young people: 'I heard that people think social security won't be there when we retire, so I'm all for doing away with it.' Chorus: 'Social security is going to die because we're going to kill it, so we should kill it.'
It's the most goddamn absurd attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy I've ever seen. And the real joke is that everyone desperately wants people to forget the alternative was 'letting people invest in the stock market', so if we'd actually privatized social security back when Bush wanted to it, we'd have lost all that money. And if, instead, we'd have invested in 'safe' bonds and stuff...we'd still have lost that money, because the damn bond rating places were criminally asleep at the wheel the last decade and giving perfect ratings to utter shit packages of loans.
So now, hilariously, no one actually mentions where we'd invest this retirement money instead of social security. They're going to wait a decade and then start pimping giving it to the rich, um, I mean, investing in the stock market, and hope we forget what happened this last decade.
So, the next time you hear an idiot talk about 'private retirement accounts', ask them what you think we should let people invest in. And then pretend they started invest in that in 2000, and see how well the market did.
If you don't like that the social security program has money and the government doesn't, so the government keeps borrowing from social security, perhaps you should figure some way to fix the government's financial woes (A good start might be not extending tax cuts, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and not repealing the health care bill, which saves hundreds of billions of dollars.), and not worry about, you now, the single part of the government that actually seems to be doing okay.
Um, you really need to actually check your assumptions. Because I don't know 'when your grandparents were around', but you're wrong. Just wrong.
Either you're talking about the great depression, when taxes, were, indeed lower, but no one was buying houses or putting people through college or, you know, eating real food...
...or 'your grandparents were around' during WWII when the tax rate was not only higher, no one was even allowed to build new homes because material went to the war effort, as did all the construction workers...
...or 'your grandparents were around' to be, oh, the 1950-1960, when the tax rates were higher.
There is one microscopic sweet spot of post-war, from 1945-1950, when the US was the only functioning economy, when the tax rates was slightly lower than current rates.
But they weren't lower than a decade ago when you hypothesis you could have been doing all these, so you're still wrong. Your grandparents had 5 years at that rate. You had a decade. (And we're talking maybe 3% lower than current rates.)
Palin will be elected but the world will end before she can take office. I'd love to see the look on her face when it happens.
What do you mean? She'd love it if that happened. She does not want to actually govern, she demonstrated that by quitting the Governorship of Alaska.
She just wants to fly around and be rich and famous, and the only way she sees to do that is talk about political stuff, which sometimes means doing something that puts her in the public eye, like running for office.
I, personally, really really really hope she does, but it will only happen if she's out of the public eye by then and needs a 'boost'.
Once a multidose is first used (or split outside of a sterilized clean room)
That was what I was assuming. That hospitals could break up multi-doses themselves in a sterile environment.
Now, if you're saying they need 'clean room' sterility instead of just normal 'operating room' sterility, obviously that's impractical.
But figuring all this out is stupid. There's no reason we couldn't just ship single-doses. There's no reason we couldn't ship just big vats of vaccine to sterile hospitals and have them repackage it and distribute them as needed.
Like I said, the health care industry has been continually operating by the slimmest margins imaginable as the health insurance industry sucked more and more money of it, and the fact someone wants a vaccine to cost $12 instead of $13 is the only reason to ever consider using preservatives at all in the US. It's crazy cost cutting.
In other countries, without medical infrastructure, where vaccines get carried from place to place in cars, the story is different, and preservatives make things much more practical...but this is America. If we can ship fish to Iowa, we can ship vaccines.
No, guns shoot bullets. People cannot shoot bullets, regardless of whether or not they have a gun. Bullets are shot by guns.
At least in that sense of 'shot'. In the other sense of 'shot', people shot people.
All this is idiotic, anyway. The problem isn't 'gun control'.
The problem is that a certain political party has been sprouting threats and metaphors using violence ever since the last election, yammering about 'second amendment remedies' and using bulleye's on political opponents.
I'm sure this guy is deranged and isn't a normal person on the right, or, hell, could be anything at all. But that doesn't change the fact that the victim's opponent had a rally where you shoot an M-16 to 'tell her how you really feel'.
