I would expect that if I did, I would waste so much time trying to get it to work that I would miss out on many of the greatest things about that part of the world. You didn't mention being insanely wealthy and able to take these trips regularly; if you are of the economic class that most of this country lives in, you will likely only make this trip once. Hence, you should make the most of it. If you really make the most of the trip you'll likely come back to this country with skills from the trip that are more valuable than what you could acquire by reading programming books during that time.
As much as I don't care for Microsoft, if this brings about an end to all the headaches I run in to trying to use mono then I will welcome it. I love all the applications that I need to run that have 30 pages worth of crowd-sourced (and nearly unreadable) documentation for how to run them in wine with mono. It's time to be done with this bullshit and get back to work. I understand the goals of mono and they were admirable but they just never really worked out. Hopefully those guys can help the development of the open-sourced.NET.
Of course, the REAL issue isn't even guns, it is mental health. We have kids who are unstable, unbalanced, and unloved, and the system does nothing for them. There is no way to identify problem or challenged kids and get them some help before they go off the deep end.
This isn't limited to kids, we have the same problem with adults. The mental health care system in this county is sad, we don't offer help early enough to those who need it and as a result, we have people who go crazy and do stupid stuff.
Because indeed we are dealing with a mental health issue. In particular we are dealing with two mental health issues that are widespread in our country:
People don't have access to good mental health treatment options
People who seek mental health treatment are still stigmatized for doing so
Until we address those issues we will still have these problems. It doesn't matter where you put guns, detectors, or anything else. All you can do is move the problem around. To make matters worse the 2010 health care bill was more about rewarding terrible insurance companies than it was actually about helping people get access to care that they need.
I saw on the video that the bicycle has pedals, a chain, and a rear derailer (presumably with a rear cassette as well). What I can't figure out though is what any of those are for. Obviously the rider isn't pedaling at 207 mph. I'm not sure if he is even resting his feet on those pedals when moving under rocket power, it seems the position he uses would be better suited to having foot pegs in a different location.
Who the hell says that his SPEECH (written by Peter Robinson) caused the wall to be brought down? It's often suggested it was his policies. Debate that.
Tell me, what policies did Reagan partake in - beyond driving our own country into insane debt by massively increasing the military budget - that had any effect on the USSR? People credit Reagan for bringing about the end of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the USSR even though he did very little in reality; particularly when one considers that t was already in a death spiral before he took office.
I'd be happy to debate this. I would love to know what was special about Reagan that brought this about that would not have happened had the White House been occupied by Walter Mondale or a Ficus Tree.
Reagan's speech was part of a much larger program to pressure the Soviets.
I don't dispute that. I fully accept that the entire cold war was about trying to bring down the USSR any way possible.
Reagan believed, fundamentally, that communism was evil and spent a lot of energy fighting it.
If it was truly about communism then by the time Reagan was in office - and indeed well before then - they wouldn't have wanted to put any energy into defeating the USSR as there was no communism left there. Certainly Reagan had some officials under him who knew that, even if he did not. It took very little time after the revolution for the state to morph from an attempt at communism to a top-heavy bureaucracy that was interested only in its own survival.
Reducing Reagan's and Thatcher's programs against communism and all that represented it down to a single speech is unfair. Your concentration on the timing of the speech in relation to when the wall came down certainly seems to discount any other actions the US and other countries took.
My point is that the USSR was already well into its death spiral before Reagan came to office. He just had a better PR team than any US president that came before him. Hell the wall didn't even come down while he was in office, it came down while Bush Sr. was president yet the credit goes to Reagan for one speech that most of the rest of the world - and importantly most of the effected world - paid almost no attention to.
Did you actually read the article? If there is something in the article that you find objectionable based on what it actually says - rather than just what you feel about the newspaper that published it - please share that. Sharing silliness such as
Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.
Does not further the conversation.
