Sorry, I wasn't aiming anything at you or your comments directly, just the general idea that 'trades=not smart or good enough to get a 'professional' job' when most 'professionals' are, in fact, not smart or good enough to become a master tradesman.
I've long argued that Canada (and the US) need a viable trades/vocational/apprenticeship education path, and to get away from the 'you need a BA just to pump gas' mentality.
I've never understood the dichotomy in North America between 'blue coller' and 'white coller,' or 'trades' versus 'professions.'
Two reasons, really. One, a lot of 'trades' give you a far more useful education in the skills for the job than most professions. Lots of construction trades, for example, follow an 'apprentice->journeyman->whatever the next level is' progression, with a professional organization; well, lets call it what it is, a guild, to award titles or certifications or whatever based on both testing *and* proven experience. Further, you can demonstrate which particular subtrades you can do; look at a welder with various 'tickets.'
Second, I can't help but notice that most of the actual skilled 'white collar' professions; Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, all work on an apprenticeship, 'trades' type system. You don't get to call yourself a 'master carpenter' until you've done your apprenticeship, put in your time as a journeyman, and accomplished various things. Well, you don't get to call yourself a 'Doctor' until you've done your time, put in your residency, and so on.
Remember, if they can spoof the callerID, they can spoof the pitch. It's not unheard of for campaign A to robocall random numbers with a pitch for Campaign B, just to piss off voters, who then won't vote for Campaign B.
Well, by 'why haven't we detected their radio transmissions,' there was no intelligent life on planet Earth until the late 1800s.
And I can very easily come up with a scenario where a civilization as advanced as us wouldn't bother using radio. It involves a planet with high background EM interference, a tradition of using visual signals, such as semaphores, which then evolves into using light-based communication, ending with everything long-distance being laser-based, or something else..
I've always wanted a good new version of Omega, where you design a tank, then write an AI for it with a proceedural language.
You're talking about Mind Rover, which tried to be that new version, but just never seemed to manage it. Maybe I should take another look at it, though.
But that's the thing. Power has already been removed from the states, and moved to the federal level. The federal government, via both the judical and the executive, regularly overrides the state governments.
Therefore, either go the rest of the way, and turn the states into government levels, rather than maintaining the fiction that they're separate entities that happen to meet in congress, if you'll pardon the pun, or put the federal back to what it was supposed to be.
Lets say a cell tower has 64 voice channels available. Lets say there are sixty-four people on that cell tower holding conversations. Lets say somebody calls your cell. Ooops, no available voice channel; they get your voice mail. You get a 'new voicemail' notification through the dedicated signalling channel.
Just turn the electoral colleges into ridings. State has 20 EC votes? State is broken into 20 ridings. People in each riding vote for whoever. Whoever has the most votes in that riding gets that EC vote.
That having been said, the EC made sense when America was, in fact, the 'United States,' which it isn't now. The Federal government has a direct impact on American voters; therefore American voters should vote directly for the Federal government.
To be fair, back in those days, the actual files were small; a 'normal' installation of a game from a CD to HD would take up fifty or sixty megabytes. The CD was used for FMV and Redbook audio.
Of course you can't send bribes by phone, so whether or not this is effective is open to debate.
The theory: elected officials need to be elected. Once elected, they can accept 'bribes' from PACs an SIs. However, if they piss off the electorate enough, they are voted out, and no longer have anything to give in exchange for 'bribes,' and therefore don't receive them. Therefore, an elected official must balance keeping the PACs and SIs happy, against keeping the electorate happy.
The practice: With disgustingly low voter turnout, and 96% reelection rates, along with no term limits, coupled with the fact that a non-trivial amount of voting is done at the behest of PACs and SIs, the elected officals have realized that once they're in, they're in for life. Hence, no need to keep the electorate happy once they're voted in. Hence, they can cater pretty much exclusively to the PACs and SIs, ignoring the electorate.
Or, put another way, instead of the Three Pillars of Society being Nobility, Church, Peasantry, now it's Career Politicans, PACs and SIs (including religious groups, natch) and, well, Peasantry. You really think there's a difference between 'Career Politican' and 'Aristocrat?' When you have 'political dynasties' like the Kennedys and Bushes?
The counter-argument that immediately springs to mind there is that, at the time, it was the United States; that is, a collection of separate states. The Federal Government had nothing to do with an individual citizen of one of those states.
It's different now; the fed routinely overrides state governments, and purports to directly represent the individual citizens, with the state governments being a management layer rather than the actual government, who all send delegates to Congress.
