I'm not religious, but I agree with the Aristotelian definition of "soul" is pretty much everything that makes an organism alive. You can say that living organisms possess "soul", dead ones don't. Just because someone uses the word soul doesn't imply they believe it something mystical and immortal.
That said, if people can't afford things, I'd say it's partial evidence of the giant failure of social security. Would those pensions have lasted longer if that extra 12% went into a 401k instead of the SS black hole? Do people realize that SS has, since the first year, taken in more money each year than it's paid out? Where did all this money go? There'd be trillions of dollars if they'd have saved and invested it (even at safe moderate rates of around 5%). So where is it? The federal government takes every penny extra and leaves a worthless IOU.
They're called U.S. Treasury Bills, and they are considered among the safest investments on the planet. Yes, even safer than 401ks, mortgage banked securities, private pensions etc, all of which can be considered as much "worthless IOUs" as the SS Trust Fund, which is exclusively U.S. Treasury Bills
The solution is not to elect Republicans who always seem to want bankrupt the treasury.
Why don't we discuss academic qualifications? Oh, I know why -- because it makes you look stupid!
Palin: BA in journalism that took her 5 years at U of Idaho
Obama: BA from Columbia, JD from Harvard, Editor in Chief of the FUCKING HARVARD LAW REVIEW, Constitutional Law professor
I know you Republicans think the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper, but you know what? The knowledge that Obama understands it is very reassuring to me given the flagrant abuses of the Constitution we've endured in the last 7 years.
Yeah, I expect Obama to be a staunch defender of the 2nd amendment.
They can call it a 'mandatory' evacuation, but they can't actually make people leave, not without declaring martial law. All it means is that if you want to stay, you can't depend on the city services to bail you out.
What I think they should do is come up with a points system. A gold is obviously worth more than a silver, and a silver worth more than a bronze, but by how much? Maybe 3 bronze:2 silver: 1 gold? I think they should also weigh it by the competitiveness of the sport and how much. Winning a team medal is a bigger deal as it is a much longer process and a country can only win one. I think for instance, winning a medal in soccer or basketball should be weighted much more heavily than say the track and field or swimming events, where you have one race and multiple medals are possible for both individuals and countries.
feel that probably 1/5 of our teachers should be rotated out annually... have "teaching" programs for professionals, you spend 2 years as a T/A (all classes should have two instructors, one main, one TA, and a parent in daily, imho). After that year, the TA would take primary on a class, then after a couple years as the main instructor, go back into the private sector. There are some good instances of lifetime teachers... but imho these are too far and few between, and I'd rather see "fresh" teachers come in, and out in a relatively short period. And it should be an honor, to have served as an instructor for said 4 year engagement.
The problem seems to be, that the various educational systems seem to be dedicated to hiring trained "teachers" who don't have much, if any specialty, instead of people who are good at their professions who want to spend a few years teaching.
I think the mistake you are making is that it takes a special skillset to deal with children and teens, that is not easily learned. Everyone forgets what it was like at that age, and thinks they can walk into a room of 14-year olds and treat them like adults. Not so. In my experience being a long-term substitute discipline problems occupied a significant portion of my time. Unlike college, this is something they are forced to do and I think at some level they view school as a prison.
A US$3,000.00 per student/per year federal voucher will fix education very quickly.
Private schools generally pay less and give less benefits to their teachers/administrators. Which means that, if you accept the free market hypothesis, public schools should attract better teachers/administrators. So why do they look worse than private schools, in terms of test scores, graduation rate, college admission rate, etc.?
Answer: because they get better students.
Children of parents who care about their kids education willing to spend money to send them to private school are going to do better, regardless of whether they actually attend private or public schools.
The voucher system would lower the barrier to entry, and more children of parents who don't care one way or the other about their kids education would enter the private school. And I bet you would see the test scores, graduation rate, college admission rate, etc. go down.
And CRPGS are watered down PNP RPGS. How can you have a huge quest in front of you, but instead end up terrorizing the towns people and never get on to the actual quest in a CRPG? Maybe that was just indicative of my play group, but we hardly ever found the actual quest, but still had fun.
Every played Baldur's gate II? There are tons of subquests that don't involve the main plot, and you can terrorize the inhabitans all you want.
The 4GB address limit is probably the best argument for why we should see more progression to 64 bit computing, but there isn't yet enough demand in the market to force the issue for at least a few more years.
I recently upgraded my desktop(well it turned out being an entirely new system, except the case and peripherals), and you actually have to try to build a 32-bit system. You can get a 64-bit CPU and motherboard for under $150 easily, and 64-bit Vista/XP is not any more expensive than the 32-bit versions. Its long past due that developers starting optimizing their apps for 64-bit systems, especially for games - the card I bought was $170 and it was probably a mid-range card was the most expensive item in the system. But the newer games like Mass Effect and The Witcher are requiring the newer cards. (Mass Effect would not even on run on my older system) They may as well require a 64-bit system as well
One of the purposes of the 2nd amendment is to protect the *majority* against intrusions by a tyrannical *minority* - namely the government. The fact that the majority would not support people who tried to violently overthrow the U.S government for the reasons you stated is not a valid criticism of the 2nd amendment. The majority has to support the insurgents.