YOU DON'T GET TO USE THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE IN POLITICS.
If you do, no shit you're in trouble when people actually, duh, start using violence. And of course they'll be the crazy ones, but that really doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
So, yes, this whole debate is about whether or not we can affect the earth's climate to an extent that we no longer can survive here.
And even if we're not the most important species on the earth, um, climate change tends to, you know, kill other animals also.
There's no logical reason that us undoing something we did to the earth, which will kill us and a bunch of other life, could ever be considered us claiming we're 'the most important species'. This is an argument made by total morons who want to look like they're contributing to the conversation.
We need a list of threads posted somewhere that are automatically redundant. Talking about how we can't really 'destroy' the earth (When of course no one has suggested we can) when talking about climate change would be near the top of that list.
The joke is, they're probably going to die too. Massive changes like this wipe out huge sections of life.
Sure, some life make it, and that life eventually re-expands to cover the world, including evolving into new species if needed.
But that doesn't change the fact it's not only people at risk. In fact, it's not really 'people' at risk at all. We are so adaptable, we already live in so many niches and have so many different supplies of food, that it's pretty damn good odds we'll make it through this.
Sadly, we'll make it thought this like other life will...by having 80% of us die off, and the other 20% eventually adapting and filling back up the earth.
I don't like that plan.
I, and the rest of the US, shouldn't like that plan for entirely selfish reasons...the US is pretty homogeneous in food and diet and midrange in climate and a lot of stuff is balanced on the knife's edge. The US is going to one of the worse hard hit by any variations.
Hell, apparently we now get repeated snowstorms here in Georgia, which has totally blown up our universe. We can't deal with snow! What's going to happen when the US has snap cold wipe out corn or something?
Um, no, that's engineering. Or research and development. Whatever you want to call it.
'Inventing new stuff' is not a science.
I don't know why it gets any special advantages at all.
It should have to physically push a buzzer. And write out the daily double. I'm okay with it being bolted into place or something, and it doesn't have to entirely fit behind the podium, but that's all.
Also, it should have to watch the board itself. It should have no electronic linkages to any outside information.
It has to be able to parse the physical environment of Jeopardy, and interact with the physical environment of Jeopardy (At least while the show it running, it doesn't have to enter or leave under its own power.)
Until then, it's not really 'playing Jeopardy', is it?
Both ME1 and ME2 do a pretty good job of railroading you along the plot while allowing you free choice.
They can do this because, fundamentally, you are 'good guy' either way, which is a hell of a lot easier then games that let you play as 'evil' and then try to have you save everyone for no explicable reason.
You just have the choice of saving the world as Captain Picard or Jack Bauer.
This extends to your bosses. You can either believe them and attempt to follow orders or you can just ignore whatever they say and either do what's 'right', or ignore them and do what's 'efficient'. And said orders can vary from reasonable to political asscovering nonsense in the first game, and from reasonable to clearly corporate corrupt in the second. But they are also both 'good guys', at least for the main goals they send you on. (Although you can get rather morally dubious side missions from both, although you can do whatever you want on them with no repercussions, because your bosses can't afford to 'punish' you in any way without risking your failure.)
It is a very well-designed alignment system.
Well, a saner system might be to have 'get a small amount of data' function and a 'get a large amount of data' function. Where the first, by default, works over 3G and wifi, while the second is only on wifi by default.
And then have a per-app config option (and a phone level one to override it) that lets the user change either of those.
And you could even put code-level constraints in those...if the app tries to download more than 100k in ten minutes, or whatever, over the 'small amount of data' function, the OS complains.
It would also be nice if the app could register types, so that magically more config options for that app could show up that explain exactly what they're for. I.e, if you have three accounts, the app could 'export' them all, and at the OS level you could say 'Do this account entirely over 3G if no wifi, do this account checking over 3G but download over wifi, and don't do this account at all on 3G.'
Or one for 'background download' and one for 'foreground download', it would have an option for both to configure, if you see what I'm saying.