The article actually cites specific statements, actions, and dates. Are there some in there that you disagree with, or some important ones that you feel they missed?
It's hard to imagine a single speech would cause the Soviet system to crumble, and Reagan had problems as a president, but he stood up for freedom, pointing out that keeping another country in a cage is evil.
There are others who made speeches as well, and none of them are as celebrated as Reagan. The important bit here though is likely that almost 3 years passed between his "famous" speech (which was seen by roughly 10% of the number of people who saw Kennedy's speech in Berlin) and the wall coming down.
Image if we had a president in office right now who stood up for freedom who said, "NSA, close down illegal surveillance."
That is political suicide to do that. It doesn't matter if the president thinks that is the right thing to do or not; if they end it they would be bashed as "soft on terror" (or worse) and the next time there is an attack - here or abroad - it would be squarely blamed on them. There is no winning hand on that matter.
Make a lot of posts to topics off the main page and meta-moderate daily and you'll soon get points.
I tried that approach before, it didn't work for me. Granted most of my posts now are to journal entry discussions, but even when I mostly discussed main page articles I still didn't get mod points. I can't find the comment now, but some time ago an employee from/. admitted that there does exist a list of people who are not given mod points. Much like the no-fly list you are not allowed to ask if you are on it or how you got to be on it, but you will find out by experience if you are there.
I did find it interesting that back when/. was experimenting with giving 10 mod points instead of 5, I would occasionally get 10. Then they started trying 15, and I generally only got 5. Not long after that the multi-year drought began. I believe I have had points once in the past 3 years, and it was all of 5 of them.
It is also peculiar that meta-moderation would be tied to being rewarded with more points, when the meta-moderation system itself is completely worthless. I remember a time several years back when it was actually useful; in particular it only came up for comments that were actually moderated and it could result in moderations being overturned, they changed that some time ago and never bothered trying to correct either of those huge problems.
If your inclined to post contrary to/. group-think, wait until the post is at the bottom of the page.
Indeed my comments do frequently run counter to the overwhelming political views on slashdot, which may be part of what got me on the "no mod points, ever" list.
When you do get mod points, resist down-modding unless its absolutely blatant.
I generally would expect the moderators to catch the most blatant cases of trolling so I doubt I down-modded anything at any time in recent memory.
In particular, even though the official American narrative is that Ronald Reagan personally tore it down with his death-ray eyes, the article has a more balanced view on the matter:
But one also shouldn't ignore that Reagan gave his speech on 12 June 1987, a good 29 months before the actual fall of the wall. And there is little evidence that it had much impact on the dynamics of the dissident movement in East Germany, or on Soviet politics at the time.
There were plenty of SuperPACs that raised more than that for individual races this election cycle, and these were midterm elections. In 2016 $10M will be chump change for election fundraising.
If Citizens United sought to disenfranchise voters as much as possible from the election process, they will accomplish it once that election is over and voters feel that their money can no longer help out in any meaningful way.
I wish I could moderate your comment up. Somehow in spite of my excellent karma I have managed to land myself on the list of people who will never again be given moderator points.
Really, violent home break-ins are exceedingly rare. The likelihood of being a victim of a violent home break-in is so minuscule that it almost isn't even worth discussing. It's too bad that the republicans don't fear things that are actually reasonable.
Paying attention to Jeep and Ram sales doesn't really say a whole lot. Jeep has the largest number of smaller - yet non-toy - SUVs of any manufacturer right now; some of the other manufacturers have been reducing their line-ups. Similarly while the Ram trucks haven't changed much in the past decade the other manufacturers are changing their trucks which shifts demand around.
You need to look at industry-wide sales stats to have a sense of what the sales numbers are doing. You need to also look at it against annual averages, as a sales uptick in the fall is not unusual when businesses are looking to finish their fiscal years.
Don't humor yourselves, slashdot editors. We don't have enough traffic to take down a small conservative blog anymore, let alone a web page hosted by Blizzard. They know what they're doing, at least when they put up a website.
