I can sympathize: I worked to pay my way through my undergrad and also graduated with some (thankfully not a lot) of student loan debt.
I won't disagree with you in that I'd prefer not to reward banks for their recent bad behavior; given an either/or choice I think we'd both prefer that the money be invested in educating someone rather than buying new gold plated letter openers for Wall St. (I'd really prefer that we don't give out money to either one.)
On the subject of the government subsidy raising tuition costs, I didn't mean to attack this particular proposal all by itself. Any government funding, either through this proposal or through reduced rates on student loans, is going to result in more inflation of college tuition costs so long as demand for a college education stays high.
Higher educational institutions are selling something that we as a nation can't seem to get enough of and we'll go to extremes to find a way to pay for it. Colleges are naturally going to try to maximize their own revenue and because demand is so high they're in a good position to do it. Even without government help, so long as they can keep their campuses full of bright eager students (or at least _paying_ students) they can afford to keep ratcheting up the cost of tuition. Throwing taxpayer money at the problem doesn't help in the mid- to long- term because these colleges aren't having problems filling their seats at today's prices and so there's no disincentive to trying to claim as much of the government's additional assistance money as possible; why leave it on the table for the students?
Higher education hasn't yet found the point where we collectively say, "Enough!" Until then tuition is going to continue to rise and any government assistance is going to be swallowed up without even a thank you from the people it's really benefiting: our higher educational system.
Hats off to the hard work and devotion that obviously went into the visual elements of this mod but the game play simply isn't there.
Almost any shot is a one-shot kill and even though you're theoretically supposed to use the iron sights pretty much just firing your weapon in the general direction of the bad (good) guys guarantees a frag.
Players familiar with the map can often camp out of visual range and simply hose down the exits from the spawn points with great effect.
The map objectives are lame and overdone (we've seen it all before) and most servers are setup to spawn endlessly making the whole exercise pointless.
There appears to be no material difference between the player classes. You could save everyone a bunch of time by simply putting all the players together in an empty room and letting them frag away. It's essentially DoD:S but with modern weapons.
This in no way compares to the polish or great (and generally well balanced) game play of CS:S, TF2, or RTCW:ET.
Summary: visually good, but boring, boring, boring.
Ok, server is/.'ed, so I can't RTFA. Can anyone tell me is this truly a tax credit, in other words a specific reduction in your taxes due to the government, or is it a $4000 subsidy (read:welfare) for college students, or a little bit of both?
I don't imagine there are a lot of college students who end up owing the government $4000 or more per year in taxes. I'm not sure what your AGI has to be in order to end up with a $4K tax bill, but if this is a direct discount off the taxes you owe to the government, then you're essentially taking the tax rate to 0% for a lot of college students who also do community work (that many of them are probably already doing anyway).
If it's really a cash handout for college students (i.e. paid to you regardless of whether or not you actually have any tax liability at all), then please let's stop calling it a tax credit and call it what it really is: a welfare payment.
In either case, you can expect colleges to raise tuition by approximately $4000 as a result and in the end we haven't really made a college education more affordable for anybody. Many people are concerned that the cost of a college education keep spiraling upwards. Programs like this are the reason why. We, as a nation, view a college education (for everyone) as an unquestionable good and thus we'll go to almost any extreme to continue to find ways to pay for it. So long as we continue to turn to the government to make up the difference we're going to see the price of tuition continue to rise.
Ahh, yes, MUDs. Such great time wasters. I too saw many people flunk out because of them. Actually, some of them were probably my fault since I'm the one who introduced them to the game!
I cut my teeth on Eltanin but spent most of my time on CrystalShard (Shout out to Rush, Ganja, and Dracos!).
I also had a really cool house just over the river in TANSTAAFL in FurryMUCK, but I never finished it because I really, really, needed to get that next level over at CS. (And the next, and the next...)
Had an apartment on LambdaMOO too but I hardly ever went there.
It's more likely that they are unsatisfied with their existing presence/messaging options (Unified Communicator and/or WebEx AIMPro) and felt they needed to build up the portfolio.
I imagine there are many enterprises telling them: "Hey, can't we just have an application independent presence engine and not have it tied to whatever flavor of the month you've got for your IM?"
Great, so we can either elect a "ditzy beauty queen with all of two years political experience" as POTUS now or we can get one in a couple of years when crazy old Grandpa John kicks the bucket.
Exactly, the issue is the young athletes who are eventually going to have to participate in doping if they want to have a chance of competing at the professional level.