The problem with the app store isn't with the rules about the app store. It's just package management, and I've long argued that OSes need something exactly like that, even for commercial apps. Linux distros should take a page from Apple's book and put a commercial purchasing ability in their package management. Apple, meanwhile, should pull some of the less useful apps.
The store itself is fine, the fact everything has to be okayed by Apple before going in the app store is fine. It's their app store, they want to present a nice shiny interface of tested and working apps with secure purchasing, I'm fine with that. Frankly, that's a hell of a lot better than, oh, Windows software purchasing.
The fact that every single app has to be okayed by Apple before going in the phone (Because the app store is the only way into the phone) is the problem.
It makes development very hard, it totally locks out OSS, etc, etc.
Apple does not have to support apps that you (hypothetically) drag into iTune and past some warning prompts about unsupported software. In that, the iPhone could have a 'tainted' mode, the same way that the Linux kernel does. If it's tainted you have to reboot into 'only supported software' mode before getting support.
Substitute, say, Huffington Post in place of Fox and you get the same result.
I don't know why people use Huffington Post in this analogy. Huffington Post is incredibly erratic in their tilt, and is not really a new agency at all. It's is, essentially, a blogging site with some paid contributors that pretends to be a news agency. (Hence the random tilt, thanks to random contributors.)
Slashdot works a little differently -- but it's the same result. More potent in fact, because the feedback loop is much more immediate and direct.
Some of the slashdot tilts are explainable, and some are even justifiable, and some are neither.
The anti-MS stuff is explainable, but not justifiable anymore. There are specific problem I have with MS, like their idiotic IE6 Forever! policy that totally fucked over web development for half a decade. But this site was founded right when MS was abusing their monopoly, and, frankly, had the shittiest OS in existence, and people desperate for anything else. Almost none of that is important anymore, but the hate still remains, and that's why.
The love, and then later hate, for Miguel De Icaza, is totally irrational, and I've never been able to figure it out. it's the same thing for the love of Apple. Look, just because someone is standing up to MS doesn't make them God.
The hate for DRM is justifiable and explainable: There's a large minority of people here who are incredibly inconvenienced by DRM, because they are trying to do weird things like play Windows games on Linux or make DVD video libraries or are early adopters who got bitten by HDMI shit or who are people who want to write programs on their phone. And don't like the fact not only is that hard, but often they have to commit a crime to do it, which is insane. Even people who don't do that stuff consider themselves 'nerdy' enough to actually want to do that stuff...I don't run Linux, but I was pissed they made it illegal to play DVDs on Linux, too. (Which, incidentally, is now allowed, thanks to the LoC.)
There's an even larger group of people here who want to use stuff for free and are annoyed they can't do that.
But you'll notice when the DRM is reasonable, and actually works, like Steam or iTunes, the place instantly turns into a flamewar where half the people don't see a problem with _that_ DRM, and the other half claim to have some sort of hypothetical problem or worry that when the seas grind the continents into dust we won't be able to use the software...but really are against any sort of DRM at all, because they want to use copyrighted stuff without paying for it.
Actually, requiring they specify what channel to use would make things better.
That way, if an app is about to get a lot of data, they can just try the wifi connection. Doesn't work, no harm, no foul.
And then they can check their config to see if they should then try the 3G connection.
Having it switch automatically will result in app developers just writing things 'to get data', whereas having to pick a specific connection for data and use it means they have to actually think about first using wifi and then using 3G, or then not using 3G.
Ie, if you don't have to specify, half the programmers will do: f = open();
Whereas if you do, they end up having to do: if (!(f = open(WIFI)) f = open(3G);
And it's a lot more likely at some point that will end up being changed to: if (!(f = open(WIFI) && CONFIG_USE_3G) f = open(3G);
If you make them do one, and then the other, and don't have a way to do both, there's a lot higher chance they'll put a test on the second, instead of having to go back and later split it in half and put a test on the second. If you always have to think about the connection you're using, then you're more likely to say 'wait, we shouldn't do this over 3G, if we don't have wifi, we can hold off'.
