Gore and Bush had a statistical tie. The differences in all the recounts were less than the margin of error for the voting machines and the margin of error for hand counting. There may have been problems with the voting style, debates over hanging chad and what not, but ultimately it was a tie. Except that American politics doesn't allow ties even in cases where mathematics disagrees. The logical solution, and humans are not logical, would have been to have a runoff.
The fault there was NOT Nader's fault. The fault was very clearly that of Gore for ignoring and dismissing that segment of the voting base, probably with the assumption that they'd eventually vote for him anyway. Gore could have won a large chunk of them back. The "follow the party line" is pretty evil I think, speaking as a decline-to-state, and candidates would do better to try to appeal to the voters rather than rely on partisanship.
Don't forget, a lot of those voters sat the election out as well, it wasn't just a choice between Nader or Gore or Bush or Buchanan, there was also the choice to just forget it all because none of them seem good. The problem comes from focusing only on the "undecided" voters in the center while ignoring those on left or right who may be uncertain.
And for heaven's sake, it's 2015 already. Are people still sucking on those sour grapes, re Nader?
That's what he calls himself, a democratic socialist. Ie, european style. But never mind all that, just having the word "socialist" there causes the far right to freak out over fear of communists.
No chance. But that's not the point. Bringing in several voices into a primary means that more issues can be discussed, even ones that the sure-to-win candidate would rather avoid. That's also why third party candidates are good as well even though they have no hope of winning. Case in point, candidate G ignores issues from third party candidate N, assuming all all of G's fan base will eventually vote for G anyway so why worry; except that losing these voters actually cost candidate G the election.
In senate and congressional races, quite a lot of candidates have lost by incorrectly assuming that support from a faction of the voters was a sure thing.
Yup, and people complain. I worked at an artificial intelligence lab one time and one researcher complained smutty images even though the most you saw was her shoulder. I didn't even know it was a centerfold image for several years after that.
Now on that note, if someone said "go google for Lena Soderberg", innocently thinking it was just a picture of a head, I could understand the problems that would come up...
Sometimes the change is difficult though. Ie, the only reason my mother finally switched was because AT&T told her that she could keep her email address. Which was utterly false of course. But keeping her email address was the primary reason she didn't want to switch. For awhile she was taking wifi from a neighbor, with permission, and so it wasn't as big a deal.
Then when you do go and get involved with the ISP, they screw around with you. Up selling you on products you don't need, misrepresenting the actual service you will get, etc. Competitors will screw with you, claiming to fix your poor satellite service and then you end up at a completely different company. The smart elderly person has learned not to trust all of this stuff.
And the price sucks, let's face it. Dialup is maybe $15 a month, 1Mbps was $30-40+ I think (fastest she could get). Sounds like peanuts to people who buy $10 cups of overpriced coffee but for people who still clip coupons it's a big fee.
No, the collections are probably automatic. Even if humans are involved somewhere in the billing, they don't have the power to easily fix things. Collectors have been sent out before to try to collect unreasonable fees in the past from other goofups from other companies.
Well, for one AT&T did not waive the fee when it was pointed out. They waited a few months until a news reporter got on the case. Now imagine it was something smaller, like merely getting billed double. Not a big enough issue for a reporter to blow the whistle on, and AT&T won't fix things because they're clueless.
These aren't really offers I don't think. I get recruiter spam, but no one sane is going to give me an offer without at least an interview, except maybe for past employers.
They are annoying to get though. Some may be decent jobs, but at the moment I'm not looking so I skip them all. But even the ones that look good are going through recruiters and that's a bad sign to me. Maybe I'm out of touch but I just don't get a good feeling about recruiters, they often seem utterly clueless about the companies they recruit for (even when they work for the company itself!), they don't know how to find a good match, they don't have my interests at heart at all, etc.
The sole reason cable companies have monopolies in cities, is because the cities granted them the monopoly in exchange for them to build out the infrastructure. This is the same as the federal government granting monopoly status to Bell Telephone, with the provision that they provide service to everyone.
The reason the feds did this is because they wanted telephone service to be universal, they knew it was a vital service in many ways. Health, civil defense, etc. There were people at the time who probably thought the way you do, why give phone service to people too stupid to live in a big city. Win/win, Bell gets to be a monopoly and the citizens get better service and the phone networks get connected together.
