Even if the US whould have invested 500Billion in a meaninful way in the Region, the world would be better off.....
How about investing that money in a meaningful way in the United States, not the middle east? Is the responsibility of our government not the voters and taxpayers of the United States?
Furthermore, we have reasons and justification for going to war with Iran.
Justification for obliterating a country on the opposite side of the planet? The Constitution doesn't say anything authorizing that. Part of the reason the United States exists is because our leaders at the time were fed up with the British government for several reasons. This includes imperialism and the fact that the British empire had its nose in too many places, including the colonies.
I think unless we have a country invading or attacking U.S. soil, we need to avoid war at all costs. Japan bombing Pearl Harbor? By all means, fight back, and take the fight to their allies (Germany, Italy) once we wrap up the Pacific theater. Specious arguments about a madman in Iraq allegedly having WMDs? Who cares? Not our problem. In that case, we didn't even declare war, but we should have. Congress alone has that authority, but ever since WW2, has been too eager to pass resolutions saying "the President can attack this other country, but we don't want to declare war and look like douchebags."
I'd say the NFL is probably one of the least "luddite" of the major sports--compare them to soccer or basketball for example...
Really? You grasp for a luddite sports league and bring up basketball, by which you probably mean the NBA?
MLB has to be the clear winner in ludditeness. They just recently allowed instant replay, but only for home run/foul calls (i.e. balls hit very close to the yellow poles). There is no official review, no challenging (ever see a coach argue and win instead of getting ejected?), nothing. Just about the only technology is the camera that tracks the location and speed of pitches for people watching on TV.
Baseball is far behind the technology curve. I'm not sure that it needs more technology, but MLB certainly needs to make some updates to how it runs its league (like cut the number of games in half, increase the pace of the game). Regardless, it is clearly the most austere of the professional sports leagues in the USA.
Few people have (or want) access to a track where we can drive 100+ mph. My Accord is quite stable at 75mph. Driving 100+ mph on a public road is ludicrous. The USA has no autobahn where cars are expected to drive that fast (or faster). Some day that 100mph driver is going to be surprised when he crests a hill and finds a truck driving 55mph in front of him.
I've gotten my Grand Prix up to about 105 MPH on the interstate before the governor kicked in, and it handled nice and smooth. No shaking, easy to keep it centered in the lane. This was on a very long bridge that was smooth, no traffic, and no cops.
The car has regular old struts, too. No fancy suspension. Then again, I wasn't cornering at those speeds, either. Who knows if it would have drifted around a corner or felt like it was going to spin out.
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery. This is for the good of the consumer of course, not so the camera manufacturer can gouge on batteries and make it more cost effective for the customer to replace the camera every 2-3 years. Makes me want to spit.
I bought a Samsung point and shoot camera a few years ago. About a year ago I dropped it on the lens and it stopped working. It was out of warranty and better models were out anyway, so I bought a new one (ST90) a little bit later.
I was both relieved and impressed that not only did the battery from my old camera work in the new one (same model number, it wasn't just the right size), but the USB cable with a proprietary end was identical as well.
We take on mountains of debt that will be repaid with our future labor. And when we do it to buy for $200,000 a house that could be built for $50,000, we are selling ourselves cheap (hoping, of course that someone will be willing to sell himself to us for even less in the future). This has the effect of consolidating a lot of power with the people how have a lot of money today. If we didn't do that, they would have about as much power as the rest of us.
The market value of a house really does correlate with the cost to create it, assuming there is not a bubble. First of all, materials are quite expensive, as is the labor not only to construct the structure, but prepare the land, dig and pour the foundation, etc. If you have to tear down an existing structure or handle hazards (e.g. a swamp, unstable/shifting land, etc), that adds more. But before you even start looking at those costs, take a look at the value of the empty lot itself. That has a market value as well: I have seen empty lots in nice areas of my city go for $100k, ten times as much as equal-sized lots with houses in the ghetto.
I believe the market value of a house truly is "what someone is willing to pay for it," not what a bank wants to mortgage it for. It is actually in the bank's interest to mortgage it for less than its worth, since in the event of a foreclosure, it is more likely to recoup its costs and at least break even.
I have been through buying, refinancing, and foreclosing a house in the past four years. I know firsthand about the value of a house, and what number various interested parties place on it.
I only know a little C/C++, I'm more a Java developer, so please forgive my cluelessness, so... Is the problem the C language itself, or the programming culture that C has fostered (including books, tutorials etc. )? Is there a language that offer native performance with better portability (like e.g. D) ? As far as I know even in C# you're subject to the whims of the garbage collector.
