>>>The midwest lacks public transport because you all drive cars. Haven't you heard of chicken-and-egg? Something has to change
Spoken like someone who's never bothered to drive across the country. Most of it is empty space, punctuated with a few farmhouses. There is NO practical way to hook-up all these widespread homes with a train system. Even in the 1800s when locomotives were king, the rails only connected major cities. It's the same reason why most of these homes do not have DSL or Cable connections...... there's just too much space inbetween.
For the wide open spaces of the midwest, the car (or horse) is the best method to move people around, rather than lay steel rails to nowhere. And the antenna or satellite dish is probably the best way to get internet/TV access, rather than lay millions of miles of cable.
>>>Wait, did you actually just play the race card in a discussion about driving habits?
No I played the slavery card, which is colorblind. We have had white, asian, and indian slaves in our past history. Did you not know that? Interesting. My point is that slavery should remain in the past - we should not reintroduce it into our present through laws that make everyone kowtow to Congress to get approval.
>>>I know people who drive *TWENTY MILES* to go grocery shopping at a mega-chain, or similarly far to get to the post office. Give those people $10/gal gas and maybe the corner grocery store[1] will start looking more appealing. >>>
You exaggerate. My grocery store is only 1 mile away. The post office is right next door to it. The mall is only 3 miles and it's surrounded by tons of other grocery stores. Nobody who lives in a suburb of a city "needs" to drive 20 miles to get food or clothes, unless they are imbeciles who simply waste gas for fun.
Nor do I like your idea (or Al Gore's idea) of raising gas prices to $10/gallon just to force people to abandon cars. You have no right to demand people live their lives in some pre-approved way. This is not a tyranny or monarchy. This is a liberated country where the people rule.
They also shouldn't move your cursor. Oftentimes I'll type my name, then my password, but suddenly the cursor moves back to the USERID box and my password gets typed with full visibility.
This video is a good argument for why highways should have a dividing wall in the middle. This texting driver would have merely scraped that wall rather than pile into another car at ~120 miles an hour.
Another video worth watching is the one where a U.S. busdriver is texting, and slams into a stopped car on the interstate.
Yes the website is up, but the tracker is still non-functional. How am I supposed to download my half-finished 10 GB torrents of "ifeelmyself.com" or "cdgirls.com" or "playboy.com" if the tracker is not working.:-(
Well I disagree. Buffy is very intelligent, exploring adolescent high-school issues and then evolving into adult-themed issues like drug addiction loss of purpose, and feeling disconnected from the world. Buffy is an excellent story.
But after reading your poor understanding of the reavers story in Firefly/Serenity, which is not about reavers but instead about the government tyranny, I suspect you don't understand Buffy either. Lack of IQ makes you think everything is bad, when in reality you're not understanding the subtexts.
It's like trying to make an ant understand math. You just annoy the ant, and then the ant labels it "worthless trash".
Fear of the Unknown is nothing unusual. People used to be afraid of solar eclipses, thinking the world was coming to an end, but it turns-out they were just the moon passing before the sun. Now that fear is gone. That same theme was explored in Babylon 5 where people feared the Shadows, but once their true form was revealed, the fear disappeared and the insectoid Shadows were forced to leave.
Anyway the reaver situation was a fear based upon lack of knowledge, but now that it's known where they came from, the characters no longer fear the reavers. Instead they fear what caused the reavers (the government experimenting on its own citizens). Although "anger" is probably the dominant component behind their emotion.
I'm starting to suspect you suffer from that disease which criminals suffer. A criminal walks into a bank, steals money, has his image captured by the security cams, and then gets arrested by the cops a few hours later. He expresses surprise, "But I was wearing lemon juice on my face - the cameras should not have been able to see!"
Like that guy you believe you know more than anyone else, but in reality are quite incompetent, and don't understand half the stuff you see on the screen. You didn't understand the point behind the reavers story, which was not about the reavers themselves, but the government's tyranny.
>>>It pisses me off that I won't get the Vista Service Pack (Windows 7) for free.
What a stupid comment. I bought Win98 and nobody gave me a free upgrade to XP (Windows 5). Later I bought to an XP-PC and nobody offered me a free upgrade to Vista (Windows 6). Why do you think you're entitled to get a free upgrade to a totally new OS (Win7), if Microsoft never gave free upgrades for previous OSes?
Wow. Talk about "entitlement generation" - you fit the profile perfectly. Sorry but you're going to just have to pay, same as I paid for my previous OS upgrades. The real world doesn't hand-out free lunches.
