I do as well - note the (ducks for cover) to indicate I was mostly joking.
I know from direct experience though that there is a no-man's land where the site costs more to maintain in time and money than the advertising on the site is worth. Many sites never break out of that area, or falter. 4chan was on that fence for the longest while because the nature of its content is upsetting to advertisers making it harder to reach volume to break out.
And web businesses aren't alone in this. A lot of business's struggle to reach a break even point.
During last dotcom boom companies had no usable plan to get income. However, Facebook is advertisers dream with its extremely targeted advertising system, Zynga has a huge amount of casual players and both advertising and direct payment system and groupon receives good money from the stores. They all have business plan. They might have to work on them a little bit as they're still so new companies, but they definitely have one that work.
Heh heh yup. Petz.com anyone?? Until we start seeing stupid sites that blatantly have no means to gather income showing up in droves again I think we're safe.
Me? On top?? Hardly. I haven't crossed the 6 figure line yet. And you can vote all you want, but no amount of misguided legislation by bloated governments in all the world can violate the laws of nature baby. Life. Is. Not. Fair.
But you can certainly bankrupt the country trying.
Not having health insurance falls under the heading of "poor decisions."
Taxes are a revenue mechanism. Not a class warfare mechanism. The failure of the income tax is that it has become nothing more than a class warfare tool - and the class it is aimed at is the middle class - that means most of the people on this board. The poor don't pay income tax and the rich pay lawyers to cheat their way out of the system entirely. The middle class, unable to afford the lawyers, bites the bullet and carries the tax burden. It's little wonder that people are either falling back into poverty or the lucky few get wealthy enough to escape the no man's zone the government has created in the middle.
A sales tax, with exemptions on necessary goods (food, clothing, etc) is balanced, fair and impossible to game into a class warfare tool. The rich can't escape it with obscure right offs either. Or go to the fair tax where everything is taxed but everyone is issued a prebate check against what the tax would collect against someone on the poverty line in the course of normal expenditures.
Health care costs are out of control because of the insanely high cost of malpractice insurance, and the pharmaceutical companies need to make enough money to pay the class action suits when drugs get through reasonable testing measures and do harm no one could have foreseen in order to prevent. This stems back to this insanely stupid idea that the government somehow has an obligation to make life fair and compensate people for their misfortune. Institute proper Tort reform and you fix the healthcare system. Congress, a body of 535 filthy lawyers, will never on the coldest day in Hell consider any action that might endanger the livelihoods of their peers and supporters. So we're screwed.
Heh heh yup. Poor people remain poor through, well, poor decisions. They do poor stuff. It's their poor way. And to all you bleeding heart liberals, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps from about as far below the poverty line as you can be and still live in the USA, so f*ck off - I'll make fun of those who choose, through their own bad decisions, to remain poor all I want.
I have little sympathy for those who will not try to better themselves or their station. Society owes no one anything. Shutting up now before this goes into a rant far larger than a slashdot post deserves.
Counterintuitive as it may be this is wrong. In order to 'fall' into the sun you have to slow down - remember that any object we launch already has earth's oribital velocity relative the sun. It takes more energy to reach Venus or (especially) Mercury than it takes to escape the solar system outright.
Extremely. Ulyseuss had to use Jupiter's gravity to slingshot it into a solar-polar orbit. It takes a lot more energy to put an object in such an orbit than current rockets can provide on their own.
Isn't this illegal in California? They have a law on the books that was lobbied into place by Hollywood, but it's vague enough to be applied to the average Joe. If so class action lawsuit in 5... 4.... 3...
Except this is "gentleman's agreement to not sue" has already broken down.
Also, the patent system has become so shoddy that anyone can get a patent through now and sue these large companies. Countersuit? No - the plaintiff doesn't actually produce any product, so they cannot be in violation of any patent the company has.
This racket is starting to collapse under it's own weight. Before too long the large companies will see that its in their own best interest to lobby for patent reforms and abolish the software patents - if for no other reason than lobbying for such a law will save them money from being constantly trolled.