I just upgraded my 4 year old computer so I could play Mass Effect and The Witcher. The total cost was around $600, not including the case, the monitor and peripherals which I already had. Thats equivalent cost to a PS3, and it probably has s better performance.
The problem with PC gaming is you run into many many "ricers" who think you have to spend upwards of $1500 to get a decent system, and they are absolutely full of shit. If you want to spend so you can run Crysis at 2048x1800 and 90 FPS great for you. Your machine will be every bit as dated as mine is in 4 years, and 1280x1024 on my 19" monitor is good enough for me.
The U.S. army has an M-249 roughly every squad(10 guys) if I'm not mistaken, so obviously they consider full auto capability weapons pretty important, as do most modern militaries.
The difference is that in Iraq, the people there are fighting against the foreigners.
In a civil war, the people that live there are fighting the people that run the place. The military the latter uses to fight is composed entirely of the former! A civil war in the US would certainly be tragic and bloody, but it would be the resistance versus a part of the military, not the entire military. Some of those former military would likely bring aid with them.
You can probably rightly claim that the U.S. military as it is now is fairly representative of the general population in terms of political beliefs, geography, ethnicity, etc. But that does not always need to be the case. I think its plausible that a two term President who is after all Commmander-in-Chief could slowly weed out undesirable people and by the time the population realizes whats up it would be too late.
But what should I expect? Any court that doesn't immediately move to reverse Wickard v. Filburn obviously doesn't care what the constitution says or means anyway. Keep in mind that someone has to bring a case first and it has to find its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. They can't do anything if someone doesn't bring a case to them.
The problem here is that in order to stand up to the military we need alot more than handguns and semi-automatic rifles. I'd say we'd need access to at least a minimum to weapons with full auto capability and probably anti-tank weapons. That would make it pretty difficult for the military to take on the population in cities, at least not without flattening the entire place by bombardment, which would be counterproductive because that would mean destroying the very thing they are attempting to control.
Yeah, you might get some defections but it should be possible to slowly weed people out who don't agree with your ideology, the President is Commander-in-Chief and appoints the Secratary of Defense, Army and Navy. It should be possible for the President to get overwhelming support from the military which leaves the general population at a severe disadvantage. As for elections, well you have Diebold in control of all the election machines and even then Senators/Congressman can be bribed/bought/bumped off.
This is why your constitution protected your right to bear arms. The rest of the world has spent decades listening to Americans wax lyrical about how and why those rights are needed. If you don't use them now, then everyone who said you were just a bunch of nut jobs spouting empty rhetoric will be proven right. Well in D.C. you certainly aren't allowed to own or carry guns, at least not until the Supreme Court overturns the ban.
Despite the 2nd amendment "protection" there are still alot of restrictions on guns. No automatic weapons, nothing with real firepower like grenades, shoulder launched missiles, tanks, or artillery.
A civilian militia in the U.S. no longer has the means to stand up to its own military, and hasn't for over 100 years.
i have to disagree here. if you never directly ask me to sleep with you, i really will wander away thinking that you didn't want to.
If you really want to, then why don't *you* ask for it? There is alot of social pressure on men not to appear 'predatory'. Women have signficantly less pressure, at least in private. If a woman propositions a man and he rejcts it, its a foul ball at worst. Whereas if a guy does it to a girl and it fails, its a strikeout - "Asked me for sex on the first date, what a creep". Where as a guy is thinking 'Wow this chick is fast, hope she's not a slut'. But he will date her again, other factors notwithstanding.
C3PO has a high, whiny, irritating voice. He appears to be based on an incredibly offensive stereotype. He looks goofy at best. He's clumsy -- he may try to help, but if he actually does any good, it's only because of pure dumb luck. CP30 does demonstrate some usefulness at several points in the series, thats not the result of 'pure dumb luck'. In Star Wars, he fools some stormtroopers on the Death Star so that R2 can help out Han, Luke and Leia by shutting down the garbage compactor. In ESB, he informs Han the hyperdrive on the Millenium Falcon is damaged and helsp repair later (Even if he interrupts Han and Leia's near intimate moment) He translates for Luke Skylwalker a few times in RTOJ. I wouldn't consider any of those be 'dumb luck'. Plus we can forgive CP30's faults because he's a droid and 'thats not what he was programmed for'.
seriously, I think you are allowed to legally 'dumpster dive' if something is thrown away, I know that it applies to people who leave stuff on the curb in residential areas, in most states that I know of.