C++ is not as bad in this regard since it is higher level. However, in C, there are some subtle issues that can come up. While it is lovingly called "portable assembler," it does expose enough low-level details and it can be configured to ignore warnings that involve a gun pointed at the developer's foot. For example, arrays are not pointers, although they are treated as such in some ways: this can cause subtle bugs if one uses pointer tricks on certain arrays. Type conversions may be valid on a common architecture such as x86, but disastrous on ARM or x86-64. Structure packing (in Java, think of it as the memory layout of all the member variables of a class being sent between JBoss and a client, except there is no Spring or serialization... raw bits on the wire only please) can cause misalignments between architectures, as can endian differences (although most libraries should be using network byte order).
The flipside is that it is easy to write portable C, assuming one turns on (and pays attention to) compiler warnings, uses libraries built for multiple platforms, and generally keeps one's head out of one's ass.
Uh, I'm childless, but the hypothetical thought of a hypothetical child being hypothetically diddled by a hypothetical TSA bastard (or anyone) puts me in a hypothetical killing mood.
I have two sons, zero daughters. Regardless, the thought of anyone, even a consenting adult, fingering my non-existent daughter's vagina outside of a gynecological exam... makes my blood boil. Just like if one of my sons said "hey dad, guess what, I just met this girl, and you're going to be a grandfather" would do the same.
My parents never had sex, and neither will my children. At least in my head.
Treat every cow you see through your infrared security system as a tank. If you're right, you're saved, if you're wrong... hamburgers?
Given the amount of explosives required to blow up a tank, I am going to make an educated guess that the same amount of explosives used on a cow would not leave much behind. Most of the meat would be blown high in the air and scattered. So maybe you could make sliders out of it, not "real" hamburgers.
They're also run by people who breathe, so by your argument we should put a stop to breathing.
I am ok with this, as long as it is the ruling class here in the U.S.A. that has that restriction. In less than five minutes, we could solve the whole problem that is "Congress."
Schools are censoring students using Google Docs. If you click the last link and log in to your Google account, you will see the list of words:
anal [...etc etc...] whore
I can understand the school's desire to maintain a certain level of maturity, but this needs to be the job of the parents and teachers, not the technology. As a father of two boys, I want them to have the opportunity to act stupid, so I can correct them and tell them what is and is not appropriate. I don't want a computer enforcing that for me.
That's because you bought it out of the road-use pump. I don't know if you can actually get non-road gasoline, but I'm sure that farmers use non-road diesel. It has a different color dye, red I think, and you get fined if you use it in your road vehicles.
I was not aware of non-road use pumps. I guess living in a city will do that. Makes sense, though. But for as much gasoline as my yard tools take, the taxes are probably miniscule when amortized over the months that one gas can will last.
Most people worldwide genuinely can't pay $250+ for an operating system.
I can find Windows 7 Home Premium x64 for $95, a much more affordable amount than $250. If you have one of the few PCs that can only run 32 bit OSes, that one is $5 more.
One of the reasons I don't use wxWidgets is that, in 2011, it supports neither 64 bit nor Unicode. Does your toolkit? I didn't see this mentioned on the web page.
Better yet, get rid of districts and use proportional representation.
Who gets to elect the Representatives, then? Ohio will have 16 districts in the next election for the U.S. House of Representatives. Should I vote for the 16 I want? The top 16 win? How is that supposed to work? Who represents ME, all of them? How beholden would they be to their voters if they know they just don't have to be #17 on the ballot?
No, I think districts make perfect sense. Part of the beauty of House elections is how small they are compared to other elected representatives. Nice and cozy: Representatives know they have a group of people who are close together, often within one TV viewing area. Fits nicely with the part of the Constitution that says all bills to levy taxes must originate in the House. Now if you want to talk about Instant Runoff Voting or one of its variants, or abolishing the electoral college and instead going with a straight popular vote, I am all in favor of that.
I used to support the troops, but now any time I hear that phrase, I just think of the guys in that article, and how the government tried to cover for them. Our soldiers are really no more than a bunch of murdering thugs, and any soldier who doesn't want to be painted with that brush needs to get out now.
The actions of the few don't mean everyone engages in such behavior that is flagrantly illegal per U.S. laws, rules of engagement, as well as human rights treaties ratified by the Senate (e.g. the Geneva conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). I am more troubled by the Pentagon's coverup at first, and foot dragging later on.