So towns gave monopoly status to cable companies for a bit less important reasons, mostly because the citizens wanted cable, they were tired of poor reception, limited options, etc. But the thinking was the same in other ways, grant the monopoly and let them spend their own money on it.
Then fast forward. Now the cable companies own that infrastructure but refuse to share it. AT&T was forced to share its lines when its monopoly was removed, which spurred a lot of competition. Cable companies still refuse though, and are getting state governments to forbid towns from doing things that might bring in competition.
Today, the internet provides phone service and television. So it's like the phone infrastructure plus the cable infrastructure, but a whole lot more besides. Maybe some think it's ok to have people still be on dialup even in the middle of a major town perhaps, just like some thought rural bumpkins shouldn't have dial phones. But this is going to be a huge and vital service. It's going to supplant broadcast tv in short order. It already is a vital service in more advanced parts of the world, and it really is sad that the USA is falling so far behind. You would think that all the "America, Rah Rah Rah" people would be all behind efforts to keep up with the neighbors.
Oh ya, food is left to the government, check out how much they give out in ag subsidies each year, how they use food surpluses to feed the poor, etc. We've got a whole cabinet level department devoted to agriculture.
If the private sector bothered with the concerns of actual citizens then we wouldn't need the government to step in on occasions. The free market is utterly incapable of solving many problems, and history has shown this time and time again.
I'm undoing all my mod points here to respond. But stop using "social justice" like some sort of curse word, it's as stupid as saying "socialist agenda" or "tea party fascists". You're making the assumption that any sort of social justice is a-priori wrong, like equating all environmentalists to being the same as Greenpeace, or all animal rights activists to being just PETA supporters. Just saying that life sucks and deal with is to support the status quo, but the status quo is pretty screwed up right now.
This paper right now is showing very blatant examples of sexism that so many "social justice" haters claim does not exist. We can't enter your world of everyone getting past all the -isms if the -isms are alive and well. The paper is not an irrelevant case, it's evidence that there is a problem (ok, so maybe it's only a problem for middle-tier academic journals with overworked editors).
The anonymous reviewer (gender unknown) seems to be of this same bent: because the paper's results seem to favor one charged viewpoint that the authors must clearly be biased. The reviewer assumed (incorrectly) that the authors never shared their paper with male colleagues. Further, despite the normal standards of the peer review process, there was no constructive feedback on how to improve the paper or a specific list of flaws to be corrected. The reviewer perhaps seems like the sort of person who rages at the term "social justice".
The claim Comcast had that a government should not compete with private business is ludicrous because the private business in question was inadequate or unavailable. Internet is infrastructure. If municipal governments are allowed to create and fund electric boards, water boards, gas boards, sewage services, and so forth, then the governments should be allowed to create internet services where none effectively exist.
This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this. A 25 year bond with a 4.64% increase in rates and in return the city *finally* gets reasonable internet service, I don't see who's being screwed except Comcast.
Well first off, the local power board has better service than Comcast, therefore Comcast probably felt obligated to up the bar lest they look like even bigger fools. Yes, it's dick waving to restore their bruised ego.
Also to get that market share back they had to either improve performance, improve service, or lower cost. And Comcast sure as hell would never improve service or lower cost...
But this is slashdot. The intended audience is chock full of people who should know what it is. I'm not saying most slashdotters who are programming nerds have used it, but they should have heard of it.
I'm disappointed to see though that Haskell is pretty high in mentions on programming.reddit.com and low for Slashdot. Maybe Slashdot should turn in its nerd card for renewal
(langpop.com is interesting for things like this too)
Slashdot Mirror
Gore and Bush had a statistical tie. The differences in all the recounts were less than the margin of error for the voting machines and the margin of error for hand counting. There may have been problems with the voting style, debates over hanging chad and what not, but ultimately it was a tie. Except that American politics doesn't allow ties even in cases where mathematics disagrees. The logical solution, and humans are not logical, would have been to have a runoff.
