They're not off by a full order of magnitude; they're talking in terabits. There is some loss of accuracy, though, since people like nice roundish numbers.
Please explain to me why we should keep a system where more than 50% of voters can vote for one candidate and still see him lose. That's certainly not what I call democracy.
That's exactly why the idea of a popular-vote presidency appeals to me. Back in the day, the rights of the individual states was a major concern, but these days, the federal government holds a large amount of power over all the citizens. Also, these days we seem to be a lot more integrated; if we had another civil war, it would be neighbor against neighbor rather than north against south. Given that we've all been clumped together under the domain of one major (federal) power, I think the majority popular vote, rather than the votes of electors from individual states, becomes more fair.
Example: Say 40 states award their electoral votes to Candidate A. However, in some of those states, 40% of the population voted for Candidate B, and in fact, Candidate B may have won if the national popular vote decided the election. Now a significant portion of those states' populations feels relatively unrepresented and dissatisfied with Candidate A's presidency.
Personally, it would seem nice if we required a 2/3-majority popular vote to decide offices, but that requirement alone can't guarantee that people will be happy with and support the winning candidate. I get the feeling that enough of us humans will be bitter and angry and cause problems no matter what the vote ratio is.
Very good points. I would like to say though, that I think ideally we should consciously pay for certain services, rather than throwing all the money into a tax. If you're gonna use the Internet, pay for the Internet; if you're going to use the library, pay for the library; and be aware that you are doing so, rather than having to go out of your way to figure out what of your cash is going toward what services. (Most people, since they're subsidizing such services from afar, would never have the subject of the destinations cross their mind.)
internet and phone services should be a public services just like police and fire
I have to disagree. The police keep you from getting robbed or shot; the firemen stop your house from burning down (potentially with you inside). In either case they're protecting your life. Phone could potentially be considered a public service, since it's used to contact police/fire/ambulance services, but the Internet? To communicate on the cheap, call people on your phone or write letters; to reap the benefits of free media, check out books, music, and movies from the library. While the Internet is terribly useful, it's not nearly as necessary to your wellbeing as being able to dial 911. Maybe on the day 911 centers switch to e-mail only, but until then, it's a luxury. There are significant alternatives, not any less useful just because they originated in the 19th or 20th centuries.
I love my Internet access, but I believe it's the kind of thing that is worth paying for and that you should pay for. If I couldn't afford service anymore, well hey, a library card is free.
Yeah, because a Windows repository wouldn't be spammed with a million bogus/useless/downright harmful applications from the very instant it was created. And if Microsoft were to verify applications to be added to the repos (as well they should), how many employees would have to waste their time running antivirus scans and making sure these apps actually deserve placement?
Call them up and ask for the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and possibly DNS servers to plug into your network settings.
Don't know how to do this? It's not surprising, but it should be. Why aren't students and new users in general taught basic things like network configuration, in this era of ubiquitous Internet?
It's annoying as hell sometimes, but I'd rather have a bunch of clueless morons behind full-fledged PCs if it gets me decent pricing on my own full-fledged PC. Imagine paying $100 for that magical e-mail/Internet/Word computer and $1500 for a baseline "real" machine?
They can be trained to like the repeal of Prop 8, just like they were trained to like Prop 8 in the first place. All it takes is a little money, some scare-tactic pamphlets, and a TV commercial or three.
Look, I'm not a strict vegan, or even a vegan at all, but technically it's "a diet and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. Vegans endeavor not to use or consume animal products of any kind." (Wikipedia) So while some make those exceptions, lots of more technical vegans wouldn't, and might even consider it a fairly important moral issue.
That's the right thing to do, but unfortunately, lots of people are conditioned to take all the other trash as the actual "news" and disregard the important stuff as not being entertaining enough. I hope that much of the media will continue to produce and improve traditional reporting, despite the fact that that isn't what gets them pageviews and high circulation counts at present, and hopefully recondition people to seek out what they really should care about.
I have about 400 8-tracks at home, most of which probably sound just as good as the day they were taken out of the shrink wrap. My oldest is probably 40 or close to it (that's around when they superseded 4-tracks, which I also have a few of). With a little care and preliminary maintenance (if you've just bought one from a thrift store or whatnot), 8-tracks will not only play today, but remain playable for years to come.