As a veteran, I always hated the term "support the troops" when I was active duty. One aspect of a fascist regime is blind support and patriotism for the military. I hate to see our country go down that road. We should respect people of all occupations: why don't we have yellow ribbons and sayings for the electrical workers that have been working day and night to restore power to the Southeast, ravaged by tornadoes? Their job, in my opinion, is far more important than anything I ever did in the military. They are serving their country very well, and in a far more important capacity than carrying out orders to attack foreign nations in direct violation of our Constitution.
For the time being the Chinese seem to feel that our debt is the most sound investment they can make (and they're not the only ones who feel that way).
I agree, but I don't think it's an "investment" in terms of "interest gained." Think of it as "China is loading the Titanic with lead blocks and making it sink faster." Then it will lose a whole bunch of capital, but emerge as a (the?) world superpower.
Everything is base 10, and if you know what the basic unit of measurement is you can very easily figure out how to go between units simply by moving a decimal place.
Why do i want to go between units, except maybe inches/feet? I like being able to divide a foot into all sorts of weird ratios and still have whole numbers. One third? One quarter? One half? One sixth? No problem! Driving drywall screws every 16" into a 48" wide sheet of drywall? Try doing that in metric!
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How about investing that money in a meaningful way in the United States, not the middle east? Is the responsibility of our government not the voters and taxpayers of the United States?
Justification for obliterating a country on the opposite side of the planet? The Constitution doesn't say anything authorizing that. Part of the reason the United States exists is because our leaders at the time were fed up with the British government for several reasons. This includes imperialism and the fact that the British empire had its nose in too many places, including the colonies.
I think unless we have a country invading or attacking U.S. soil, we need to avoid war at all costs. Japan bombing Pearl Harbor? By all means, fight back, and take the fight to their allies (Germany, Italy) once we wrap up the Pacific theater. Specious arguments about a madman in Iraq allegedly having WMDs? Who cares? Not our problem. In that case, we didn't even declare war, but we should have. Congress alone has that authority, but ever since WW2, has been too eager to pass resolutions saying "the President can attack this other country, but we don't want to declare war and look like douchebags."
Really? You grasp for a luddite sports league and bring up basketball, by which you probably mean the NBA?
MLB has to be the clear winner in ludditeness. They just recently allowed instant replay, but only for home run/foul calls (i.e. balls hit very close to the yellow poles). There is no official review, no challenging (ever see a coach argue and win instead of getting ejected?), nothing. Just about the only technology is the camera that tracks the location and speed of pitches for people watching on TV.
Baseball is far behind the technology curve. I'm not sure that it needs more technology, but MLB certainly needs to make some updates to how it runs its league (like cut the number of games in half, increase the pace of the game). Regardless, it is clearly the most austere of the professional sports leagues in the USA.
I've gotten my Grand Prix up to about 105 MPH on the interstate before the governor kicked in, and it handled nice and smooth. No shaking, easy to keep it centered in the lane. This was on a very long bridge that was smooth, no traffic, and no cops.
The car has regular old struts, too. No fancy suspension. Then again, I wasn't cornering at those speeds, either. Who knows if it would have drifted around a corner or felt like it was going to spin out.
I bought a Samsung point and shoot camera a few years ago. About a year ago I dropped it on the lens and it stopped working. It was out of warranty and better models were out anyway, so I bought a new one (ST90) a little bit later.
I was both relieved and impressed that not only did the battery from my old camera work in the new one (same model number, it wasn't just the right size), but the USB cable with a proprietary end was identical as well.
You do know that LLC is short for "Limited Liability Corporation," right?
They do something really amazing for me: I can purchase an item and use it the same day.
The market value of a house really does correlate with the cost to create it, assuming there is not a bubble. First of all, materials are quite expensive, as is the labor not only to construct the structure, but prepare the land, dig and pour the foundation, etc. If you have to tear down an existing structure or handle hazards (e.g. a swamp, unstable/shifting land, etc), that adds more. But before you even start looking at those costs, take a look at the value of the empty lot itself. That has a market value as well: I have seen empty lots in nice areas of my city go for $100k, ten times as much as equal-sized lots with houses in the ghetto.
I believe the market value of a house truly is "what someone is willing to pay for it," not what a bank wants to mortgage it for. It is actually in the bank's interest to mortgage it for less than its worth, since in the event of a foreclosure, it is more likely to recoup its costs and at least break even.
I have been through buying, refinancing, and foreclosing a house in the past four years. I know firsthand about the value of a house, and what number various interested parties place on it.