Of course, one or two stupid developers are going to just use 3G for everything, but hopefully someone will notice, and it would be fewer than the programmers who just did 'Open a connection' without thinking about which they were using.
Why not point to the actual change of 2009: 6,547.05, 2010: 11585.38?
Which is great for all the money you invested in 2009.
Not great all for the money invested in the previous 20 years if you needed it in 2009.
yes the stock market is a stupid place to invest if you buy 100% of your holding at one random point in time, and sell it all at one other random point in time.
Which is how any sort of required investments work.
You have the completely wrong understanding. I already described how they actually work. But again you don't read.
No, I explained that you used the word 'government pension' to talk about some sort of thing that the poor elderly can get, and I politely pointed out you're using the wrong term and no one in America knows what you're talking about, because only government employees can earn government pensions, so it hardly works as some sort of national solution.
That is only a 'win' if you're an idiot.
Which is exactly what I said. Did you just not bother reading?
I misread that, because it didn't occur to me that you though a return of $1400 over 11 years was useful! I've make that much interest on my checking account.
I also covered that. You know "dividends"...
Except that dividends on the Dow are, um, about 1.4%.
You know, worse than one year CDs.
Even combining that with the 0.3% interest rate, you can invest in five year CDs and make more. Granted, not over 10 years at a $10,000 a year..but you could probably come out even by investing in the longest possible CD that would be done at the limit each year, with 10, 7, 5, etc as time goes by.
I point to the actual change in value: 2009: 11722.98, 2010: 11585.38.
It doesn't matter 'when' the sells happen, it matters that the Dow went down.
Yes, if you were a day trader, you could have made money. That doesn't change anything. People are supposed to be regularly investing via some sort of plan, not day trading the Dow.
over your cherry picked bad timing period".
Ah, yes, the check-picked time period that just happened. Would you rather I use 1960 to 1970? Or 1970 to 1980? Did you know a dollar invested in 1966 and taken out in 1982 would be worth 33 cents after inflation? You're the one trying to cherry pick times.
And you're wrong. The pathological worse time period would be from 2000-2009.
But let's not use the worse case scenarios. I would take the first day of the year, but that day is weird for the market. So let's do it fair and roll a dice for the day to invest. The first year Dow was 11722 for a random value, and 11722 mod 365 is 42. (Seriously? 42?) The 42th day of the year is, what, February 11?
Everyone invested 10,000 on Feb 11, starting in 2000 and moving it to some other account (bonds?) in Feb 11, 2010. (Thank goodness they didn't move it in Feb 11 2009.)
Treasuries, munis, and corporate bonds ratios dependant on how far away retirement is and current prices.
You do realize that muni bonds are threatened now, right? Because so many local governments are bankrupt? And the Republicans want to repeal the law disallowing state governments from declaring bankrupcy, so even state bonds are in danger? (Local governments can or can't, depending on the state, but states can't.)
And I will again point out that investing in government bonds is just a roundabout and insane way of the government providing retirement, instead, you know, actually having payouts indexed to things like social security. It provides no discernible benefit to anyone.
So you've left corporate bonds...rated by the same bond rating industry we've discovered does nothing at all.
I'm not American, I'm from a country with both forced retirement savings in personal accounts and government pensions for those that need them.
You keep using the phrase 'government pensions'. I don't think you know what that means in the US, or you don't know what social security is.
Pensions, in America, are things employers provide. Employers include 'the government', but no one gets a 'government pension' if they didn't work for the government.
Government 'pensions' in other places, from what I understand, are essentially an account that people pay into through taxes and collect later. This is what social security is. We just do not call it a 'pension'. We call it 'insurance' for some utterly inexplicably reason.
Granted, you said 'if they need it', which is what we mean by 'means testing', giving it only to people who have no retirement income (aka, a pension) from previous employers. We don't currently do that for social security, but has been proposed as one of the fixes. (We don't do it mainly because almost no one gets any sort of retirement pension anymore, so it's a lot of work to means test for almost no net gain.)
Erm, I didn't say it was bed of roses.