>>>Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 so it's the same core.
I think that diminishes the changes that have been made. XP == Windows NT 5. Vista == Windows NT 6. Windows 7 == Window NT 7. Each one is a different generation from the previous.
Uh. What??? Recycled paper has nothing to do with what we were discussing (e-readers). Using a paper-free medium is the cheapest option of all. Yes cutting-down trees would help employ loggers, but that would be a "broken window"-type fallacy.
It's not a special case. Voice calls used to cost $1.00 a minute but most customers thought that was waaaay too high, so there's been a pressure to move that price lower-and-lower over time to around 20 cents per minute. That's the market in action.
>>>In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost.
Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap. So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).
>>>Or perhaps it could be run like the US Postal Service, in which case it would provide world-class service at a far lower price than any of its competitors.
(falls over laughing). hahahahahaahahaahaahahaaahaaahahaaaahahaahahaha! Whew. That was hiliarious. The U.S.P.S. is losing money year-after-year and only survives because of taxes drawn from out of our paychecks (see my previous post). And when I have something important to ship, I definitely don't use the government company. Instead I go to one of the private companies because (1) they cost less (2) they don't lose stuff and (3) if they did it's insured for free (upto $100). Oh and (4) they are the only ones who offer overnight package service; the government does not.
>>>just pointing out that services set up by the government aren't inherently inefficient as you seem to be implying
I can't think of a single government company that is as efficiently-run as its commercial counterpart.
I pay $0 a month for my cellphone service, and I'm direct-billed at 18 cents per minute for calls, which is typically only 2-3 dollars each month. You pay what? Around $50 to $60 per month? Which one of us is the idiot? (just joking)
If the government steps-in to banish the Greenlight ISP, that's not a flaw of the free market. That's a flaw of government and that's who you should blame, not the marketplace. The problem is the politicians who don't know how to say "no" to corporations. It's too bad North Carolina doesn't have some kind of document, a constitution if you will, that specifically enumerates which powers the politicians can (and can not) exercise. Oh well. I guess I'm just dreaming. If such a thing ever existed, nobody pays any attention to it anyhow - just words on paper.
Almost all of it. I realized that Obama was akin to FDR, and a near-identical clone of Mussolini (a big government supporter), and that I didn't want a repeat of either of those men, since neither of them embraced the pro-human rights and small-government philosophy that the 1789 Revolutionaries supports.
So I voted for the other guy.
As for the current economic crisis, I bought stocks when the price was hovering around 6500 and made a killing, since I knew from the Depression and other recessions that they'd eventually come back up. Knowing history has helped me tremendously. I didn't expect the bounce to happen so fast, but I knew it would eventually.
I rebel. To hell with your foreign rules borrowed from foreign languages. I'm an English speaker by god, and I will pluralize my words according to MY traditions - either "s" or "es". If you don't like it, eat my battleax.
But many of the rules are completely arbitrary. For example: "Don't use double negatives." Why not? Chaucer and Shakespeare used double negatives all the time. In some of his more elaborate sentences, Chaucer used quadruple negatives. Who's to say one of the greatest writers used improper grammar?
Most Latin words have been converted to English words. We say "republics" not "republica" or whatever the hell the Latin form is. We say "arts" not "arti". And why is it that "viruses" is okay, but "funguses" is not? Who decides this and who put them in power?
I say BS to that. We should adopt the word to our English rules instead of trying to maintain a bunch of confusing foreign rules from Latin, French, German, Italian, and so on. It's hard enough to learn the rules for one language's plurals, much less 5 or 6 more on top of that. Let's bring some sanity to the table, not anality.
>>>So, you're a Republican who learned its politically incorrect to like W?
So you routinely believe all Republicans just HAVE to love all Republican presidents? You truly are a dolt. I was registered (R) but voted for Harry Browne (L) in 2000. I haven't liked W since I first heard him open his mouth.
I didn't vote for anybody in 2004 since it seemed pointless to even bother.
If you think those Deficit graphs look bad, wait until you see Obama's graphs circa 2016. He's increasing our national debt from $110,000 to $170,000 per American home - a faster growth in debt than even the Reagan years.
>>>Trickle down...
Isn't that the philosophy behind giving those bailouts to Chrysler, AIG, and other banks? i.e. They get the money and it trickles-down to the rest of us? Obama and the Congressional Democrats seem to love the idea.
