Why do SF shows/movies have to choose between utopian or dystopian futures? Maybe the future will be like most of the past, not entirely good, but not completely bad either.
We have had that now for the last 2 years or so. Are we more free? I don't think so, and one might argue that we're even less free than before.
You mean that one party controlling both Houses of Congress and the Presidency results in deadlock? The only time the U.S. has had deadlock in my lifetime was when the Republicans controlled Congress and Bill Clinton was President. The result of that was an almost balanced budget (they claimed it was balanced, yet national debt increased every year).
We had the exact opposite of deadlock from January of 2009 throuh January of 2010 (when Scott Brown was elected to the Senate and broke the Democrat's filibuster proof majority). Even since then we are still a long way from a dead locked government. It just isn't that hard for the Democrats to break a Republican filifbuster, since the Republicans only have a single vote to spare.
I just don't understand how people can think that there is a deadlock when one Party overwhelmingly controls the two active branches of government.
The reason for the rise of the concept of "self-plagiarism" is these types of automated plagiarism detectors. If I have written a lot of papers that are in their database and can lift sections out of a previous paper I wrote without citing it as a source, these programs are going to generate a lot of false positives.
The thing that you are overlooking is that in several states, sales tax rate varies from location to location. In NY each county and municipality may charge a different rate (within a particular range). This is not something that can be determined by zip code. You have to know which municipality a specific address is in.
If you do that then you get a patchwork system of 50 states worth of regulations and the problems that come with both enforcing the regulations as well as keeping in compliance.
All you're doing is moving the influence peddling to the state level and probably not even making it more expensive.
Do you know anyone who would be able to raise the kind of startup capital that it would take to topple say, GM,
IF it wasn't for government intervention, GM would be toppled. While he is wrong about it only taking a few months, he is right that most bug corporations would be destroyed by true free market capitalism. How many of the fortune 500 were around before 1900? Of those would any of them have been Fortune 500 companies at that time? For that matter how many of today's Fortune 500 companies would have been Fortune 500 companies in 1950? How many of the top 500 companies from 1950 are still around?
Corporatists are not on the right. They are on the same side of the political spectrum as communists and socialists. Those who favor government control of economic activity prefer a few large corporations to many small companies because a few large corporations are easier to control than a large number of small companies.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that energy companies leans to the right.
Of course they would be lying. I don't know how the donations from energy companies are running in this election cycle (I have seen a couple of reports that say that this election cycle is not following the pattern), but in every election cycle from 1992 through 2008 energy companies gave significantly more to Democrats than to Republicans.
This is very similar to the method that the CIA used to get a seat at the Big Boys table in U.S. Intelligence operations in the 1950s. When OSS became the CIA after WWII, they became a junior member of the U.S. Intelligence operations. In the 1950s, the Defense Intelligence Agency (I may have the wrong department, but it was the organization that got the lion's share of the U.S. Intelligence budget) estimated how many intercontinental bombers the Soviets had by looking at the size of the factories where they produced them and estimating how many the U.S. could produce in a factory of that many square feet. The CIA wanted to get a bigger chunk of the Intelligence budget, so they started looking at satellite photos of the Russian bombers. They noticed that the numbers on the tails of Soviet bombers went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5....11,12, 13, 14, 15,...21, 22, 23, 24, 25, etc. Based on this they determined that the Soviets had many fewer bombers than earlier estimates. When other sources provided corroborating evidence, the CIA was able to get a bigger chunk of the Intelligence budget. Of course, they then made the same sort of mistake in estimating ICBMs that they had corrected with this methodology.
The registrar's response is, "Getting the textbook order is the bookstore's job." The way I dealt with it was explaining to the students, "The professor almost always uses the same book, but because he has not officially told me that he is doing so, I can only buy the book back at the price the wholesaler is paying. If the professor had put in a book order for next semester, I would be paying X dollars for this book. Since he hasn't, and may not use this book next semester, I can only pay you 1/4X dollars for it."
Seriously. If Democrats are pulling this and Republicans are renaming candidates "Rich Whitey" with this bald faced implausible deniability imagine what dirty tricks they are pulling behind closed source code. It's a fucking travesty.