Have any sites gone down in the past 12 months from too much slashdot traffic? I haven't heard of any. We didn't even take down any of the small-time gun 3D printing sites, which are practically the bread and butter of this site now.
Really, are there people reading slashdot who don't know what open source means? The summary could have been trimmed down a fair bit by excluding that segment.
But conservatives are the real victims in America today!!1one
That's been the chorus on slashdot for years now. Even if they take the senate today we'll still hear the conservatives here bitching endlessly about being oppressed minorities.
Besides, it drives clicks and that's the important thing.
Pretty much. Any article that helps send slashdot readers to the likes of townhall.com and other conservative echo chambers are generally fast-tracked to the front page.
Because it's kinda like Entity A (a company) doesn't want to do business (hire) Entity B (a black homosexual 65 year old man). Do you still not see a problem?
You're really not comparing apples to apples, here. However if you really want to play that particular - and disconnected - card, then you need to ask why your mythical company A did not hire person B. If there was someone else who was better qualified for the position, then there is no problem. There are even intangible qualifications that can be counted in the process, such as fitness for the physical requirements or availability of reliable transportation to the site.
In other words you cannot win by trying to play that card in a vacuum. The real world doesn't work that way.
From the summary I see that company A has decided they don't want to do business with company B. I don't see them doing anything to prevent any other company from coming along and doing business with said company B. Isn't this how the market is supposed to work, companies are free to make their own decisions about who they want to do business with?
Intelligence agencies are well aware that no worthwhile discussions happen here any more, so they won't read what you write here. Of course, neither will anyone else...
which they have forced the country to call "Obamacare", even though Obama had nothing to do with
Forced? What kind of crack are you smoking? Obama has even said on live TV that he's happy to call the ACA "Obamacare".
Obama is a politician, in case you haven't noticed. His legacy was on the line, which is why he signed it in to law. He was well aware by the time that failure pile of a bill made it to his desk that he would never, ever, see another bill relating to health care during his presidency (regardless of the outcome of his reelection bid in 2012) so he had to take ownership of it or become known in history as the president who rejected it.
I case you have had your eyes and ears closed and covered for all the past 6+ years, the name "Obamacare" was started as a derogatory remark towards the bill from the republicans. More to the point, it was started by republicans who were mad that Obama was about to sign their bill in to law and get credit for doing something, even if that something he was doing was coming from everything they wanted to do.
Groups have been pressuring the oil/gas companies to give information on the composition of the magic "fracking solution" for years now. All the companies have been willing to say so far is "it's safe, trust us!". If the courts can't get the companies to tell us why we should trust them on the safety of this cocktail, perhaps the hackers will find out its composition and tell us first?
One might wonder how an oil/gas company would look in terms of safety if they were ousted by a Chinese group...
The actual legislation that has been signed under President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama has been a continuation of the conservative agenda of the past 20+ years in Washington. The only reason the GOP voted against the health insurance bill of 2010 (which they have forced the country to call "Obamacare", even though Obama had nothing to do with its writing or contents) was because they didn't want him associated with actually doing something about the health care problems in this country (even though it didn't do shit). Not only was that bill in particular the largest corporate handout in the history of government, and a gift to the industry behind some of the largest lobbying groups to buy politicians from either side (indeed the insurance industry owns politicians on both sides) but it was about as pro-huge-business as you can get.
If you don't like the health insurance bill, the GOP won't fix it. Hell, most of the republican candidates have proposed to repeal it - and then replace it with the same fucking thing.
In other words all that has happened in the past couple decades here politically is that the democrats have shifted rightward to the positions where the republicans were 20 years ago, and the republicans have shifted rightward off into lala land. There is no center, and there sure as hell isn't a left. You have no choice on the ballot that will get us off this track, all you can do is vote for the velocity.