Yes, when I drove a truck. They are very popular with truck drivers and you can find them at any truck stop -- admittedly in a form well suited to being bolted to a truck. Most drivers put the thing on whatever mirror is not holding their CB ariel. I have seen a few suitable for use in a car there though, so look around.
I've always thought that NASCAR in particular could reduce the thickness of their rulebook considerably by putting the teams on a fuel allowance for the race. If the cars start going too fast to be safe, pull back the fuel they are allowed to get.
Agreed - but people in groups procrastinate in the face of danger. Repairing the levees in New Orleans for example. The procrastination is even worse when the consequences are not disastrous. I predict IPv4 will be here 10 years from now enabled by nightmarish workarounds.
People will not fix anything with low impact or low frequency. This is why auto accidents aren't addressed more seriously by society as a whole - the loss of a few lives, or even 40,000 / year in a population of 300 million, is "low impact."
Ask Google how that worked out for them in China. (The issue there was censorship, but the tactic - take my ball and go home - is the same as you suggest and futile).
Is that with the best tech (both machines and math techniques) ELO has only been bested by 8%. You'd think it would be at least in the low 20's. Whether ELO is retained, it's a testament to its genius.
Incidently folks, Chess is only the most well known user of ELO ratings. Many other competitive games make use of them as well.
It is academic though. You are taking a word that has a commonly understood definition and using very tortured logic to try to define it back to its etymological root. You are using your own definition of democracy that has nothing to do with what Churchill was speaking about.
Let me spell it out to you. Democracy is a class of governing systems that uses citizen voting in some form to function. A simple pluraism is a specific example of democracy. A constitutional republic is a far more refined example of a democracy, but it's still a democracy.
Democracy in the abstract doesn't care about the implementation - about the exact majority thresholds being 51% or 60% or 75% or so on. It merely cares that voting was done in the first place.
Ye old overused car example: There's a world of difference between an 1880's horseless carriage and a 2010 Chevy Volt, but they are still both cars. What you are doing is as logically tortured and idiotic as trying to claim the word "car" only applies to those 1880's horseless carriages.
At best such pedantry is an academic exercise, at worst it's just utter foolishness.
Churchill's statement addresses Democracy in all it's forms. As such it's a dangerous blanket statement that must be proven against each case - each child class as it were. You already accept that it is lousy in your narrowly defined version of democracy which you only accept, but I'm telling you his statement applies to all the others.
Our government sucks. Britain's government - a constitutional monarchy also sucks. The EU is not really any better. All of these systems have severe problems which we haven't been able to resolve and probably never will resolve because as structures of human governance they are as flawed as the humans that compose them.
Hence the first part of the statement "Democracy is a lousy system." holds true. The second part "but it's the best we've come up with so far." also holds true until you can demonstrate to me a non-democratic system that works better. Good luck with that though - we've been looking for the better part of 10,000 years.
I can see that. I'm not a political science nerd so I didn't want to speak for them as a group.
As a layman on the topic I see republics as a subset of democracies. What C64 spoke of is a different subset I think is called a 'pluralism.' The Athenians tried that - didn't work too well.
Thinks improve over time. Parlimentary systems seem to work better than 2 party governance. Instant Runoff Vote works better than first-past the post. But then you get into these messy problems like "tradition".
Even computer science is vulnerable to this. x86 architecture is likely not the best way to set up a CPU instruction set. I'm sure in the last 30 years better has been concieved. But x86 has a lot of inertia, tradition and mindshare behind it. People don't change because of the up front costs.
Politics is much the same way. Using Sequential Transfer vote for the house and Instant run off vote for the president would be idea. But it would noticeably, maybe even considerably or severely weaken the two ruling parties. Since none of the current power brokers have anything to gain from the change the change won't occur despite the fact it would be better for the country.