In other words, with this fundamental shift, suddenly you're penalizing somebody who lives in a low-EC state simply for where they live, because their vote for President, who now directly impacts their lives, unlike two hundred years ago, is worth less than a high-EC state's voter.
I think maybe my problem is that I just don't understand the cat fighting, I mean, important checks-and-balances interplay between the Executive and the Legislative branches of the US Government.
Although it does seem to me that rather than a Tax and Spend Liberal, Bush II is simply a Spend and Spend conservative.
But couldn't Reagan and Bush I have simply refused to sign the Democratic Congress's appropriations, unless they override the Executive veto with a supermajority?
Out of curiosity, how would you explain the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of budget deficets by Reagen, Bush I, and Bush II, all 'fiscal conservative' Republicans, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of budget surpluses of Clinton, a 'tax and spend liberal?'
If you watch the 'making of' documentaries that have been available on Xbox Live for a while, you see the project leaders drilling into the teams the 'vision' statement of the game; 'kicking somebody's ass with the Force'.
Yes, the offical one-line pitch of the game is 'kicking somebody's ass with the Force.'
And the only time UAC ever fires is: a) in a situation similar to sudo, or b) when a program hasn't been written to follow Windows programming practices that have been in place for over EIGHT YEARS.
In Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, one of the plotlines involves an accelerator/collider built around Jupiter. The idea is to get closer and closer to replicating the conditions of the big bang.
In the story, a theory is developed that any given race survives long enough to develop a similar experiment, which works too well, and recreates the big bang, and creates a new universe. Eventually, life is formed, evolves, and winds up doing the experiment themselves...
Given that the 360's upcoming update will allow it to stream Netflix, is it so out of the question that USBKeyMovieDRM could possibly be built in at a later time?
Actually, I'd say those merchant accounts improve the standing of the CC companies.
"The ToS you signed clearly says you won't try to circumvent the security features on the Credit Card systems we let you use, and you're making a FREAKING TELEVISION SHOW about it?"
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I wasn't aiming anything at you or your comments directly, just the general idea that 'trades=not smart or good enough to get a 'professional' job' when most 'professionals' are, in fact, not smart or good enough to become a master tradesman.
I've long argued that Canada (and the US) need a viable trades/vocational/apprenticeship education path, and to get away from the 'you need a BA just to pump gas' mentality.
I've never understood the dichotomy in North America between 'blue coller' and 'white coller,' or 'trades' versus 'professions.'
Two reasons, really. One, a lot of 'trades' give you a far more useful education in the skills for the job than most professions. Lots of construction trades, for example, follow an 'apprentice->journeyman->whatever the next level is' progression, with a professional organization; well, lets call it what it is, a guild, to award titles or certifications or whatever based on both testing *and* proven experience. Further, you can demonstrate which particular subtrades you can do; look at a welder with various 'tickets.'
Second, I can't help but notice that most of the actual skilled 'white collar' professions; Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, all work on an apprenticeship, 'trades' type system. You don't get to call yourself a 'master carpenter' until you've done your apprenticeship, put in your time as a journeyman, and accomplished various things. Well, you don't get to call yourself a 'Doctor' until you've done your time, put in your residency, and so on.
Remember, if they can spoof the callerID, they can spoof the pitch. It's not unheard of for campaign A to robocall random numbers with a pitch for Campaign B, just to piss off voters, who then won't vote for Campaign B.
Well, by 'why haven't we detected their radio transmissions,' there was no intelligent life on planet Earth until the late 1800s.
And I can very easily come up with a scenario where a civilization as advanced as us wouldn't bother using radio. It involves a planet with high background EM interference, a tradition of using visual signals, such as semaphores, which then evolves into using light-based communication, ending with everything long-distance being laser-based, or something else..
Thank the Gods he wasn't playing Diablo.
I've always wanted a good new version of Omega, where you design a tank, then write an AI for it with a proceedural language.
You're talking about Mind Rover, which tried to be that new version, but just never seemed to manage it. Maybe I should take another look at it, though.
But that's the thing. Power has already been removed from the states, and moved to the federal level. The federal government, via both the judical and the executive, regularly overrides the state governments.
Therefore, either go the rest of the way, and turn the states into government levels, rather than maintaining the fiction that they're separate entities that happen to meet in congress, if you'll pardon the pun, or put the federal back to what it was supposed to be.
Lets say a cell tower has 64 voice channels available. Lets say there are sixty-four people on that cell tower holding conversations. Lets say somebody calls your cell. Ooops, no available voice channel; they get your voice mail. You get a 'new voicemail' notification through the dedicated signalling channel.