Slashdot Mirror
I would expect that if I did, I would waste so much time trying to get it to work that I would miss out on many of the greatest things about that part of the world. You didn't mention being insanely wealthy and able to take these trips regularly; if you are of the economic class that most of this country lives in, you will likely only make this trip once. Hence, you should make the most of it. If you really make the most of the trip you'll likely come back to this country with skills from the trip that are more valuable than what you could acquire by reading programming books during that time.
As much as I don't care for Microsoft, if this brings about an end to all the headaches I run in to trying to use mono then I will welcome it. I love all the applications that I need to run that have 30 pages worth of crowd-sourced (and nearly unreadable) documentation for how to run them in wine with mono. It's time to be done with this bullshit and get back to work. I understand the goals of mono and they were admirable but they just never really worked out. Hopefully those guys can help the development of the open-sourced .NET.
Of course, the REAL issue isn't even guns, it is mental health. We have kids who are unstable, unbalanced, and unloved, and the system does nothing for them. There is no way to identify problem or challenged kids and get them some help before they go off the deep end.
This isn't limited to kids, we have the same problem with adults. The mental health care system in this county is sad, we don't offer help early enough to those who need it and as a result, we have people who go crazy and do stupid stuff.
Because indeed we are dealing with a mental health issue. In particular we are dealing with two mental health issues that are widespread in our country:
Until we address those issues we will still have these problems. It doesn't matter where you put guns, detectors, or anything else. All you can do is move the problem around. To make matters worse the 2010 health care bill was more about rewarding terrible insurance companies than it was actually about helping people get access to care that they need.
I saw on the video that the bicycle has pedals, a chain, and a rear derailer (presumably with a rear cassette as well). What I can't figure out though is what any of those are for. Obviously the rider isn't pedaling at 207 mph. I'm not sure if he is even resting his feet on those pedals when moving under rocket power, it seems the position he uses would be better suited to having foot pegs in a different location.
Who the hell says that his SPEECH (written by Peter Robinson) caused the wall to be brought down? It's often suggested it was his policies. Debate that.
Tell me, what policies did Reagan partake in - beyond driving our own country into insane debt by massively increasing the military budget - that had any effect on the USSR? People credit Reagan for bringing about the end of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the USSR even though he did very little in reality; particularly when one considers that t was already in a death spiral before he took office.
I'd be happy to debate this. I would love to know what was special about Reagan that brought this about that would not have happened had the White House been occupied by Walter Mondale or a Ficus Tree.
Reagan's speech was part of a much larger program to pressure the Soviets.
I don't dispute that. I fully accept that the entire cold war was about trying to bring down the USSR any way possible.
Reagan believed, fundamentally, that communism was evil and spent a lot of energy fighting it.
If it was truly about communism then by the time Reagan was in office - and indeed well before then - they wouldn't have wanted to put any energy into defeating the USSR as there was no communism left there. Certainly Reagan had some officials under him who knew that, even if he did not. It took very little time after the revolution for the state to morph from an attempt at communism to a top-heavy bureaucracy that was interested only in its own survival.
Reducing Reagan's and Thatcher's programs against communism and all that represented it down to a single speech is unfair. Your concentration on the timing of the speech in relation to when the wall came down certainly seems to discount any other actions the US and other countries took.
My point is that the USSR was already well into its death spiral before Reagan came to office. He just had a better PR team than any US president that came before him. Hell the wall didn't even come down while he was in office, it came down while Bush Sr. was president yet the credit goes to Reagan for one speech that most of the rest of the world - and importantly most of the effected world - paid almost no attention to.
The Guardian? The British version of Pravda?
Did you actually read the article? If there is something in the article that you find objectionable based on what it actually says - rather than just what you feel about the newspaper that published it - please share that. Sharing silliness such as
Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.
Does not further the conversation.
The article actually cites specific statements, actions, and dates. Are there some in there that you disagree with, or some important ones that you feel they missed?