The fault there was NOT Nader's fault. The fault was very clearly that of Gore for ignoring and dismissing that segment of the voting base, probably with the assumption that they'd eventually vote for him anyway. Gore could have won a large chunk of them back. The "follow the party line" is pretty evil I think, speaking as a decline-to-state, and candidates would do better to try to appeal to the voters rather than rely on partisanship.
Don't forget, a lot of those voters sat the election out as well, it wasn't just a choice between Nader or Gore or Bush or Buchanan, there was also the choice to just forget it all because none of them seem good. The problem comes from focusing only on the "undecided" voters in the center while ignoring those on left or right who may be uncertain.
And for heaven's sake, it's 2015 already. Are people still sucking on those sour grapes, re Nader?
That's what he calls himself, a democratic socialist. Ie, european style. But never mind all that, just having the word "socialist" there causes the far right to freak out over fear of communists.
With governments you have the theoretical possibility to vote the bastards out. With corporations you are always at the mercy of the bastards.
No chance. But that's not the point. Bringing in several voices into a primary means that more issues can be discussed, even ones that the sure-to-win candidate would rather avoid. That's also why third party candidates are good as well even though they have no hope of winning. Case in point, candidate G ignores issues from third party candidate N, assuming all all of G's fan base will eventually vote for G anyway so why worry; except that losing these voters actually cost candidate G the election.
In senate and congressional races, quite a lot of candidates have lost by incorrectly assuming that support from a faction of the voters was a sure thing.
The problem perhaps comes from googling for the name and ending up with links to Playboy instead of image analysis sites.
Yup, and people complain. I worked at an artificial intelligence lab one time and one researcher complained smutty images even though the most you saw was her shoulder. I didn't even know it was a centerfold image for several years after that.
Now on that note, if someone said "go google for Lena Soderberg", innocently thinking it was just a picture of a head, I could understand the problems that would come up...
Sometimes the change is difficult though. Ie, the only reason my mother finally switched was because AT&T told her that she could keep her email address. Which was utterly false of course. But keeping her email address was the primary reason she didn't want to switch. For awhile she was taking wifi from a neighbor, with permission, and so it wasn't as big a deal.
Then when you do go and get involved with the ISP, they screw around with you. Up selling you on products you don't need, misrepresenting the actual service you will get, etc. Competitors will screw with you, claiming to fix your poor satellite service and then you end up at a completely different company. The smart elderly person has learned not to trust all of this stuff.
And the price sucks, let's face it. Dialup is maybe $15 a month, 1Mbps was $30-40+ I think (fastest she could get). Sounds like peanuts to people who buy $10 cups of overpriced coffee but for people who still clip coupons it's a big fee.
No, the collections are probably automatic. Even if humans are involved somewhere in the billing, they don't have the power to easily fix things. Collectors have been sent out before to try to collect unreasonable fees in the past from other goofups from other companies.
Well, for one AT&T did not waive the fee when it was pointed out. They waited a few months until a news reporter got on the case. Now imagine it was something smaller, like merely getting billed double. Not a big enough issue for a reporter to blow the whistle on, and AT&T won't fix things because they're clueless.
Am I too old that I remember when "game developer" meant actually developing the game engine too?
These aren't really offers I don't think. I get recruiter spam, but no one sane is going to give me an offer without at least an interview, except maybe for past employers.
They are annoying to get though. Some may be decent jobs, but at the moment I'm not looking so I skip them all. But even the ones that look good are going through recruiters and that's a bad sign to me. Maybe I'm out of touch but I just don't get a good feeling about recruiters, they often seem utterly clueless about the companies they recruit for (even when they work for the company itself!), they don't know how to find a good match, they don't have my interests at heart at all, etc.
Do you have references to the "we are Social Justice Warriors" paper or the journal it was published in?
Trying to prevent sexism or racism or other isms did not used to be considered an evil thing to do, at least not until the last couple of years.
The sole reason cable companies have monopolies in cities, is because the cities granted them the monopoly in exchange for them to build out the infrastructure. This is the same as the federal government granting monopoly status to Bell Telephone, with the provision that they provide service to everyone.