8-tracks, like VHS, are big both in cartridge and tape; have mechanisms (internal in 8-tracks, external in VHS) that would seem to get finicky over the years; but are respectively proven and poised for longevity. CDs and DVDs might rot or get scratched and the digital data is irrecoverably gone, but analog tape can be spliced, have its playback tweaked to give the highest fidelity possible, and almost always still be *somewhat* playable, period.
I'm just asking to be flamebait, but this old analog equipment is made to last, even though 8-tracks were implicitly conceived as a true throwaway format. A few of us cultists will be listening to our 8-tracks, records, and cassettes, and watching VHS movies, for years to come.:)
What kind of stuff do you use it for? Just novelty poking around, or something practical?
I must admit, I only bring up my O2 to play the Tron light-cycle demo game.:P
Not to nitpick, but Commodore, TI, Tandy-RadioShack, and hundreds of other, less-recognized companies helped start the very same bandwagon that Apple claimed to be leading with the II. Let's not forget that the virtually unchanged Commodore 64 sold 30 million. While the iPod dominates the portable digital media-player market, the Apple II back in the day was an expensive niche in an already-existing market. Kind of like the Macintosh today...hm...
I'd support Scheme. It's what they taught for our Intro to Programming class in high school, coupled with the How to Design Programs book. The mass of parentheses are intimidating and annoying at first, but I wound up appreciating how clear they could make "what belongs to what?" And there are all sorts of teachpacks for kids to generate drawings (and thus games).
Can't remember who precisely did the research, but I was watching an old Nova documentary yesterday about global dimming, and apparently by measuring the difference between daily highs and lows over the days surrounding 9/11, the days immediately after had a significantly smaller temperature range than the others. This was supposed to be a good indicator there was an effect on the weather, because the range trends usually change gradually. Interesting stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not off by a full order of magnitude; they're talking in terabits. There is some loss of accuracy, though, since people like nice roundish numbers.
That's exactly why the idea of a popular-vote presidency appeals to me. Back in the day, the rights of the individual states was a major concern, but these days, the federal government holds a large amount of power over all the citizens. Also, these days we seem to be a lot more integrated; if we had another civil war, it would be neighbor against neighbor rather than north against south. Given that we've all been clumped together under the domain of one major (federal) power, I think the majority popular vote, rather than the votes of electors from individual states, becomes more fair.
Example: Say 40 states award their electoral votes to Candidate A. However, in some of those states, 40% of the population voted for Candidate B, and in fact, Candidate B may have won if the national popular vote decided the election. Now a significant portion of those states' populations feels relatively unrepresented and dissatisfied with Candidate A's presidency.
Personally, it would seem nice if we required a 2/3-majority popular vote to decide offices, but that requirement alone can't guarantee that people will be happy with and support the winning candidate. I get the feeling that enough of us humans will be bitter and angry and cause problems no matter what the vote ratio is.
Very good points. I would like to say though, that I think ideally we should consciously pay for certain services, rather than throwing all the money into a tax. If you're gonna use the Internet, pay for the Internet; if you're going to use the library, pay for the library; and be aware that you are doing so, rather than having to go out of your way to figure out what of your cash is going toward what services. (Most people, since they're subsidizing such services from afar, would never have the subject of the destinations cross their mind.)
I have to disagree. The police keep you from getting robbed or shot; the firemen stop your house from burning down (potentially with you inside). In either case they're protecting your life. Phone could potentially be considered a public service, since it's used to contact police/fire/ambulance services, but the Internet? To communicate on the cheap, call people on your phone or write letters; to reap the benefits of free media, check out books, music, and movies from the library. While the Internet is terribly useful, it's not nearly as necessary to your wellbeing as being able to dial 911. Maybe on the day 911 centers switch to e-mail only, but until then, it's a luxury. There are significant alternatives, not any less useful just because they originated in the 19th or 20th centuries.
I love my Internet access, but I believe it's the kind of thing that is worth paying for and that you should pay for. If I couldn't afford service anymore, well hey, a library card is free.
There are lots of files available on Usenet binary servers these days, that's probably why they're throttling it back.