It's hard to imagine a single speech would cause the Soviet system to crumble, and Reagan had problems as a president, but he stood up for freedom, pointing out that keeping another country in a cage is evil.
There are others who made speeches as well, and none of them are as celebrated as Reagan. The important bit here though is likely that almost 3 years passed between his "famous" speech (which was seen by roughly 10% of the number of people who saw Kennedy's speech in Berlin) and the wall coming down.
Image if we had a president in office right now who stood up for freedom who said, "NSA, close down illegal surveillance."
That is political suicide to do that. It doesn't matter if the president thinks that is the right thing to do or not; if they end it they would be bashed as "soft on terror" (or worse) and the next time there is an attack - here or abroad - it would be squarely blamed on them. There is no winning hand on that matter.
Make a lot of posts to topics off the main page and meta-moderate daily and you'll soon get points.
I tried that approach before, it didn't work for me. Granted most of my posts now are to journal entry discussions, but even when I mostly discussed main page articles I still didn't get mod points. I can't find the comment now, but some time ago an employee from /. admitted that there does exist a list of people who are not given mod points. Much like the no-fly list you are not allowed to ask if you are on it or how you got to be on it, but you will find out by experience if you are there.
/. was experimenting with giving 10 mod points instead of 5, I would occasionally get 10. Then they started trying 15, and I generally only got 5. Not long after that the multi-year drought began. I believe I have had points once in the past 3 years, and it was all of 5 of them.
I did find it interesting that back when
It is also peculiar that meta-moderation would be tied to being rewarded with more points, when the meta-moderation system itself is completely worthless. I remember a time several years back when it was actually useful; in particular it only came up for comments that were actually moderated and it could result in moderations being overturned, they changed that some time ago and never bothered trying to correct either of those huge problems.
If your inclined to post contrary to /. group-think, wait until the post is at the bottom of the page.
Indeed my comments do frequently run counter to the overwhelming political views on slashdot, which may be part of what got me on the "no mod points, ever" list.
When you do get mod points, resist down-modding unless its absolutely blatant.
I generally would expect the moderators to catch the most blatant cases of trolling so I doubt I down-modded anything at any time in recent memory.
In particular, even though the official American narrative is that Ronald Reagan personally tore it down with his death-ray eyes, the article has a more balanced view on the matter:
But one also shouldn't ignore that Reagan gave his speech on 12 June 1987, a good 29 months before the actual fall of the wall. And there is little evidence that it had much impact on the dynamics of the dissident movement in East Germany, or on Soviet politics at the time.
There were plenty of SuperPACs that raised more than that for individual races this election cycle, and these were midterm elections. In 2016 $10M will be chump change for election fundraising.
If Citizens United sought to disenfranchise voters as much as possible from the election process, they will accomplish it once that election is over and voters feel that their money can no longer help out in any meaningful way.
I wish I could moderate your comment up. Somehow in spite of my excellent karma I have managed to land myself on the list of people who will never again be given moderator points.
Really, violent home break-ins are exceedingly rare. The likelihood of being a victim of a violent home break-in is so minuscule that it almost isn't even worth discussing. It's too bad that the republicans don't fear things that are actually reasonable.
Paying attention to Jeep and Ram sales doesn't really say a whole lot. Jeep has the largest number of smaller - yet non-toy - SUVs of any manufacturer right now; some of the other manufacturers have been reducing their line-ups. Similarly while the Ram trucks haven't changed much in the past decade the other manufacturers are changing their trucks which shifts demand around.
You need to look at industry-wide sales stats to have a sense of what the sales numbers are doing. You need to also look at it against annual averages, as a sales uptick in the fall is not unusual when businesses are looking to finish their fiscal years.
Don't humor yourselves, slashdot editors. We don't have enough traffic to take down a small conservative blog anymore, let alone a web page hosted by Blizzard. They know what they're doing, at least when they put up a website.