Just turn the electoral colleges into ridings. State has 20 EC votes? State is broken into 20 ridings. People in each riding vote for whoever. Whoever has the most votes in that riding gets that EC vote.
That having been said, the EC made sense when America was, in fact, the 'United States,' which it isn't now. The Federal government has a direct impact on American voters; therefore American voters should vote directly for the Federal government.
Canada, Switzerland, Austrailia...
To be fair, back in those days, the actual files were small; a 'normal' installation of a game from a CD to HD would take up fifty or sixty megabytes. The CD was used for FMV and Redbook audio.
The theory: elected officials need to be elected. Once elected, they can accept 'bribes' from PACs an SIs. However, if they piss off the electorate enough, they are voted out, and no longer have anything to give in exchange for 'bribes,' and therefore don't receive them. Therefore, an elected official must balance keeping the PACs and SIs happy, against keeping the electorate happy.
The practice: With disgustingly low voter turnout, and 96% reelection rates, along with no term limits, coupled with the fact that a non-trivial amount of voting is done at the behest of PACs and SIs, the elected officals have realized that once they're in, they're in for life. Hence, no need to keep the electorate happy once they're voted in. Hence, they can cater pretty much exclusively to the PACs and SIs, ignoring the electorate.
Or, put another way, instead of the Three Pillars of Society being Nobility, Church, Peasantry, now it's Career Politicans, PACs and SIs (including religious groups, natch) and, well, Peasantry. You really think there's a difference between 'Career Politican' and 'Aristocrat?' When you have 'political dynasties' like the Kennedys and Bushes?
But there would only be two songs.
Level 1: Do da-do. Do da-do. Do da DODODODO-do. Do-da-Do DO DO DOO da DO DO DO da da DO DO da na do. do DA NANANA do DANANA.....
Level 2: DoDAdoDAdoDADA do na dananananananana-na.
Of course, the Sy Snoodles and the Max Rebo Band expansion would have slightly more content....
Chess stopped being fun for me when I realized that so much of it was simple rote memorization.
I'd rather see something like concordcet or instant runoff voting.
It all went downhill when they cancelled Secret of Vulcan Fury
The counter-argument that immediately springs to mind there is that, at the time, it was the United States; that is, a collection of separate states. The Federal Government had nothing to do with an individual citizen of one of those states.
It's different now; the fed routinely overrides state governments, and purports to directly represent the individual citizens, with the state governments being a management layer rather than the actual government, who all send delegates to Congress.
In other words, with this fundamental shift, suddenly you're penalizing somebody who lives in a low-EC state simply for where they live, because their vote for President, who now directly impacts their lives, unlike two hundred years ago, is worth less than a high-EC state's voter.
I think maybe my problem is that I just don't understand the cat fighting, I mean, important checks-and-balances interplay between the Executive and the Legislative branches of the US Government.
Although it does seem to me that rather than a Tax and Spend Liberal, Bush II is simply a Spend and Spend conservative.
But couldn't Reagan and Bush I have simply refused to sign the Democratic Congress's appropriations, unless they override the Executive veto with a supermajority?
Out of curiosity, how would you explain the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of budget deficets by Reagen, Bush I, and Bush II, all 'fiscal conservative' Republicans, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of budget surpluses of Clinton, a 'tax and spend liberal?'
Honest question.
If you watch the 'making of' documentaries that have been available on Xbox Live for a while, you see the project leaders drilling into the teams the 'vision' statement of the game; 'kicking somebody's ass with the Force'.
Yes, the offical one-line pitch of the game is 'kicking somebody's ass with the Force.'
And the only time UAC ever fires is: a) in a situation similar to sudo, or b) when a program hasn't been written to follow Windows programming practices that have been in place for over EIGHT YEARS.
What if Stardock shuts down tomorrow?
In Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, one of the plotlines involves an accelerator/collider built around Jupiter. The idea is to get closer and closer to replicating the conditions of the big bang.
In the story, a theory is developed that any given race survives long enough to develop a similar experiment, which works too well, and recreates the big bang, and creates a new universe. Eventually, life is formed, evolves, and winds up doing the experiment themselves...
Given that the 360's upcoming update will allow it to stream Netflix, is it so out of the question that USBKeyMovieDRM could possibly be built in at a later time?
Actually, I'd say those merchant accounts improve the standing of the CC companies.
"The ToS you signed clearly says you won't try to circumvent the security features on the Credit Card systems we let you use, and you're making a FREAKING TELEVISION SHOW about it?"