Actually, if you look at the pure numbers, we killed about five times more people with our Iraq/Afghan bombings than all the 9/11 deaths put together. The best course to follow, in order to save lives, would have been to do nothing. Yes shore-up the border defenses so no more terrorists can sneak through, but that's it.
And you also have to put things into perspective. 3000 Americans died in terrorist attacks over the last decade. But during that same timespan 24 million people died in the U.S.; 1 million from car accidents alone. The amount of deaths inflicted by Bin Laden is only one-third percent as many killed (indirectly) by Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, et cetera. i.e. Exceedingly small. It would have made much more sense to have a "war on car safety" to save lives than kill foreigners.
>>>it made the Republicans look really foolish for squandering all that economic growth.
The dot-com crash happened in late 1999 and continued into 2000 - Clinton's last year in office. How can you blame the Republican Bush for that downturn when he wasn't even elected yet? (shaking heads). So illogical.
What part of Reagan was "not perfect" did you not understand? I guess English is not your first language. Also propping-up dictators (to prevent expansion of Russia) is nothing new. It's an old, old policy that Reagan copied from his predecessors Carter, Nixon, LBJ, Kennedy and Truman. That was American policy between 1947-1990, not the work of just one president. If you disagree with that policy, you need to blame ALL of them not just one.
Anyway the reason I like Reagan/Bush Senior combination is they brought us out of a major recession (1981-82), cut corporate taxes that led to one of our biggest booms (1983 to 1998), and drove the Soviet Union into bankruptcy (they couldn't keep-up with the U.S. military machine). Our country has not been so competently led since the 1800s.
And of course I have to give credit where credit is due. The 1980s Democratic Congress which aided Reagan also deserves a pat on the back for following his lead rather than putting-up roadblocks.
"I never had sexual relations with that woman." That's a lie. Not under oath, no, but still a lie to 300 million Americans. And yes a boss ordering a secretary or intern, "Service me or get fired" IS a violation of the law. Even if that never happened, it still needed to be prosecuted to protect the rights of the victim(s).
Slashdot Mirror
>>>The midwest lacks public transport because you all drive cars. Haven't you heard of chicken-and-egg? Something has to change
Spoken like someone who's never bothered to drive across the country. Most of it is empty space, punctuated with a few farmhouses. There is NO practical way to hook-up all these widespread homes with a train system. Even in the 1800s when locomotives were king, the rails only connected major cities. It's the same reason why most of these homes do not have DSL or Cable connections...... there's just too much space inbetween.
For the wide open spaces of the midwest, the car (or horse) is the best method to move people around, rather than lay steel rails to nowhere. And the antenna or satellite dish is probably the best way to get internet/TV access, rather than lay millions of miles of cable.
>>>Wait, did you actually just play the race card in a discussion about driving habits?
No I played the slavery card, which is colorblind. We have had white, asian, and indian slaves in our past history. Did you not know that? Interesting. My point is that slavery should remain in the past - we should not reintroduce it into our present through laws that make everyone kowtow to Congress to get approval.
>>>I know people who drive *TWENTY MILES* to go grocery shopping at a mega-chain, or similarly far to get to the post office. Give those people $10/gal gas and maybe the corner grocery store[1] will start looking more appealing.
>>>
You exaggerate. My grocery store is only 1 mile away. The post office is right next door to it. The mall is only 3 miles and it's surrounded by tons of other grocery stores. Nobody who lives in a suburb of a city "needs" to drive 20 miles to get food or clothes, unless they are imbeciles who simply waste gas for fun.
Nor do I like your idea (or Al Gore's idea) of raising gas prices to $10/gallon just to force people to abandon cars. You have no right to demand people live their lives in some pre-approved way. This is not a tyranny or monarchy. This is a liberated country where the people rule.
They also shouldn't move your cursor. Oftentimes I'll type my name, then my password, but suddenly the cursor moves back to the USERID box and my password gets typed with full visibility.
This video is a good argument for why highways should have a dividing wall in the middle. This texting driver would have merely scraped that wall rather than pile into another car at ~120 miles an hour.
Another video worth watching is the one where a U.S. busdriver is texting, and slams into a stopped car on the interstate.
I'm frustrated.
Yes the website is up, but the tracker is still non-functional. How am I supposed to download my half-finished 10 GB torrents of "ifeelmyself.com" or "cdgirls.com" or "playboy.com" if the tracker is not working. :-(
Well I disagree. Buffy is very intelligent, exploring adolescent high-school issues and then evolving into adult-themed issues like drug addiction loss of purpose, and feeling disconnected from the world. Buffy is an excellent story.