Have any sites gone down in the past 12 months from too much slashdot traffic? I haven't heard of any. We didn't even take down any of the small-time gun 3D printing sites, which are practically the bread and butter of this site now.
Are you always this much fun or only when you think you know what you're talking about?
Really, are there people reading slashdot who don't know what open source means? The summary could have been trimmed down a fair bit by excluding that segment.
Even for election day, you're a little over-amped. Might I suggest decaf for tomorrow morning?
But conservatives are the real victims in America today!!1one
That's been the chorus on slashdot for years now. Even if they take the senate today we'll still hear the conservatives here bitching endlessly about being oppressed minorities.
Besides, it drives clicks and that's the important thing.
Pretty much. Any article that helps send slashdot readers to the likes of townhall.com and other conservative echo chambers are generally fast-tracked to the front page.
Because it's kinda like Entity A (a company) doesn't want to do business (hire) Entity B (a black homosexual 65 year old man). Do you still not see a problem?
You're really not comparing apples to apples, here. However if you really want to play that particular - and disconnected - card, then you need to ask why your mythical company A did not hire person B. If there was someone else who was better qualified for the position, then there is no problem. There are even intangible qualifications that can be counted in the process, such as fitness for the physical requirements or availability of reliable transportation to the site.
In other words you cannot win by trying to play that card in a vacuum. The real world doesn't work that way.
From the summary I see that company A has decided they don't want to do business with company B. I don't see them doing anything to prevent any other company from coming along and doing business with said company B. Isn't this how the market is supposed to work, companies are free to make their own decisions about who they want to do business with?
Intelligence agencies are well aware that no worthwhile discussions happen here any more, so they won't read what you write here. Of course, neither will anyone else...
which they have forced the country to call "Obamacare", even though Obama had nothing to do with
Forced? What kind of crack are you smoking? Obama has even said on live TV that he's happy to call the ACA "Obamacare".
Obama is a politician, in case you haven't noticed. His legacy was on the line, which is why he signed it in to law. He was well aware by the time that failure pile of a bill made it to his desk that he would never, ever, see another bill relating to health care during his presidency (regardless of the outcome of his reelection bid in 2012) so he had to take ownership of it or become known in history as the president who rejected it.
I case you have had your eyes and ears closed and covered for all the past 6+ years, the name "Obamacare" was started as a derogatory remark towards the bill from the republicans. More to the point, it was started by republicans who were mad that Obama was about to sign their bill in to law and get credit for doing something, even if that something he was doing was coming from everything they wanted to do.
Groups have been pressuring the oil/gas companies to give information on the composition of the magic "fracking solution" for years now. All the companies have been willing to say so far is "it's safe, trust us!". If the courts can't get the companies to tell us why we should trust them on the safety of this cocktail, perhaps the hackers will find out its composition and tell us first?
One might wonder how an oil/gas company would look in terms of safety if they were ousted by a Chinese group...
The actual legislation that has been signed under President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama has been a continuation of the conservative agenda of the past 20+ years in Washington. The only reason the GOP voted against the health insurance bill of 2010 (which they have forced the country to call "Obamacare", even though Obama had nothing to do with its writing or contents) was because they didn't want him associated with actually doing something about the health care problems in this country (even though it didn't do shit). Not only was that bill in particular the largest corporate handout in the history of government, and a gift to the industry behind some of the largest lobbying groups to buy politicians from either side (indeed the insurance industry owns politicians on both sides) but it was about as pro-huge-business as you can get.
If you don't like the health insurance bill, the GOP won't fix it. Hell, most of the republican candidates have proposed to repeal it - and then replace it with the same fucking thing.
In other words all that has happened in the past couple decades here politically is that the democrats have shifted rightward to the positions where the republicans were 20 years ago, and the republicans have shifted rightward off into lala land. There is no center, and there sure as hell isn't a left. You have no choice on the ballot that will get us off this track, all you can do is vote for the velocity.