Oh well - I see up thread the dip shit mods have shown up to mark as troll the opinions they don't agree with. It won't be much longer before the cognitive discourse is modded down and the conversation snuffed.
On that note I personally believe Scholastism would be the idea governing system - only those with a demonstrable threshold of intelligence would be allowed to vote or make decisions (or mod slashdot posts). Unfortunately the enormous power granted to the persons who write the tests make the system utterly unworkable - as even the likes of Einstein and Hawkins will fail a test every time if you ask the right questions.
Churchill was referring to the US and British governments at the time. The nuance between a pure democracy and a democratic republic is academic to most discussions and the words tend to be used synonymously even when, strictly speaking, they aren't the same as you point out. While such pedantry might score you points with political science nerds, it is of little use when addressing the general populace. In general discussions being understood is more important that being precise - and since the listeners of the speech would understand what is meant by democracy and would scratch their heads at the term "republics" Churchill chose the phrasing that would be understood even though it is, strictly speaking, incorrect.
Then again, in my experience the only time a speaker refers to democracy without meaning 'democratic republic' is when the speaker is trying to score points by showing off how smart they are, or when the speaker is debating such an individual as I am now. That might impress some people, it doesn't impress me.
To use a computer science analogy - A teacher is addressing neophyte programmers on the first day of programming 101. He says, "C is a lousy programming language, but it's the best we've come up with."
Rebuttal by the "smart kid": "Of course it's lousy, that's why we use C++"
Everyone snickers at the 'smart kid' because they either don't know or don't care about the differences between C and C++, or they do but understand that those differences aren't germane to the original discussion and statement. In trying to look smart, he looks foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
I do as well - note the (ducks for cover) to indicate I was mostly joking.
I know from direct experience though that there is a no-man's land where the site costs more to maintain in time and money than the advertising on the site is worth. Many sites never break out of that area, or falter. 4chan was on that fence for the longest while because the nature of its content is upsetting to advertisers making it harder to reach volume to break out.
And web businesses aren't alone in this. A lot of business's struggle to reach a break even point.
You're exactly right on popular != profitable. Has 4chan ever made a profit? Or for that matter, does slashdot? (ducks for cover)
During last dotcom boom companies had no usable plan to get income. However, Facebook is advertisers dream with its extremely targeted advertising system, Zynga has a huge amount of casual players and both advertising and direct payment system and groupon receives good money from the stores. They all have business plan. They might have to work on them a little bit as they're still so new companies, but they definitely have one that work.
Heh heh yup. Petz.com anyone?? Until we start seeing stupid sites that blatantly have no means to gather income showing up in droves again I think we're safe.
If I wear GeoHot I would comply with the order - after feeding the hardware through a wood chipper and a trash compactor.
Me? On top?? Hardly. I haven't crossed the 6 figure line yet. And you can vote all you want, but no amount of misguided legislation by bloated governments in all the world can violate the laws of nature baby. Life. Is. Not. Fair.
But you can certainly bankrupt the country trying.
Life isn't fair you fucking baby - deal with it. The government has no role whatsoever in trying to make it fair.
Not having health insurance falls under the heading of "poor decisions."
Taxes are a revenue mechanism. Not a class warfare mechanism. The failure of the income tax is that it has become nothing more than a class warfare tool - and the class it is aimed at is the middle class - that means most of the people on this board. The poor don't pay income tax and the rich pay lawyers to cheat their way out of the system entirely. The middle class, unable to afford the lawyers, bites the bullet and carries the tax burden. It's little wonder that people are either falling back into poverty or the lucky few get wealthy enough to escape the no man's zone the government has created in the middle.
A sales tax, with exemptions on necessary goods (food, clothing, etc) is balanced, fair and impossible to game into a class warfare tool. The rich can't escape it with obscure right offs either. Or go to the fair tax where everything is taxed but everyone is issued a prebate check against what the tax would collect against someone on the poverty line in the course of normal expenditures.