You do know that the incident you are referring to occured in Illinois? And that the overwhelmng majority of Illinois elected officials are Democrats? In particular, the state board of elections is dominated by Democrats.
there are 20 million people here during the workday, it's a pretty good sample of the US.
This is a mistake that people in NYC make all of the time. Some of the most parochial people I know live and work in NYC. Usually they think they are cosmopolitan, even though they have never lived outside of the New York metro area and almost all of their friends live and work in the New York metro area.
And large part of the potential "issues" you mention are precisely political in nature.
That was my point. One of the largest problems with this debate is that scientists want to use the prestige of science in the parts of the debate that are primarily political, where scientific method does not provide any answers. Scientific method cannot tell us what the "best" solution to a problem is until we define what "best" means.
The point is that appealing to the "consensus of the scientific community" is an appeal to authority, not a logical argument. The problem with the global warming debate is that there are a large number of scientists who are saying, "Here is an issue. It is a problem and you must take this action to deal with it." The first part is science, "Here is an issue." Everything after that is not science, it is politics. If scientists would limit themselves to applying the authority of science to the first statement, we could have a much better discussion of the issues involved.
Whether or not global warming is a problem is a matter of interpretation. If global warming is a problem, the best way to deal with it is a matter of opinion. Is it better to spend money to attempt to reverse the warming trend or would it be better to attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of warming (assuming that there are negative consequences...a debate that we have not yet had in a meaningful way).
You are correct. Of course by that standard, why do we now believe in a heliocentric solar system? Once upon a time the scientific community had pretty decisively answered the question of where the center of the solar system was. They had concluded that it was Earth. They did so for much the same reason that current scientific consensus says that man is the cause of global warming...philisophical predisposition.
Sorry, that is not true. Byzantium was carrying the torch of civilization and culture. The collapse of Byzantium happened as the rennaissance was beginning in Italy. There is probably a relationship between the two. While rennaissance Italy gained much knowledge and culture from the lands of Islam, most of it was from non-muslims fleeing the oppression of Muslim rule. Most of the ideas and knowledge that Europeans got from Muslim lands had originally been developed by non-muslims. Arabic numbers is a prime example of this. Arabic numbers originated in India and were carried to Arabia after Muslim conquest of parts of India.
ice for the students to just submit their course listing to the bookstore before the semester break...
But that would require the professors to tell the bookstore what texts they were going to use before the semester break. I used to manage a college bookstore, getting the professors to tell me what books they were going to use for the upcoming semester was like pulling teeth. About 1/2 of them would tell me two weeks before classes started, well after the students who had just taken the class had sold their books back and I had shipped them off to the wholesaler. Even the professors who almost always used the same books would do this. Several of them told me, "Oh, I always use the same book, why didn't you order in the one I used last time." When I asked them how I was supposed to know that they were going to use the same book, they said, "Good point, now you know." I fell for that twice, both times the professor changed texts the following semester. I had bought a lot of the books from the students who had taken the class the previous semester at half of the new text price and had to sell them to the used text wholesaler at around $2 a piece.
Wrong, the trend of college tuition going up much faster than inflation goes back to when states and the federal government were increasing the amount of money they subsidized public universities every year at a rate that was greater than inflation. Actually, 10-15 years ago I saw an article that said that increases in government aid for a college education actually caused tuition to rise faster.
Considering that college tuition (something that the college has even greater control over) is one of the few things to increase in price faster than textbooks, I see this as being a really great idea.
Actually, I think this is in part that the colleges are upset that the money that goes to textbooks doesn't go to them. They obviously don't care about how much the cost goes up, just look at tuition. What the college administrators care about is that the parents and students see this steady increase. If they can move this into a fee that is paid right along with tuition, they can hide this cost and get rid of one of the sources of complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do SF shows/movies have to choose between utopian or dystopian futures? Maybe the future will be like most of the past, not entirely good, but not completely bad either.
We have had that now for the last 2 years or so. Are we more free? I don't think so, and one might argue that we're even less free than before.