In fact, pointing out that it was a bad time economically sorta makes my point more. The only time we've had taxes this low are during in economic problems. (Yes, yes, we're also in economic problems now...but we had taxes this low for a decade, well before any problems.)
I just said that it and the Great Depression were the only times that 'grandparents' could be adults that we had a lower tax rate than now.
That is, assume we don't have 60 year olds wandering around here talking about their grandparents or something. Specially, to see lower taxes and not be in an economic disaster, from age 20-30, these 'grandparents' would have to be born before 1900, to be an adult from 1920-1930. (And then they probably lost their house and investments in the 1929 crash, so that seems like a really bad example.)
No, I'm not a police officer. I think they should be evaluated by the thought vigilantes.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD! Only Gold can SAVE US NOW!
Seriously, you know what would a fuckload better than stupid gold in an actual economic collapse?
Some sort of power generator, preferably a renewable one. As an added bonus, you don't have to wait until then to use it. I'm sure the people who actually were smart enough to get those would be willing to trade the power for lumps of metal they can't do anything with. Or not.
Hell, the Boy Scout Handbook will, literally, be worth its weight in gold. When makes the gold a pretty dumb investment instead of just buying the book.
Not that I do think there's going to be any sort of 'collapse' (Although I think the bank problems are just getting started.), but it's very telling what sort of stupid shit people think is important.
I bet 90% of the gold hoarding morons don't even have a plan to get drinkable water if everything blows up. Or own a hand-cranked battery charger. I wonder how many of them realize you need water to grow these 'seeds' they have? Seeds in quotes because they probably are all dead.
Remember when survivalism used to be done by people who were paranoid, yes, but who were smart and well prepared? They'd have basement stocked with canned goods and generators and supplies of gasoline that they'd carefully top off? With rows of car batteries and a hand crank in case the gas ran out? Remember those guys? (I'm sure they're still out there.)
Sure, they were classic example of 'craziness is taking an incorrect premise to the logical ends', but at least you could fucking respect those guys and they got starring roles in apocalyptic stories.
Instead we now get paranoid people who are idiots who think you, apparently, can live off gold.
The DJIA closed at 11,674.76 last week, so our investment is worth $111,487.51. So basically unchanged (up $1,487.51 over what we invested), with the absolutly worst case investment plan (buy the yearly high).
Fencepost error. You invested eleven years in there. You invested in 2000, and in 2010, and all the years in the middle. That's 11 deposits of $10000, which is $110,000 invested.
You got a return of $1487, which is under 0.3% interest rate. (Technically, I don't know what day you started, so the investment could have been slightly longer than 10 years, or slightly short than 11, or somewhere in the middle, so the rate varies.)
Inflation, meanwhile, was 3.8% over that period. The DOW: Doing ten times worse than inflation. Put all your money in it tomorrow!
Yes the bond-rating agencies were being fraud, still anyone who bothered to look could see that real estate was in a bubble and avoid those.
If only we had some third party agencies that would rate bonds to make sure that they were reasonable investments...oh, FUCK.
Sorry, you lose that argument. People can't do an infinite amount of research on bonds. They're bonds, not stocks. You're not supposed to have to do research to weed out obviously bogus ones. You're supposed to pick your level of risk and go with AA+ or BB, end of story.
Just like you don't get to specify individual stocks, you don't get to specify individual bonds either. The retirement plan you think people should be using has to be automatic, not having people do research every month to figure out where to invest. A computer must be able to do it.
If people can do it wrong because of lack of research and lose all their money, your plan is broken.
Now, if you want to specify only specific types of bonds, like government or commercial real estate, feel free...but you don't get to exclude mortgage backed bonds retroactively solely because that specific market blew up. That's cheating.
So you're an idiot? Obviously government bonds would be part of almost any investment strategy.
If the government provides for retirement, it provides for retirement.
Everyone saying 'We should invest ourselves, not have SS' and then expecting to able to buy nice safe government bonds are actually expecting the government to provide for their retirement...they just don't want the government to provide for other people's retirement.