It's amazing to me that NASA has the foresight to design such a remote update system years before the concept of a "firmware update" was ever applied to consumer technology.
Well, perhaps they didn't. Maybe someone discovered a buffer overflow somewhere:-)
MMOG's might not be the best example, because you largely don't care for "correctness" like you do with say, a database app that handles financial transactions. If the client threads/processes don't get their input into the server process in time, because they have a slow network connection, then too damn bad, they'll have to wait for the next update or send the command again.
You are largely right, however. There are few problems where multithreading/multiprocessing buys you anything. On a single processor, the only reason to do it is take advantage of times where the user isn't doing anything. For example, theres no reason why you wouldn't want to have a separate thread for AI processing a chess game. There is no need to obtain locks because the algorithm is independent of user input.
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I'm not religious, but I agree with the Aristotelian definition of "soul" is pretty much everything that makes an organism alive. You can say that living organisms possess "soul", dead ones don't. Just because someone uses the word soul doesn't imply they believe it something mystical and immortal.
That said, if people can't afford things, I'd say it's partial evidence of the giant failure of social security. Would those pensions have lasted longer if that extra 12% went into a 401k instead of the SS black hole? Do people realize that SS has, since the first year, taken in more money each year than it's paid out? Where did all this money go? There'd be trillions of dollars if they'd have saved and invested it (even at safe moderate rates of around 5%). So where is it? The federal government takes every penny extra and leaves a worthless IOU.
They're called U.S. Treasury Bills, and they are considered among the safest investments on the planet. Yes, even safer than 401ks, mortgage banked securities, private pensions etc, all of which can be considered as much "worthless IOUs" as the SS Trust Fund, which is exclusively U.S. Treasury Bills
The solution is not to elect Republicans who always seem to want bankrupt the treasury.
Why don't we discuss academic qualifications? Oh, I know why -- because it makes you look stupid!
Palin: BA in journalism that took her 5 years at U of Idaho Obama: BA from Columbia, JD from Harvard, Editor in Chief of the FUCKING HARVARD LAW REVIEW, Constitutional Law professor
I know you Republicans think the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper, but you know what? The knowledge that Obama understands it is very reassuring to me given the flagrant abuses of the Constitution we've endured in the last 7 years.
Yeah, I expect Obama to be a staunch defender of the 2nd amendment.
They can call it a 'mandatory' evacuation, but they can't actually make people leave, not without declaring martial law. All it means is that if you want to stay, you can't depend on the city services to bail you out.
What I think they should do is come up with a points system. A gold is obviously worth more than a silver, and a silver worth more than a bronze, but by how much? Maybe 3 bronze:2 silver: 1 gold? I think they should also weigh it by the competitiveness of the sport and how much. Winning a team medal is a bigger deal as it is a much longer process and a country can only win one. I think for instance, winning a medal in soccer or basketball should be weighted much more heavily than say the track and field or swimming events, where you have one race and multiple medals are possible for both individuals and countries.
feel that probably 1/5 of our teachers should be rotated out annually... have "teaching" programs for professionals, you spend 2 years as a T/A (all classes should have two instructors, one main, one TA, and a parent in daily, imho). After that year, the TA would take primary on a class, then after a couple years as the main instructor, go back into the private sector. There are some good instances of lifetime teachers... but imho these are too far and few between, and I'd rather see "fresh" teachers come in, and out in a relatively short period. And it should be an honor, to have served as an instructor for said 4 year engagement. The problem seems to be, that the various educational systems seem to be dedicated to hiring trained "teachers" who don't have much, if any specialty, instead of people who are good at their professions who want to spend a few years teaching.
I think the mistake you are making is that it takes a special skillset to deal with children and teens, that is not easily learned. Everyone forgets what it was like at that age, and thinks they can walk into a room of 14-year olds and treat them like adults. Not so. In my experience being a long-term substitute discipline problems occupied a significant portion of my time. Unlike college, this is something they are forced to do and I think at some level they view school as a prison.
A US$3,000.00 per student/per year federal voucher will fix education very quickly.
Private schools generally pay less and give less benefits to their teachers/administrators. Which means that, if you accept the free market hypothesis, public schools should attract better teachers/administrators. So why do they look worse than private schools, in terms of test scores, graduation rate, college admission rate, etc.?
Answer: because they get better students.
Children of parents who care about their kids education willing to spend money to send them to private school are going to do better, regardless of whether they actually attend private or public schools.
The voucher system would lower the barrier to entry, and more children of parents who don't care one way or the other about their kids education would enter the private school. And I bet you would see the test scores, graduation rate, college admission rate, etc. go down.
And CRPGS are watered down PNP RPGS. How can you have a huge quest in front of you, but instead end up terrorizing the towns people and never get on to the actual quest in a CRPG? Maybe that was just indicative of my play group, but we hardly ever found the actual quest, but still had fun.