You mean that one party controlling both Houses of Congress and the Presidency results in deadlock? The only time the U.S. has had deadlock in my lifetime was when the Republicans controlled Congress and Bill Clinton was President. The result of that was an almost balanced budget (they claimed it was balanced, yet national debt increased every year).
We had the exact opposite of deadlock from January of 2009 throuh January of 2010 (when Scott Brown was elected to the Senate and broke the Democrat's filibuster proof majority). Even since then we are still a long way from a dead locked government. It just isn't that hard for the Democrats to break a Republican filifbuster, since the Republicans only have a single vote to spare.
I just don't understand how people can think that there is a deadlock when one Party overwhelmingly controls the two active branches of government.
The reason for the rise of the concept of "self-plagiarism" is these types of automated plagiarism detectors. If I have written a lot of papers that are in their database and can lift sections out of a previous paper I wrote without citing it as a source, these programs are going to generate a lot of false positives.
The thing that you are overlooking is that in several states, sales tax rate varies from location to location. In NY each county and municipality may charge a different rate (within a particular range). This is not something that can be determined by zip code. You have to know which municipality a specific address is in.
If you do that then you get a patchwork system of 50 states worth of regulations and the problems that come with both enforcing the regulations as well as keeping in compliance. All you're doing is moving the influence peddling to the state level and probably not even making it more expensive.
So that would make the U.S. more like Europe.
Do you know anyone who would be able to raise the kind of startup capital that it would take to topple say, GM,
IF it wasn't for government intervention, GM would be toppled. While he is wrong about it only taking a few months, he is right that most bug corporations would be destroyed by true free market capitalism. How many of the fortune 500 were around before 1900? Of those would any of them have been Fortune 500 companies at that time? For that matter how many of today's Fortune 500 companies would have been Fortune 500 companies in 1950? How many of the top 500 companies from 1950 are still around?
The problem with that link is that Presidents don't control spending, Congress does.
The tea-partiers are the useful idiots of the "old guard". They only exist to get votes for the GOP.
Oh, so that explains all of the tea party supported candidates who defeated the GOP establishment candidates in the primaries (Alaska, Delaware, etc).
Corporatists are not on the right. They are on the same side of the political spectrum as communists and socialists. Those who favor government control of economic activity prefer a few large corporations to many small companies because a few large corporations are easier to control than a large number of small companies.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that energy companies leans to the right.
Of course they would be lying. I don't know how the donations from energy companies are running in this election cycle (I have seen a couple of reports that say that this election cycle is not following the pattern), but in every election cycle from 1992 through 2008 energy companies gave significantly more to Democrats than to Republicans.
This is very similar to the method that the CIA used to get a seat at the Big Boys table in U.S. Intelligence operations in the 1950s. When OSS became the CIA after WWII, they became a junior member of the U.S. Intelligence operations. In the 1950s, the Defense Intelligence Agency (I may have the wrong department, but it was the organization that got the lion's share of the U.S. Intelligence budget) estimated how many intercontinental bombers the Soviets had by looking at the size of the factories where they produced them and estimating how many the U.S. could produce in a factory of that many square feet. The CIA wanted to get a bigger chunk of the Intelligence budget, so they started looking at satellite photos of the Russian bombers. They noticed that the numbers on the tails of Soviet bombers went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5....11,12, 13, 14, 15,...21, 22, 23, 24, 25, etc. Based on this they determined that the Soviets had many fewer bombers than earlier estimates. When other sources provided corroborating evidence, the CIA was able to get a bigger chunk of the Intelligence budget. Of course, they then made the same sort of mistake in estimating ICBMs that they had corrected with this methodology.
The registrar's response is, "Getting the textbook order is the bookstore's job." The way I dealt with it was explaining to the students, "The professor almost always uses the same book, but because he has not officially told me that he is doing so, I can only buy the book back at the price the wholesaler is paying. If the professor had put in a book order for next semester, I would be paying X dollars for this book. Since he hasn't, and may not use this book next semester, I can only pay you 1/4X dollars for it."
Seriously. If Democrats are pulling this and Republicans are renaming candidates "Rich Whitey" with this bald faced implausible deniability imagine what dirty tricks they are pulling behind closed source code. It's a fucking travesty.