The problem is that below a certain age you can't reasonably be considered to be able to give informed consent and that is exactly what you'd want to have for a practice that might have significant future negative health outcomes. If the kids can't give informed consent, that throws it back on the parents.
So, do we give parents the right to choose for their child a cosmetic (for lack of a better word) medical procedure that has a high probability of negative long term outcomes? Is a better chance of winning a game an outcome that has a value to society that's greater than the considerations of the child's health?
I'd argue that for something as trivial as winning a sporting event, we'd want to err on the side of caution and not make a choice for a child that we have a reasonable expectation will turn out poorly for them later in life.
If an adult wants to take those chances, well, that's another discussion. However, I don't see how you can allow adults to do it without it naturally flowing back to becoming a requirement for children.
"I met a rich old man once... [whose] friend of his needed some cash when the Great Depression hit"
"Keep everything" is a common sentiment among people who grew up in or after the Great Depression. Case in point: my Grandfather who passed away last year. Even though he had a relatively small house (1500 sqft furnished + ~1000 sqft unfurnished), we managed to fill THREE full size dumpsters and set out 37 stuffed full bags of trash before we'd finished cleaning out his house. And that was _after_ we'd already removed the items for auction, made six trips to Goodwill, and packed all the things we were saving for Grandma.
So, speaking on behalf of the poor suckers who might have to clean out your house some day, PLEASE don't save everything.
Because lack of transmission line capacity is a limiting factor, not just for the wind farms, but for power distribution in Texas in general. The WSJ had a decent write-up about it on Friday. The rest of the media seems to be fixating on the part about delivery from the wind farms, but the reality appears to be that a lot of the pricing problems in TX are related to the fact that we don't have the transmission facilities to move electricity around efficiently and thus consumers of power in TX are usually stuck with the spot market rate.
The hope is that fixing this problem will in the long run result in better pricing for everyone as the grid is able to deliver electricity more efficiently.
The actual cost of performing the service was likely redacted, not as a matter of national security, but because the pricing is contractually considered proprietary information .
Most companies include this as a standard clause in their master service agreements so that Joe's Barber shop isn't upset that Big Government Office is getting a different (presumably better) price for exactly the same service.
"Alcohol and tobacco are two examples of legal products that are taxed to hell. There is not a large black market for these items."
I disagree. There actually is a large black, or at least gray, market for tobacco products. Native American reservations, especially on the East coast, make a tidy profit allowing people to skip the local tobacco taxes.
Also, while there's no black market to speak of for _legal_ purchases of alcohol (by those who are over 21), there is a large black market for selling alcohol for people who can't legally buy it.
What this would amount to is a giant dare to Apple (and a lot of other high tech companies) to move out of CA.
I think the tax would have to be pretty onerous for Apple to actually move, but you can bet it would figure into the planning for the next Apple or Google when it came time to pick an HQ.
Actually, if you want to teach CS then I'd vote for going back to Pascal. It was designed to be a teaching language and as such it's powerful enough to solve interesting problems but not nearly so dangerous to the user as C or any of its descendants.
I don't have any experience with Python, but I can confidently say that Perl is the _last_ thing you'd want to put in front of a delicate little CS newbie. Don't get me wrong, Perl is sinfully delicious but let's be honest, as a programming language it's just a mess.
Based on my recent recruiting experiences I'd have to say that H1-B visa limits are _not_ responsible for the decline in enrollment. In fact, if anything, at most of the universities I visited students on an H1B or F1 visa are all you can find in the CS department.
Most of them can't get hired after they graduate because companies are increasingly unwilling to sponsor visas, but it's sure not keeping them from coming to school here.
If you're looking for the reason for the drop in enrollment you don't really have to look any farther than the.com boom. Notice that the peak of enrollment is just about 4 years off of the peak of the.com boom. I certainly saw a lot of students in that time period who thought that a CS degree was an easy way to get on the gravy train.
No, you've got that backwards. The Internet was designed for porn. Note that Al Gore, infamous pr0n king, claims credit for creating the Internet. This original intent is further clarified by our legislators' continued use of the phrase "series of tubes" to describe the Internet.
"Research" is merely the socially acceptable cover story invented by all those perverted computer scientists out there in order to obtain funding and secure patents for their "plurality of global systems to electronically convey digital adult entertainment materials to my mom's basement" on a computer.