The reason the feds did this is because they wanted telephone service to be universal, they knew it was a vital service in many ways. Health, civil defense, etc. There were people at the time who probably thought the way you do, why give phone service to people too stupid to live in a big city. Win/win, Bell gets to be a monopoly and the citizens get better service and the phone networks get connected together.
So towns gave monopoly status to cable companies for a bit less important reasons, mostly because the citizens wanted cable, they were tired of poor reception, limited options, etc. But the thinking was the same in other ways, grant the monopoly and let them spend their own money on it.
Then fast forward. Now the cable companies own that infrastructure but refuse to share it. AT&T was forced to share its lines when its monopoly was removed, which spurred a lot of competition. Cable companies still refuse though, and are getting state governments to forbid towns from doing things that might bring in competition.
Today, the internet provides phone service and television. So it's like the phone infrastructure plus the cable infrastructure, but a whole lot more besides. Maybe some think it's ok to have people still be on dialup even in the middle of a major town perhaps, just like some thought rural bumpkins shouldn't have dial phones. But this is going to be a huge and vital service. It's going to supplant broadcast tv in short order. It already is a vital service in more advanced parts of the world, and it really is sad that the USA is falling so far behind. You would think that all the "America, Rah Rah Rah" people would be all behind efforts to keep up with the neighbors.
Oh ya, food is left to the government, check out how much they give out in ag subsidies each year, how they use food surpluses to feed the poor, etc. We've got a whole cabinet level department devoted to agriculture.
If the private sector bothered with the concerns of actual citizens then we wouldn't need the government to step in on occasions. The free market is utterly incapable of solving many problems, and history has shown this time and time again.
I'm undoing all my mod points here to respond. But stop using "social justice" like some sort of curse word, it's as stupid as saying "socialist agenda" or "tea party fascists". You're making the assumption that any sort of social justice is a-priori wrong, like equating all environmentalists to being the same as Greenpeace, or all animal rights activists to being just PETA supporters. Just saying that life sucks and deal with is to support the status quo, but the status quo is pretty screwed up right now.
This paper right now is showing very blatant examples of sexism that so many "social justice" haters claim does not exist. We can't enter your world of everyone getting past all the -isms if the -isms are alive and well. The paper is not an irrelevant case, it's evidence that there is a problem (ok, so maybe it's only a problem for middle-tier academic journals with overworked editors).
The anonymous reviewer (gender unknown) seems to be of this same bent: because the paper's results seem to favor one charged viewpoint that the authors must clearly be biased. The reviewer assumed (incorrectly) that the authors never shared their paper with male colleagues. Further, despite the normal standards of the peer review process, there was no constructive feedback on how to improve the paper or a specific list of flaws to be corrected. The reviewer perhaps seems like the sort of person who rages at the term "social justice".
1Gbit may be more than they need, but they weren't even getting reasonable internet either.
The claim Comcast had that a government should not compete with private business is ludicrous because the private business in question was inadequate or unavailable. Internet is infrastructure. If municipal governments are allowed to create and fund electric boards, water boards, gas boards, sewage services, and so forth, then the governments should be allowed to create internet services where none effectively exist.
Written in Ada can make things better, but written by Lockheed Martin, so it balances itself out.
I think they are related. Comcast would never have rolled out it's own system if there was no competition.
This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this. A 25 year bond with a 4.64% increase in rates and in return the city *finally* gets reasonable internet service, I don't see who's being screwed except Comcast.
Well first off, the local power board has better service than Comcast, therefore Comcast probably felt obligated to up the bar lest they look like even bigger fools. Yes, it's dick waving to restore their bruised ego.
Also to get that market share back they had to either improve performance, improve service, or lower cost. And Comcast sure as hell would never improve service or lower cost...
COBOL is not widely known, but it's hard to find a programmer who hasn't heard of it. And Haskell seems to be more popular than COBOL (langpop.com).
It also had these pesky side effects.
Or underestimating the decline of Slashdot?
But this is slashdot. The intended audience is chock full of people who should know what it is. I'm not saying most slashdotters who are programming nerds have used it, but they should have heard of it.
I'm disappointed to see though that Haskell is pretty high in mentions on programming.reddit.com and low for Slashdot. Maybe Slashdot should turn in its nerd card for renewal
(langpop.com is interesting for things like this too)