But after reading your poor understanding of the reavers story in Firefly/Serenity, which is not about reavers but instead about the government tyranny, I suspect you don't understand Buffy either. Lack of IQ makes you think everything is bad, when in reality you're not understanding the subtexts.
It's like trying to make an ant understand math. You just annoy the ant, and then the ant labels it "worthless trash".
Fear of the Unknown is nothing unusual. People used to be afraid of solar eclipses, thinking the world was coming to an end, but it turns-out they were just the moon passing before the sun. Now that fear is gone. That same theme was explored in Babylon 5 where people feared the Shadows, but once their true form was revealed, the fear disappeared and the insectoid Shadows were forced to leave.
Anyway the reaver situation was a fear based upon lack of knowledge, but now that it's known where they came from, the characters no longer fear the reavers. Instead they fear what caused the reavers (the government experimenting on its own citizens). Although "anger" is probably the dominant component behind their emotion.
I'm starting to suspect you suffer from that disease which criminals suffer. A criminal walks into a bank, steals money, has his image captured by the security cams, and then gets arrested by the cops a few hours later. He expresses surprise, "But I was wearing lemon juice on my face - the cameras should not have been able to see!"
Like that guy you believe you know more than anyone else, but in reality are quite incompetent, and don't understand half the stuff you see on the screen. You didn't understand the point behind the reavers story, which was not about the reavers themselves, but the government's tyranny.
>>>HDSPA network is all digital unlike your old landline.
The landline is digital. 56k modems are digital. DSL modems are digital. There's no real difference except one is wired and one is not.
.
>>>Please stop trying to sound like a smart ass when replying if you want intelligent answers.
He wasn't being smart. You mis-attributed sarcasm where none was intended.
>>>It pisses me off that I won't get the Vista Service Pack (Windows 7) for free.
What a stupid comment. I bought Win98 and nobody gave me a free upgrade to XP (Windows 5). Later I bought to an XP-PC and nobody offered me a free upgrade to Vista (Windows 6). Why do you think you're entitled to get a free upgrade to a totally new OS (Win7), if Microsoft never gave free upgrades for previous OSes?
Wow. Talk about "entitlement generation" - you fit the profile perfectly. Sorry but you're going to just have to pay, same as I paid for my previous OS upgrades. The real world doesn't hand-out free lunches.
>>>Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 so it's the same core.
I think that diminishes the changes that have been made. XP == Windows NT 5. Vista == Windows NT 6. Windows 7 == Window NT 7. Each one is a different generation from the previous.
What's wrong with M.e? Isn't it just Windows 98 with a few new features added?
Uh. What??? Recycled paper has nothing to do with what we were discussing (e-readers). Using a paper-free medium is the cheapest option of all. Yes cutting-down trees would help employ loggers, but that would be a "broken window"-type fallacy.
It's not a special case. Voice calls used to cost $1.00 a minute but most customers thought that was waaaay too high, so there's been a pressure to move that price lower-and-lower over time to around 20 cents per minute. That's the market in action.
>>>In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost.
Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap. So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).
>>>Or perhaps it could be run like the US Postal Service, in which case it would provide world-class service at a far lower price than any of its competitors.
(falls over laughing). hahahahahaahahaahaahahaaahaaahahaaaahahaahahaha! Whew. That was hiliarious. The U.S.P.S. is losing money year-after-year and only survives because of taxes drawn from out of our paychecks (see my previous post). And when I have something important to ship, I definitely don't use the government company. Instead I go to one of the private companies because (1) they cost less (2) they don't lose stuff and (3) if they did it's insured for free (upto $100). Oh and (4) they are the only ones who offer overnight package service; the government does not.
>>>just pointing out that services set up by the government aren't inherently inefficient as you seem to be implying
I can't think of a single government company that is as efficiently-run as its commercial counterpart.
>>>You're an idiot.
I pay $0 a month for my cellphone service, and I'm direct-billed at 18 cents per minute for calls, which is typically only 2-3 dollars each month. You pay what? Around $50 to $60 per month? Which one of us is the idiot? (just joking)
>>>Try http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/0044216&art_pos=1 The Greenlight example.
If the government steps-in to banish the Greenlight ISP, that's not a flaw of the free market. That's a flaw of government and that's who you should blame, not the marketplace. The problem is the politicians who don't know how to say "no" to corporations. It's too bad North Carolina doesn't have some kind of document, a constitution if you will, that specifically enumerates which powers the politicians can (and can not) exercise. Oh well. I guess I'm just dreaming. If such a thing ever existed, nobody pays any attention to it anyhow - just words on paper.