To some extent, things this was also a communications problem. Edward Tufte has analyzed the Challenger and Columbia disasters and concluded that they largely occurred because critical information became obfuscated as it moved up the decision tree. Take a look at his analysis of the Columbia disaster:
I disagree. The problem is neither campaign contributions nor the voters. The problem is that the federal government has:
1) Too much power, and 2) Too much of our money
The ability of the federal government to dole our large sums of money, power, and other favors is really the root cause of the issue. The campaign contributions are merely a symptom of the problem and no amount of "patching" is going to resolve the underlying problem. What exactly do you imagine the campaign contributions are supposed to be buying? Money, power, and favors.
The solution is a federal government with vastly smaller powers and correspondingly smaller amounts of money, power, and favors to sell.
Absent that, or better in addition, the next best solution is to remove the (unconstitutional, in my opinion) spending limits but require full disclosure so we can see exactly who owns who and how much it will cost to buy the outcome we desire. That may seem crass and undemocratic but it is at least fair and transparent.
"Sorry but anyone with an ounce of sense knew that he didn't have them..."
Snopes has an interesting page listing quotes from many people who didn't have "an ounce of sense" and believed that Iraq did indeed have an active WMD program. Many of them are not named Bush.
"the fact is that Iraq didn't have them and wasn't working on them"
A quote I think we can all agree, _now_, is true. However, as you can see from the above link, there were many influential US leaders who ostensibly believed Iraq posed a credible WMD threat.
Also the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf ) passed both Houses of the US Congress and was signed into law by President Bush in October 2002 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution#Passage ). Thus, at least a majority of both Houses of Congress agreed to some extent that Iraq posed a threat to US security, which included (in the text of the bill) the threat of WMDs.
Oh, bummer, you rolled a critical failure on your grapple attempt when reaching for my dice. Make a reflex save to take half damage from my spilled drink.
Slashdot Mirror
I can sympathize: I worked to pay my way through my undergrad and also graduated with some (thankfully not a lot) of student loan debt.
I won't disagree with you in that I'd prefer not to reward banks for their recent bad behavior; given an either/or choice I think we'd both prefer that the money be invested in educating someone rather than buying new gold plated letter openers for Wall St. (I'd really prefer that we don't give out money to either one.)
On the subject of the government subsidy raising tuition costs, I didn't mean to attack this particular proposal all by itself. Any government funding, either through this proposal or through reduced rates on student loans, is going to result in more inflation of college tuition costs so long as demand for a college education stays high.
Higher educational institutions are selling something that we as a nation can't seem to get enough of and we'll go to extremes to find a way to pay for it. Colleges are naturally going to try to maximize their own revenue and because demand is so high they're in a good position to do it. Even without government help, so long as they can keep their campuses full of bright eager students (or at least _paying_ students) they can afford to keep ratcheting up the cost of tuition. Throwing taxpayer money at the problem doesn't help in the mid- to long- term because these colleges aren't having problems filling their seats at today's prices and so there's no disincentive to trying to claim as much of the government's additional assistance money as possible; why leave it on the table for the students?
Higher education hasn't yet found the point where we collectively say, "Enough!" Until then tuition is going to continue to rise and any government assistance is going to be swallowed up without even a thank you from the people it's really benefiting: our higher educational system.
Don't give it a go; you will regret it.
Hats off to the hard work and devotion that obviously went into the visual elements of this mod but the game play simply isn't there.
Almost any shot is a one-shot kill and even though you're theoretically supposed to use the iron sights pretty much just firing your weapon in the general direction of the bad (good) guys guarantees a frag.
Players familiar with the map can often camp out of visual range and simply hose down the exits from the spawn points with great effect.
The map objectives are lame and overdone (we've seen it all before) and most servers are setup to spawn endlessly making the whole exercise pointless.
There appears to be no material difference between the player classes. You could save everyone a bunch of time by simply putting all the players together in an empty room and letting them frag away. It's essentially DoD:S but with modern weapons.
This in no way compares to the polish or great (and generally well balanced) game play of CS:S, TF2, or RTCW:ET.
Summary: visually good, but boring, boring, boring.
Ok, server is /.'ed, so I can't RTFA. Can anyone tell me is this truly a tax credit, in other words a specific reduction in your taxes due to the government, or is it a $4000 subsidy (read:welfare) for college students, or a little bit of both?