It's especially ironic as half the idiots wanting to phase out social security claim to be 'deficit hawks' who, if they actually wanted to reduce the deficit, would, you know, be wanting less bonds issued. Instead they want to loan the government money and live off it later at nice high interest rates in a way that only they participate in, as opposed to a standardize government program.(1)
I have nothing against investing in government bonds in the actual real world, but it's the height of dishonesty to assert that social security is a bad idea, and everyone should purchase government bonds instead.
I really don't get why it has to be SS or nothing?
It's not SS or nothing. You can invest additionally wherever you want.
But in the actual world, where 90% of Americans live and work, they do not actually make enough to invest anywhere. They'll have some medical expense or some layoff or lose their house because the bank committed fraud when it sold them to them and then use their retirement principle to recover from that, or declare bankrupcy and lose it anyway, and never managed to recover any savings.
All the people who think we should put the base level of retirement, the thing that keeps people from staving in the streets, in a place where people can access it, have never been in a situation where people actually have no money, and, would, you know, use that money instead if they could get to it. (Of course, no one's been in that circumstances, as we don't let people wipe out their SS money.)
Of course, yo
BZZZZT, that was not an answer to the question I posed asking where people should have their money instead of social security.
Please try again.
140 m workers investing in the productive capacity of the economy...
Don't worry, they could have invested in their house, and lived on reverse mortgages...oh, shit, wait, the value of their house just plummeted and no one's giving out reverse mortgages anymore, are they?
They could have invested in bonds instead. I'm sure the bond-rating agencies weren't just rubber-stamping A++ rating on shitty bonds backed by bad mortgages...no, wait, they were, weren't they?
Do you 'privatize social security' idiots not actually pay attention to the actual news?
Please list anything that someone investing in 'the productive capacity of the economy' could have started investing in 2000 and made money. (No, you don't get to retroactively pick specific companies, but you can pick something like the Dow...although that specially, obviously, is not a good idea.)
It doesn't have to 'make money' every year, but it needs to somewhat predictably increase and never ever plummet, because people will be living off it. Come on, it's got to be somewhere around 4% to beat social security, and let's say it can't ever drop by more than 5% over a year. Please point to it.
Oh, and you don't get to use government bonds. Using government bonds is just having the government pay for it in a slightly stranger way. Duh. Saying 'The government shouldn't be handling retirement, instead, people should loan the government money and live off the interest that the government provides' is utterly surreal, especially from a group of people who uniformly want the government to stop borrowing and live with its mean.
This, of course, doesn't address the problem of some people living to 100 and hence running out of money in their account. I guess we can be charitably and assume that the system just assumes people will pay their own way until age 90 or whatever, and then the government will just cover the few remaining people, but that is going to cost at least some money.
And it's also failing to address the fact that if everyone invested, it would entirely distort the market. If everyone invested in the stock market, well, it would be a very different stock market. if everyone bought bonds the demand for bonds would stay high, which would result in people issuing lower-rate bonds to cover the market. But first let's see if you can find somewhere to invest in the first place, and then we can look at what 140 million people investing in that market would do.
No, that's a stupid way to fix the system.
The actual way to fix the system is to raise or even remove the income cap.
Or just raising rates by 2% or whatever. Or means testing.
Idiots looking at the social security system and claiming it's about to be 'broke' and we should give up on it are like idiots looking at a gas gauge in a bus and claiming we're almost out of gas so we should get out and walk.
We're only going to run out of gas only if morons repeating over and over 'social security is broke' actually manage to elect enough navigators to keep us from stopping at a fucking gas station and buying more gas.
The rich, in this analogy, own a taxi service, aka, the stock market, where they wish people would spend their money instead.
Rich people: 'Social security is broken because there's a very minor problem with it that will cause issues in a few decades, we should get rid of it.' Young people: 'I heard that people think social security won't be there when we retire, so I'm all for doing away with it.' Chorus: 'Social security is going to die because we're going to kill it, so we should kill it.'