C++ is not as bad in this regard since it is higher level. However, in C, there are some subtle issues that can come up. While it is lovingly called "portable assembler," it does expose enough low-level details and it can be configured to ignore warnings that involve a gun pointed at the developer's foot. For example, arrays are not pointers, although they are treated as such in some ways: this can cause subtle bugs if one uses pointer tricks on certain arrays. Type conversions may be valid on a common architecture such as x86, but disastrous on ARM or x86-64. Structure packing (in Java, think of it as the memory layout of all the member variables of a class being sent between JBoss and a client, except there is no Spring or serialization... raw bits on the wire only please) can cause misalignments between architectures, as can endian differences (although most libraries should be using network byte order).
The flipside is that it is easy to write portable C, assuming one turns on (and pays attention to) compiler warnings, uses libraries built for multiple platforms, and generally keeps one's head out of one's ass.
I have two sons, zero daughters. Regardless, the thought of anyone, even a consenting adult, fingering my non-existent daughter's vagina outside of a gynecological exam... makes my blood boil. Just like if one of my sons said "hey dad, guess what, I just met this girl, and you're going to be a grandfather" would do the same.
My parents never had sex, and neither will my children. At least in my head.
Given the amount of explosives required to blow up a tank, I am going to make an educated guess that the same amount of explosives used on a cow would not leave much behind. Most of the meat would be blown high in the air and scattered. So maybe you could make sliders out of it, not "real" hamburgers.
I am ok with this, as long as it is the ruling class here in the U.S.A. that has that restriction. In less than five minutes, we could solve the whole problem that is "Congress."
It is more profitable for the content provider to charge you a lot more money for crap you don't want that happens to include something you do.
True on-demand content would essentially impose a free market on the system, which does not benefit the copyright cartels.
Schools are censoring students using Google Docs. If you click the last link and log in to your Google account, you will see the list of words:
I can understand the school's desire to maintain a certain level of maturity, but this needs to be the job of the parents and teachers, not the technology. As a father of two boys, I want them to have the opportunity to act stupid, so I can correct them and tell them what is and is not appropriate. I don't want a computer enforcing that for me.
I was not aware of non-road use pumps. I guess living in a city will do that. Makes sense, though. But for as much gasoline as my yard tools take, the taxes are probably miniscule when amortized over the months that one gas can will last.
I paid a tax on the gasoline in my lawnmower and in my line trimmer, and I live in the U.S.
It embiggens the noblest spirit, too.
I can find Windows 7 Home Premium x64 for $95, a much more affordable amount than $250. If you have one of the few PCs that can only run 32 bit OSes, that one is $5 more.
POUNCE!
Attacking China would destroy our economy.
One of the reasons I don't use wxWidgets is that, in 2011, it supports neither 64 bit nor Unicode. Does your toolkit? I didn't see this mentioned on the web page.
Who gets to elect the Representatives, then? Ohio will have 16 districts in the next election for the U.S. House of Representatives. Should I vote for the 16 I want? The top 16 win? How is that supposed to work? Who represents ME, all of them? How beholden would they be to their voters if they know they just don't have to be #17 on the ballot?
No, I think districts make perfect sense. Part of the beauty of House elections is how small they are compared to other elected representatives. Nice and cozy: Representatives know they have a group of people who are close together, often within one TV viewing area. Fits nicely with the part of the Constitution that says all bills to levy taxes must originate in the House. Now if you want to talk about Instant Runoff Voting or one of its variants, or abolishing the electoral college and instead going with a straight popular vote, I am all in favor of that.
The actions of the few don't mean everyone engages in such behavior that is flagrantly illegal per U.S. laws, rules of engagement, as well as human rights treaties ratified by the Senate (e.g. the Geneva conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). I am more troubled by the Pentagon's coverup at first, and foot dragging later on.
As a veteran, I always hated the term "support the troops" when I was active duty. One aspect of a fascist regime is blind support and patriotism for the military. I hate to see our country go down that road. We should respect people of all occupations: why don't we have yellow ribbons and sayings for the electrical workers that have been working day and night to restore power to the Southeast, ravaged by tornadoes? Their job, in my opinion, is far more important than anything I ever did in the military. They are serving their country very well, and in a far more important capacity than carrying out orders to attack foreign nations in direct violation of our Constitution.
I agree, but I don't think it's an "investment" in terms of "interest gained." Think of it as "China is loading the Titanic with lead blocks and making it sink faster." Then it will lose a whole bunch of capital, but emerge as a (the?) world superpower.
Why do i want to go between units, except maybe inches/feet? I like being able to divide a foot into all sorts of weird ratios and still have whole numbers. One third? One quarter? One half? One sixth? No problem! Driving drywall screws every 16" into a 48" wide sheet of drywall? Try doing that in metric!