Yeah, because a Windows repository wouldn't be spammed with a million bogus/useless/downright harmful applications from the very instant it was created. And if Microsoft were to verify applications to be added to the repos (as well they should), how many employees would have to waste their time running antivirus scans and making sure these apps actually deserve placement?
I guess just going up to 11 isn't enough for you folks. Kids these days... *shakes head*
Call them up and ask for the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and possibly DNS servers to plug into your network settings. Don't know how to do this? It's not surprising, but it should be. Why aren't students and new users in general taught basic things like network configuration, in this era of ubiquitous Internet?
It's annoying as hell sometimes, but I'd rather have a bunch of clueless morons behind full-fledged PCs if it gets me decent pricing on my own full-fledged PC. Imagine paying $100 for that magical e-mail/Internet/Word computer and $1500 for a baseline "real" machine?
They can be trained to like the repeal of Prop 8, just like they were trained to like Prop 8 in the first place. All it takes is a little money, some scare-tactic pamphlets, and a TV commercial or three.
Look, I'm not a strict vegan, or even a vegan at all, but technically it's "a diet and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. Vegans endeavor not to use or consume animal products of any kind." (Wikipedia) So while some make those exceptions, lots of more technical vegans wouldn't, and might even consider it a fairly important moral issue.
The only problem with that is that a lot of vegans, by very definition, would take issue with animal-sourced supplements.
Seven years is hardly too soon.
That's the right thing to do, but unfortunately, lots of people are conditioned to take all the other trash as the actual "news" and disregard the important stuff as not being entertaining enough. I hope that much of the media will continue to produce and improve traditional reporting, despite the fact that that isn't what gets them pageviews and high circulation counts at present, and hopefully recondition people to seek out what they really should care about.
On that note, I'm moving to a teletype hooked up to a Unix server somewhere running Lynx...
Luckily for me, my old manual typewriter costs only as much as the ink and paper I put in it. :)
I have about 400 8-tracks at home, most of which probably sound just as good as the day they were taken out of the shrink wrap. My oldest is probably 40 or close to it (that's around when they superseded 4-tracks, which I also have a few of). With a little care and preliminary maintenance (if you've just bought one from a thrift store or whatnot), 8-tracks will not only play today, but remain playable for years to come. 8-tracks, like VHS, are big both in cartridge and tape; have mechanisms (internal in 8-tracks, external in VHS) that would seem to get finicky over the years; but are respectively proven and poised for longevity. CDs and DVDs might rot or get scratched and the digital data is irrecoverably gone, but analog tape can be spliced, have its playback tweaked to give the highest fidelity possible, and almost always still be *somewhat* playable, period. I'm just asking to be flamebait, but this old analog equipment is made to last, even though 8-tracks were implicitly conceived as a true throwaway format. A few of us cultists will be listening to our 8-tracks, records, and cassettes, and watching VHS movies, for years to come. :)
What kind of stuff do you use it for? Just novelty poking around, or something practical? I must admit, I only bring up my O2 to play the Tron light-cycle demo game. :P
My SGI O2 has you beat. :)
Not to nitpick, but Commodore, TI, Tandy-RadioShack, and hundreds of other, less-recognized companies helped start the very same bandwagon that Apple claimed to be leading with the II. Let's not forget that the virtually unchanged Commodore 64 sold 30 million. While the iPod dominates the portable digital media-player market, the Apple II back in the day was an expensive niche in an already-existing market. Kind of like the Macintosh today...hm...
Researchers could not be reached for further comments regarding the possibility of a zombie outbreak.
Once again, technology enhances the social porn-viewing experience! :D
I'd support Scheme. It's what they taught for our Intro to Programming class in high school, coupled with the How to Design Programs book. The mass of parentheses are intimidating and annoying at first, but I wound up appreciating how clear they could make "what belongs to what?" And there are all sorts of teachpacks for kids to generate drawings (and thus games).
I have three words for you: "It's a trap!"
Can't remember who precisely did the research, but I was watching an old Nova documentary yesterday about global dimming, and apparently by measuring the difference between daily highs and lows over the days surrounding 9/11, the days immediately after had a significantly smaller temperature range than the others. This was supposed to be a good indicator there was an effect on the weather, because the range trends usually change gradually. Interesting stuff.