Almost all of it. I realized that Obama was akin to FDR, and a near-identical clone of Mussolini (a big government supporter), and that I didn't want a repeat of either of those men, since neither of them embraced the pro-human rights and small-government philosophy that the 1789 Revolutionaries supports.
So I voted for the other guy.
As for the current economic crisis, I bought stocks when the price was hovering around 6500 and made a killing, since I knew from the Depression and other recessions that they'd eventually come back up. Knowing history has helped me tremendously. I didn't expect the bounce to happen so fast, but I knew it would eventually.
I rebel. To hell with your foreign rules borrowed from foreign languages. I'm an English speaker by god, and I will pluralize my words according to MY traditions - either "s" or "es". If you don't like it, eat my battleax.
But many of the rules are completely arbitrary. For example: "Don't use double negatives." Why not? Chaucer and Shakespeare used double negatives all the time. In some of his more elaborate sentences, Chaucer used quadruple negatives. Who's to say one of the greatest writers used improper grammar?
Most Latin words have been converted to English words. We say "republics" not "republica" or whatever the hell the Latin form is. We say "arts" not "arti". And why is it that "viruses" is okay, but "funguses" is not? Who decides this and who put them in power?
I say BS to that. We should adopt the word to our English rules instead of trying to maintain a bunch of confusing foreign rules from Latin, French, German, Italian, and so on. It's hard enough to learn the rules for one language's plurals, much less 5 or 6 more on top of that. Let's bring some sanity to the table, not anality.
>>>So, you're a Republican who learned its politically incorrect to like W?
So you routinely believe all Republicans just HAVE to love all Republican presidents? You truly are a dolt. I was registered (R) but voted for Harry Browne (L) in 2000. I haven't liked W since I first heard him open his mouth.
I didn't vote for anybody in 2004 since it seemed pointless to even bother.
If you think those Deficit graphs look bad, wait until you see Obama's graphs circa 2016. He's increasing our national debt from $110,000 to $170,000 per American home - a faster growth in debt than even the Reagan years.
>>>Trickle down...
Isn't that the philosophy behind giving those bailouts to Chrysler, AIG, and other banks? i.e. They get the money and it trickles-down to the rest of us? Obama and the Congressional Democrats seem to love the idea.
Actually, if you look at the pure numbers, we killed about five times more people with our Iraq/Afghan bombings than all the 9/11 deaths put together. The best course to follow, in order to save lives, would have been to do nothing. Yes shore-up the border defenses so no more terrorists can sneak through, but that's it.
And you also have to put things into perspective. 3000 Americans died in terrorist attacks over the last decade. But during that same timespan 24 million people died in the U.S.; 1 million from car accidents alone. The amount of deaths inflicted by Bin Laden is only one-third percent as many killed (indirectly) by Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, et cetera. i.e. Exceedingly small. It would have made much more sense to have a "war on car safety" to save lives than kill foreigners.
>>>it made the Republicans look really foolish for squandering all that economic growth.
The dot-com crash happened in late 1999 and continued into 2000 - Clinton's last year in office. How can you blame the Republican Bush for that downturn when he wasn't even elected yet? (shaking heads). So illogical.
What part of Reagan was "not perfect" did you not understand? I guess English is not your first language. Also propping-up dictators (to prevent expansion of Russia) is nothing new. It's an old, old policy that Reagan copied from his predecessors Carter, Nixon, LBJ, Kennedy and Truman. That was American policy between 1947-1990, not the work of just one president. If you disagree with that policy, you need to blame ALL of them not just one.
Anyway the reason I like Reagan/Bush Senior combination is they brought us out of a major recession (1981-82), cut corporate taxes that led to one of our biggest booms (1983 to 1998), and drove the Soviet Union into bankruptcy (they couldn't keep-up with the U.S. military machine). Our country has not been so competently led since the 1800s.
And of course I have to give credit where credit is due. The 1980s Democratic Congress which aided Reagan also deserves a pat on the back for following his lead rather than putting-up roadblocks.
>>>he never actually lied.
"I never had sexual relations with that woman." That's a lie. Not under oath, no, but still a lie to 300 million Americans. And yes a boss ordering a secretary or intern, "Service me or get fired" IS a violation of the law. Even if that never happened, it still needed to be prosecuted to protect the rights of the victim(s).