Health care costs are out of control because of the insanely high cost of malpractice insurance, and the pharmaceutical companies need to make enough money to pay the class action suits when drugs get through reasonable testing measures and do harm no one could have foreseen in order to prevent. This stems back to this insanely stupid idea that the government somehow has an obligation to make life fair and compensate people for their misfortune. Institute proper Tort reform and you fix the healthcare system. Congress, a body of 535 filthy lawyers, will never on the coldest day in Hell consider any action that might endanger the livelihoods of their peers and supporters. So we're screwed.
Heh heh yup. Poor people remain poor through, well, poor decisions. They do poor stuff. It's their poor way. And to all you bleeding heart liberals, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps from about as far below the poverty line as you can be and still live in the USA, so f*ck off - I'll make fun of those who choose, through their own bad decisions, to remain poor all I want.
I have little sympathy for those who will not try to better themselves or their station. Society owes no one anything. Shutting up now before this goes into a rant far larger than a slashdot post deserves.
Counterintuitive as it may be this is wrong. In order to 'fall' into the sun you have to slow down - remember that any object we launch already has earth's oribital velocity relative the sun. It takes more energy to reach Venus or (especially) Mercury than it takes to escape the solar system outright.
Extremely. Ulyseuss had to use Jupiter's gravity to slingshot it into a solar-polar orbit. It takes a lot more energy to put an object in such an orbit than current rockets can provide on their own.
Isn't this illegal in California? They have a law on the books that was lobbied into place by Hollywood, but it's vague enough to be applied to the average Joe. If so class action lawsuit in 5... 4.... 3...
Except this is "gentleman's agreement to not sue" has already broken down.
Also, the patent system has become so shoddy that anyone can get a patent through now and sue these large companies. Countersuit? No - the plaintiff doesn't actually produce any product, so they cannot be in violation of any patent the company has.
This racket is starting to collapse under it's own weight. Before too long the large companies will see that its in their own best interest to lobby for patent reforms and abolish the software patents - if for no other reason than lobbying for such a law will save them money from being constantly trolled.
Yes, when I drove a truck. They are very popular with truck drivers and you can find them at any truck stop -- admittedly in a form well suited to being bolted to a truck. Most drivers put the thing on whatever mirror is not holding their CB ariel. I have seen a few suitable for use in a car there though, so look around.
But that would put Wal-Mart out of business!
Jokes aside, trade wars lead to shooting wars. This isn't welcome news.
The article is describing a "barred spiral" galaxy. Not only have these been observed, but it's been theorized for some time the Milky Way is one.
As is the bowling ball.
I've always thought that NASCAR in particular could reduce the thickness of their rulebook considerably by putting the teams on a fuel allowance for the race. If the cars start going too fast to be safe, pull back the fuel they are allowed to get.
Agreed - but people in groups procrastinate in the face of danger. Repairing the levees in New Orleans for example. The procrastination is even worse when the consequences are not disastrous. I predict IPv4 will be here 10 years from now enabled by nightmarish workarounds.
People will not fix anything with low impact or low frequency. This is why auto accidents aren't addressed more seriously by society as a whole - the loss of a few lives, or even 40,000 / year in a population of 300 million, is "low impact."
Why is it that problems never seem to get corrected until they are well and truly disastrous in scope.
Ask Google how that worked out for them in China. (The issue there was censorship, but the tactic - take my ball and go home - is the same as you suggest and futile).
Is that with the best tech (both machines and math techniques) ELO has only been bested by 8%. You'd think it would be at least in the low 20's. Whether ELO is retained, it's a testament to its genius.
Incidently folks, Chess is only the most well known user of ELO ratings. Many other competitive games make use of them as well.
Is this with or without the ROM hack that removes the kill screen and restores the programmer's original intent for the game?
It is academic though. You are taking a word that has a commonly understood definition and using very tortured logic to try to define it back to its etymological root. You are using your own definition of democracy that has nothing to do with what Churchill was speaking about.