You do know that the incident you are referring to occured in Illinois? And that the overwhelmng majority of Illinois elected officials are Democrats? In particular, the state board of elections is dominated by Democrats.
Hardware companies start making more and more systems with the "other guys" software as a platform...
Actually, this happens because they can't make systems with Apples software as the platform.
there are 20 million people here during the workday, it's a pretty good sample of the US.
This is a mistake that people in NYC make all of the time. Some of the most parochial people I know live and work in NYC. Usually they think they are cosmopolitan, even though they have never lived outside of the New York metro area and almost all of their friends live and work in the New York metro area.
Exactly, which means that Islam never "carried the torch of civilization and culture."
And large part of the potential "issues" you mention are precisely political in nature.
That was my point. One of the largest problems with this debate is that scientists want to use the prestige of science in the parts of the debate that are primarily political, where scientific method does not provide any answers. Scientific method cannot tell us what the "best" solution to a problem is until we define what "best" means.
The point is that appealing to the "consensus of the scientific community" is an appeal to authority, not a logical argument. The problem with the global warming debate is that there are a large number of scientists who are saying, "Here is an issue. It is a problem and you must take this action to deal with it." The first part is science, "Here is an issue." Everything after that is not science, it is politics. If scientists would limit themselves to applying the authority of science to the first statement, we could have a much better discussion of the issues involved.
Whether or not global warming is a problem is a matter of interpretation. If global warming is a problem, the best way to deal with it is a matter of opinion. Is it better to spend money to attempt to reverse the warming trend or would it be better to attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of warming (assuming that there are negative consequences...a debate that we have not yet had in a meaningful way).
Byzantium stood for another 200+ years after the 4th Crusade sacked the city.
You are correct. Of course by that standard, why do we now believe in a heliocentric solar system? Once upon a time the scientific community had pretty decisively answered the question of where the center of the solar system was. They had concluded that it was Earth. They did so for much the same reason that current scientific consensus says that man is the cause of global warming...philisophical predisposition.
Sorry, that is not true. Byzantium was carrying the torch of civilization and culture. The collapse of Byzantium happened as the rennaissance was beginning in Italy. There is probably a relationship between the two. While rennaissance Italy gained much knowledge and culture from the lands of Islam, most of it was from non-muslims fleeing the oppression of Muslim rule. Most of the ideas and knowledge that Europeans got from Muslim lands had originally been developed by non-muslims. Arabic numbers is a prime example of this. Arabic numbers originated in India and were carried to Arabia after Muslim conquest of parts of India.
ice for the students to just submit their course listing to the bookstore before the semester break...
But that would require the professors to tell the bookstore what texts they were going to use before the semester break. I used to manage a college bookstore, getting the professors to tell me what books they were going to use for the upcoming semester was like pulling teeth. About 1/2 of them would tell me two weeks before classes started, well after the students who had just taken the class had sold their books back and I had shipped them off to the wholesaler. Even the professors who almost always used the same books would do this. Several of them told me, "Oh, I always use the same book, why didn't you order in the one I used last time." When I asked them how I was supposed to know that they were going to use the same book, they said, "Good point, now you know." I fell for that twice, both times the professor changed texts the following semester. I had bought a lot of the books from the students who had taken the class the previous semester at half of the new text price and had to sell them to the used text wholesaler at around $2 a piece.
Wrong, the trend of college tuition going up much faster than inflation goes back to when states and the federal government were increasing the amount of money they subsidized public universities every year at a rate that was greater than inflation. Actually, 10-15 years ago I saw an article that said that increases in government aid for a college education actually caused tuition to rise faster.
Considering that college tuition (something that the college has even greater control over) is one of the few things to increase in price faster than textbooks, I see this as being a really great idea.
Actually, I think this is in part that the colleges are upset that the money that goes to textbooks doesn't go to them. They obviously don't care about how much the cost goes up, just look at tuition. What the college administrators care about is that the parents and students see this steady increase. If they can move this into a fee that is paid right along with tuition, they can hide this cost and get rid of one of the sources of complaint.
Did anyone else read the headline as "World's smallest FUD display"? I was trying to figure out if it was from Apple or Microsoft.