Every played Baldur's gate II? There are tons of subquests that don't involve the main plot, and you can terrorize the inhabitans all you want.
Check out newegg http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=368&name=Operating-Systems Vista Home Premium 64-bit and 32-bit are the same price, $109.99. I got my version (64-bit) for $99.
The 4GB address limit is probably the best argument for why we should see more progression to 64 bit computing, but there isn't yet enough demand in the market to force the issue for at least a few more years.
I recently upgraded my desktop(well it turned out being an entirely new system, except the case and peripherals), and you actually have to try to build a 32-bit system. You can get a 64-bit CPU and motherboard for under $150 easily, and 64-bit Vista/XP is not any more expensive than the 32-bit versions. Its long past due that developers starting optimizing their apps for 64-bit systems, especially for games - the card I bought was $170 and it was probably a mid-range card was the most expensive item in the system. But the newer games like Mass Effect and The Witcher are requiring the newer cards. (Mass Effect would not even on run on my older system) They may as well require a 64-bit system as well
One of the purposes of the 2nd amendment is to protect the *majority* against intrusions by a tyrannical *minority* - namely the government. The fact that the majority would not support people who tried to violently overthrow the U.S government for the reasons you stated is not a valid criticism of the 2nd amendment. The majority has to support the insurgents.
I just upgraded my 4 year old computer so I could play Mass Effect and The Witcher. The total cost was around $600, not including the case, the monitor and peripherals which I already had. Thats equivalent cost to a PS3, and it probably has s better performance. The problem with PC gaming is you run into many many "ricers" who think you have to spend upwards of $1500 to get a decent system, and they are absolutely full of shit. If you want to spend so you can run Crysis at 2048x1800 and 90 FPS great for you. Your machine will be every bit as dated as mine is in 4 years, and 1280x1024 on my 19" monitor is good enough for me.
I don't think that section of Chicago is serviced by the El.
The U.S. army has an M-249 roughly every squad(10 guys) if I'm not mistaken, so obviously they consider full auto capability weapons pretty important, as do most modern militaries.
The difference is that in Iraq, the people there are fighting against the foreigners.
In a civil war, the people that live there are fighting the people that run the place. The military the latter uses to fight is composed entirely of the former! A civil war in the US would certainly be tragic and bloody, but it would be the resistance versus a part of the military, not the entire military. Some of those former military would likely bring aid with them.
You can probably rightly claim that the U.S. military as it is now is fairly representative of the general population in terms of political beliefs, geography, ethnicity, etc. But that does not always need to be the case. I think its plausible that a two term President who is after all Commmander-in-Chief could slowly weed out undesirable people and by the time the population realizes whats up it would be too late.The problem here is that in order to stand up to the military we need alot more than handguns and semi-automatic rifles. I'd say we'd need access to at least a minimum to weapons with full auto capability and probably anti-tank weapons. That would make it pretty difficult for the military to take on the population in cities, at least not without flattening the entire place by bombardment, which would be counterproductive because that would mean destroying the very thing they are attempting to control.
Yeah, you might get some defections but it should be possible to slowly weed people out who don't agree with your ideology, the President is Commander-in-Chief and appoints the Secratary of Defense, Army and Navy. It should be possible for the President to get overwhelming support from the military which leaves the general population at a severe disadvantage. As for elections, well you have Diebold in control of all the election machines and even then Senators/Congressman can be bribed/bought/bumped off.
If you really want to, then why don't *you* ask for it? There is alot of social pressure on men not to appear 'predatory'. Women have signficantly less pressure, at least in private. If a woman propositions a man and he rejcts it, its a foul ball at worst. Whereas if a guy does it to a girl and it fails, its a strikeout - "Asked me for sex on the first date, what a creep". Where as a guy is thinking 'Wow this chick is fast, hope she's not a slut'. But he will date her again, other factors notwithstanding.
Acting like an alpha all the time will work to some extent. On the other hand, do you really want the Eva Brauns and Monica Lewinskys of the world?
seriously, I think you are allowed to legally 'dumpster dive' if something is thrown away, I know that it applies to people who leave stuff on the curb in residential areas, in most states that I know of.
Well, perhaps they didn't. Maybe someone discovered a buffer overflow somewhere :-)
MMOG's might not be the best example, because you largely don't care for "correctness" like you do with say, a database app that handles financial transactions. If the client threads/processes don't get their input into the server process in time, because they have a slow network connection, then too damn bad, they'll have to wait for the next update or send the command again.
You are largely right, however. There are few problems where multithreading/multiprocessing buys you anything. On a single processor, the only reason to do it is take advantage of times where the user isn't doing anything. For example, theres no reason why you wouldn't want to have a separate thread for AI processing a chess game. There is no need to obtain locks because the algorithm is independent of user input.