Let me spell it out to you. Democracy is a class of governing systems that uses citizen voting in some form to function. A simple pluraism is a specific example of democracy. A constitutional republic is a far more refined example of a democracy, but it's still a democracy.
Democracy in the abstract doesn't care about the implementation - about the exact majority thresholds being 51% or 60% or 75% or so on. It merely cares that voting was done in the first place.
Ye old overused car example: There's a world of difference between an 1880's horseless carriage and a 2010 Chevy Volt, but they are still both cars. What you are doing is as logically tortured and idiotic as trying to claim the word "car" only applies to those 1880's horseless carriages.
At best such pedantry is an academic exercise, at worst it's just utter foolishness.
Churchill's statement addresses Democracy in all it's forms. As such it's a dangerous blanket statement that must be proven against each case - each child class as it were. You already accept that it is lousy in your narrowly defined version of democracy which you only accept, but I'm telling you his statement applies to all the others.
Our government sucks. Britain's government - a constitutional monarchy also sucks. The EU is not really any better. All of these systems have severe problems which we haven't been able to resolve and probably never will resolve because as structures of human governance they are as flawed as the humans that compose them.
Hence the first part of the statement "Democracy is a lousy system." holds true. The second part "but it's the best we've come up with so far." also holds true until you can demonstrate to me a non-democratic system that works better. Good luck with that though - we've been looking for the better part of 10,000 years.
I can see that. I'm not a political science nerd so I didn't want to speak for them as a group.
As a layman on the topic I see republics as a subset of democracies. What C64 spoke of is a different subset I think is called a 'pluralism.' The Athenians tried that - didn't work too well.
Thinks improve over time. Parlimentary systems seem to work better than 2 party governance. Instant Runoff Vote works better than first-past the post. But then you get into these messy problems like "tradition".
Even computer science is vulnerable to this. x86 architecture is likely not the best way to set up a CPU instruction set. I'm sure in the last 30 years better has been concieved. But x86 has a lot of inertia, tradition and mindshare behind it. People don't change because of the up front costs.
Politics is much the same way. Using Sequential Transfer vote for the house and Instant run off vote for the president would be idea. But it would noticeably, maybe even considerably or severely weaken the two ruling parties. Since none of the current power brokers have anything to gain from the change the change won't occur despite the fact it would be better for the country.
Oh well - I see up thread the dip shit mods have shown up to mark as troll the opinions they don't agree with. It won't be much longer before the cognitive discourse is modded down and the conversation snuffed.
On that note I personally believe Scholastism would be the idea governing system - only those with a demonstrable threshold of intelligence would be allowed to vote or make decisions (or mod slashdot posts). Unfortunately the enormous power granted to the persons who write the tests make the system utterly unworkable - as even the likes of Einstein and Hawkins will fail a test every time if you ask the right questions.
Churchill was referring to the US and British governments at the time. The nuance between a pure democracy and a democratic republic is academic to most discussions and the words tend to be used synonymously even when, strictly speaking, they aren't the same as you point out. While such pedantry might score you points with political science nerds, it is of little use when addressing the general populace. In general discussions being understood is more important that being precise - and since the listeners of the speech would understand what is meant by democracy and would scratch their heads at the term "republics" Churchill chose the phrasing that would be understood even though it is, strictly speaking, incorrect.
Then again, in my experience the only time a speaker refers to democracy without meaning 'democratic republic' is when the speaker is trying to score points by showing off how smart they are, or when the speaker is debating such an individual as I am now. That might impress some people, it doesn't impress me.
To use a computer science analogy - A teacher is addressing neophyte programmers on the first day of programming 101. He says, "C is a lousy programming language, but it's the best we've come up with."
Rebuttal by the "smart kid": "Of course it's lousy, that's why we use C++"
Everyone snickers at the 'smart kid' because they either don't know or don't care about the differences between C and C++, or they do but understand that those differences aren't germane to the original discussion and statement. In trying to look smart, he looks foolish.