I don't imagine there are a lot of college students who end up owing the government $4000 or more per year in taxes. I'm not sure what your AGI has to be in order to end up with a $4K tax bill, but if this is a direct discount off the taxes you owe to the government, then you're essentially taking the tax rate to 0% for a lot of college students who also do community work (that many of them are probably already doing anyway).
If it's really a cash handout for college students (i.e. paid to you regardless of whether or not you actually have any tax liability at all), then please let's stop calling it a tax credit and call it what it really is: a welfare payment.
In either case, you can expect colleges to raise tuition by approximately $4000 as a result and in the end we haven't really made a college education more affordable for anybody. Many people are concerned that the cost of a college education keep spiraling upwards. Programs like this are the reason why. We, as a nation, view a college education (for everyone) as an unquestionable good and thus we'll go to almost any extreme to continue to find ways to pay for it. So long as we continue to turn to the government to make up the difference we're going to see the price of tuition continue to rise.
Ahh, yes, MUDs. Such great time wasters. I too saw many people flunk out because of them. Actually, some of them were probably my fault since I'm the one who introduced them to the game!
I cut my teeth on Eltanin but spent most of my time on CrystalShard (Shout out to Rush, Ganja, and Dracos!).
I also had a really cool house just over the river in TANSTAAFL in FurryMUCK, but I never finished it because I really, really, needed to get that next level over at CS. (And the next, and the next...)
Had an apartment on LambdaMOO too but I hardly ever went there.
It's more likely that they are unsatisfied with their existing presence/messaging options (Unified Communicator and/or WebEx AIMPro) and felt they needed to build up the portfolio.
I imagine there are many enterprises telling them: "Hey, can't we just have an application independent presence engine and not have it tied to whatever flavor of the month you've got for your IM?"
Oh great...NOW my mod points expire. Somebody mod this up.
Great, so we can either elect a "ditzy beauty queen with all of two years political experience" as POTUS now or we can get one in a couple of years when crazy old Grandpa John kicks the bucket.
Exactly, the issue is the young athletes who are eventually going to have to participate in doping if they want to have a chance of competing at the professional level.
The problem is that below a certain age you can't reasonably be considered to be able to give informed consent and that is exactly what you'd want to have for a practice that might have significant future negative health outcomes. If the kids can't give informed consent, that throws it back on the parents.
So, do we give parents the right to choose for their child a cosmetic (for lack of a better word) medical procedure that has a high probability of negative long term outcomes? Is a better chance of winning a game an outcome that has a value to society that's greater than the considerations of the child's health?
I'd argue that for something as trivial as winning a sporting event, we'd want to err on the side of caution and not make a choice for a child that we have a reasonable expectation will turn out poorly for them later in life.
If an adult wants to take those chances, well, that's another discussion. However, I don't see how you can allow adults to do it without it naturally flowing back to becoming a requirement for children.
"I met a rich old man once ... [whose] friend of his needed some cash when the Great Depression hit"
"Keep everything" is a common sentiment among people who grew up in or after the Great Depression. Case in point: my Grandfather who passed away last year. Even though he had a relatively small house (1500 sqft furnished + ~1000 sqft unfurnished), we managed to fill THREE full size dumpsters and set out 37 stuffed full bags of trash before we'd finished cleaning out his house. And that was _after_ we'd already removed the items for auction, made six trips to Goodwill, and packed all the things we were saving for Grandma.
So, speaking on behalf of the poor suckers who might have to clean out your house some day, PLEASE don't save everything.
Because lack of transmission line capacity is a limiting factor, not just for the wind farms, but for power distribution in Texas in general. The WSJ had a decent write-up about it on Friday. The rest of the media seems to be fixating on the part about delivery from the wind farms, but the reality appears to be that a lot of the pricing problems in TX are related to the fact that we don't have the transmission facilities to move electricity around efficiently and thus consumers of power in TX are usually stuck with the spot market rate.
The hope is that fixing this problem will in the long run result in better pricing for everyone as the grid is able to deliver electricity more efficiently.
"" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler "
I find your .sig intriguing: do you get an automatic Godwin on every post you make?
The actual cost of performing the service was likely redacted, not as a matter of national security, but because the pricing is contractually considered proprietary information .
Most companies include this as a standard clause in their master service agreements so that Joe's Barber shop isn't upset that Big Government Office is getting a different (presumably better) price for exactly the same service.
your new Texan Petawatt Laser Overlords.
I wish I had mod points. +1 THANK YOU!
"Alcohol and tobacco are two examples of legal products that are taxed to hell. There is not a large black market for these items."