It's the most goddamn absurd attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy I've ever seen. And the real joke is that everyone desperately wants people to forget the alternative was 'letting people invest in the stock market', so if we'd actually privatized social security back when Bush wanted to it, we'd have lost all that money. And if, instead, we'd have invested in 'safe' bonds and stuff...we'd still have lost that money, because the damn bond rating places were criminally asleep at the wheel the last decade and giving perfect ratings to utter shit packages of loans.
So now, hilariously, no one actually mentions where we'd invest this retirement money instead of social security. They're going to wait a decade and then start pimping giving it to the rich, um, I mean, investing in the stock market, and hope we forget what happened this last decade.
So, the next time you hear an idiot talk about 'private retirement accounts', ask them what you think we should let people invest in. And then pretend they started invest in that in 2000, and see how well the market did.
If you don't like that the social security program has money and the government doesn't, so the government keeps borrowing from social security, perhaps you should figure some way to fix the government's financial woes (A good start might be not extending tax cuts, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and not repealing the health care bill, which saves hundreds of billions of dollars.), and not worry about, you now, the single part of the government that actually seems to be doing okay.
Um, you really need to actually check your assumptions. Because I don't know 'when your grandparents were around', but you're wrong. Just wrong.
Either you're talking about the great depression, when taxes, were, indeed lower, but no one was buying houses or putting people through college or, you know, eating real food...
There is one microscopic sweet spot of post-war, from 1945-1950, when the US was the only functioning economy, when the tax rates was slightly lower than current rates.
But they weren't lower than a decade ago when you hypothesis you could have been doing all these, so you're still wrong. Your grandparents had 5 years at that rate. You had a decade. (And we're talking maybe 3% lower than current rates.)
Palin will be elected but the world will end before she can take office. I'd love to see the look on her face when it happens.
What do you mean? She'd love it if that happened. She does not want to actually govern, she demonstrated that by quitting the Governorship of Alaska.
She just wants to fly around and be rich and famous, and the only way she sees to do that is talk about political stuff, which sometimes means doing something that puts her in the public eye, like running for office.
I, personally, really really really hope she does, but it will only happen if she's out of the public eye by then and needs a 'boost'.
That's just because kids haven't learned that particular stupidity yet.
Once a multidose is first used (or split outside of a sterilized clean room)
That was what I was assuming. That hospitals could break up multi-doses themselves in a sterile environment.
Now, if you're saying they need 'clean room' sterility instead of just normal 'operating room' sterility, obviously that's impractical.
But figuring all this out is stupid. There's no reason we couldn't just ship single-doses. There's no reason we couldn't ship just big vats of vaccine to sterile hospitals and have them repackage it and distribute them as needed.
Like I said, the health care industry has been continually operating by the slimmest margins imaginable as the health insurance industry sucked more and more money of it, and the fact someone wants a vaccine to cost $12 instead of $13 is the only reason to ever consider using preservatives at all in the US. It's crazy cost cutting.
In other countries, without medical infrastructure, where vaccines get carried from place to place in cars, the story is different, and preservatives make things much more practical...but this is America. If we can ship fish to Iowa, we can ship vaccines.
The point of the tea party is a big FU middle finger to both parties, because they both are so corrupt and ingrained with corporates.
Um, only in Delusional Land.
The Tea Party is the Republican base seized by the Koch brothers and Fox News. It's large corporations outright operating the Republican base.
It's more corporate than the actual Republican party, which at least was only indirectly corporate.
No, guns shoot bullets. People cannot shoot bullets, regardless of whether or not they have a gun. Bullets are shot by guns.
At least in that sense of 'shot'. In the other sense of 'shot', people shot people.
All this is idiotic, anyway. The problem isn't 'gun control'.
The problem is that a certain political party has been sprouting threats and metaphors using violence ever since the last election, yammering about 'second amendment remedies' and using bulleye's on political opponents.
I'm sure this guy is deranged and isn't a normal person on the right, or, hell, could be anything at all. But that doesn't change the fact that the victim's opponent had a rally where you shoot an M-16 to 'tell her how you really feel'.
YOU DON'T GET TO USE THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE IN POLITICS.
If you do, no shit you're in trouble when people actually, duh, start using violence. And of course they'll be the crazy ones, but that really doesn't matter.