I disagree. There actually is a large black, or at least gray, market for tobacco products. Native American reservations, especially on the East coast, make a tidy profit allowing people to skip the local tobacco taxes.
Also, while there's no black market to speak of for _legal_ purchases of alcohol (by those who are over 21), there is a large black market for selling alcohol for people who can't legally buy it.
What this would amount to is a giant dare to Apple (and a lot of other high tech companies) to move out of CA.
I think the tax would have to be pretty onerous for Apple to actually move, but you can bet it would figure into the planning for the next Apple or Google when it came time to pick an HQ.
Take it like a man, shorty!
Actually, if you want to teach CS then I'd vote for going back to Pascal. It was designed to be a teaching language and as such it's powerful enough to solve interesting problems but not nearly so dangerous to the user as C or any of its descendants.
I don't have any experience with Python, but I can confidently say that Perl is the _last_ thing you'd want to put in front of a delicate little CS newbie. Don't get me wrong, Perl is sinfully delicious but let's be honest, as a programming language it's just a mess.
Based on my recent recruiting experiences I'd have to say that H1-B visa limits are _not_ responsible for the decline in enrollment. In fact, if anything, at most of the universities I visited students on an H1B or F1 visa are all you can find in the CS department.
.com boom. Notice that the peak of enrollment is just about 4 years off of the peak of the .com boom. I certainly saw a lot of students in that time period who thought that a CS degree was an easy way to get on the gravy train.
Most of them can't get hired after they graduate because companies are increasingly unwilling to sponsor visas, but it's sure not keeping them from coming to school here.
If you're looking for the reason for the drop in enrollment you don't really have to look any farther than the
No, you've got that backwards. The Internet was designed for porn. Note that Al Gore, infamous pr0n king, claims credit for creating the Internet. This original intent is further clarified by our legislators' continued use of the phrase "series of tubes" to describe the Internet.
"Research" is merely the socially acceptable cover story invented by all those perverted computer scientists out there in order to obtain funding and secure patents for their "plurality of global systems to electronically convey digital adult entertainment materials to my mom's basement" on a computer.
To some extent, things this was also a communications problem. Edward Tufte has analyzed the Challenger and Columbia disasters and concluded that they largely occurred because critical information became obfuscated as it moved up the decision tree. Take a look at his analysis of the Columbia disaster:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E.T.
Challenger has similar issues. I can't find a direct cite for it but this page:
http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
does an OK job of excerpting the ideas.
"The problem is the voters."
I disagree. The problem is neither campaign contributions nor the voters. The problem is that the federal government has:
1) Too much power, and
2) Too much of our money
The ability of the federal government to dole our large sums of money, power, and other favors is really the root cause of the issue. The campaign contributions are merely a symptom of the problem and no amount of "patching" is going to resolve the underlying problem. What exactly do you imagine the campaign contributions are supposed to be buying? Money, power, and favors.
Alexis de Tocqueville had it exactly right:
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alexisdeto390854.html
The solution is a federal government with vastly smaller powers and correspondingly smaller amounts of money, power, and favors to sell.
Absent that, or better in addition, the next best solution is to remove the (unconstitutional, in my opinion) spending limits but require full disclosure so we can see exactly who owns who and how much it will cost to buy the outcome we desire. That may seem crass and undemocratic but it is at least fair and transparent.
"Sorry but anyone with an ounce of sense knew that he didn't have them..."
Snopes has an interesting page listing quotes from many people who didn't have "an ounce of sense" and believed that Iraq did indeed have an active WMD program. Many of them are not named Bush.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp
"the fact is that Iraq didn't have them and wasn't working on them"
A quote I think we can all agree, _now_, is true. However, as you can see from the above link, there were many influential US leaders who ostensibly believed Iraq posed a credible WMD threat.
Also the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf ) passed both Houses of the US Congress and was signed into law by President Bush in October 2002 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution#Passage ). Thus, at least a majority of both Houses of Congress agreed to some extent that Iraq posed a threat to US security, which included (in the text of the bill) the threat of WMDs.
Bush didn't get us into Iraq by himself.
Oh, bummer, you rolled a critical failure on your grapple attempt when reaching for my dice. Make a reflex save to take half damage from my spilled drink.
"...is like saying if I eat a lot of cake I won't get fat."
Damnit! We should all know by now: THERE IS NO CAKE!
Sheesh, you must be new here.