Jo-Ham, until this point I was going to write you off as a typical international victim of the echo chambers of Digg, Reddit, etc.
But after this: "Even Sarah Palin has to duck across the border to canada to afford medicine." you reveal yourself as an absolute partisan hack out to score worthless political points rather advance any sort of debate.
To those who don't know, in 1957 when Sarah Palin was a child living out in the middle of nowhere her father took her brother over the border once because they couldn't get out of their town by road or plane to the nearest Alaskan hospital after he burned himself. The train went over the border so they went with it.
It's *disgraceful* that you try and portray that in the way that you have here; as though recently she went over and that it was a matter of cost. You are disgustingly void of anything resembling intellectual honesty, this is the level of "discourse" in the political left at present and it SUCKS.
I hate to break it to you but the NHS is the worst of all the western public healthcare systems.
I'll take the Australian, German or French system any day over the abomination that is the NHS.
And I'm sure that you're aware that most states in the US (which of course are as populous and economically large as most European countries) have various forms of public insurance and public public care, so much so that even the "worst case" "victims" the administration keep bringing out to show how awful the current US healthcare system is have all been covered and receiving full treatment in their respective states public systems. Something the administration always conveniently neglect to mention.
The current rigmarole in the United States regarding healthcare is not about public / private, it's about the Federal Government moving into areas that it's does not have the authority to legislate. It's directly comparable to if (when) the European Union decides it's going to "take over" all of its member states discrete healthcare systems and run them from Brussels.
When that happens the EU *certainly* won't choose the UK model, and given how noisy and condescending you Brits have been about the Americans unwillingness to allow complete take over of healthcare by their Federal government don't expect any sympathy when the EU (yes they are talking about it http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_overview/co_operation/mobility/patient_mobility_en.htm) comes to take over yours.
As soon as Obama was inaugurated the 24/7 American Patriot Dissent Machine renamed itself as the 24/7 American Obama Patriot Machine.
Any dissent which days before was front and center on every blog, newspaper, cable news outlet, protest headquarters, faculty meeting, etc effective immediately became vile racist treachery and that had to be denounced if uttered in relation to Obama.
Many moderate supporters of Obama such as myself were bitten by this turn around. Opinions and views that just weeks earlier had been "metro and cool" when Bush was president were suddenly cause for outrage, mocking and hyperbole if aired now that Obama was president. Where we were recently (according to our "betters") the educated and sophisticated "independents", we suddenly were finding ourselves as a group being denounced from the very same media for simply daring to air the same uncertainties that were so popular to talk about under the last administration.
And so a new generation of everyman has learned a sharp lesson about the "cool" metro left, a lesson last learned in the late 70's:
Don't trust them as far as you can throw them. For despite the front of being "tolerant" and "compassionate" and "inclusive", in reality they are absolutely ruthless. They make the likes of Karl Rove and the Freepers and Fox News look like tame puppies in comparison. One needs only look at the locked down, utterly bizarre world of the average University Campus to see a microsim of the outcome of the progressive lefts policies.
And this "moderate" who got many a +5 insightful on this site in the lead up to the election arguing for Obama, will *never* fall for the siren song of progressive left should it ever arise again.
Hint: If you're going to pull a number out of your backside try to go for something that at least sounds semi-reasonable to the average man.
I will say if you're the product of one "of the other things funded by government taxation" over the past century then you prove the parents point I'm sorry to say.
Also in the early 1800's (to go back two hundred years in case you can't count either) there was about 80-90% literacy and the average ten year old who spent three days a week at the local parish school getting rapped over the knuckles for not deciphering Shakespeare correctly was more literate, articulate and well versed in logic, debate and reason than the vast majority of individuals coming out of the public education system at present.
Sorry to bring a fact into your hazed pop-culture oriented distortion of history.
Whatever is necessary to advance your political religion right?
Organised Crime?
I suppose that's a good a label as any for the Chinese Government and its "grey market" factories who have total support of said government in their counterfeit output.
Erm 100 years ago was 1910, not 1610 and hardly as uncivilised as you assume it was. The majority most definitely could read and write, life wasn't fundamentally that different than it is now. It was in the middle of the industrial revolution, compulsory education had been around for awhile and creature comforts were starting to flood into the home.
Second, food preservation has been around since the early 1600s, using glass jars to preserve fruit and veges has been in the home since the mid 1800s. In fact I have a food preservation boiler passed down to me from my great, great grandfather that was made in 1890 and he was a poor as poor convict farmer who took up a 200 acre selection in the mountains when he was pardoned in 1850.
Third my family is spread across the world and most of that movement was started from about 1830. Poverty came in the depression but before that the "average person" was reasonably well off and could most certainly travel. Otherwise just who exactly populated the US, Canada and Australia? The majority were certainly not just the European aristocrats. My great great grandmother for example brought herself over from Ireland in 1847. The travel cost wasn't the problem, the six months at sea was why people didn't often do it.
You really should read a few proper history books and not simply assume that because you think something that it's true.
In fact it's extremely chauvinistic that you just write the past off like that based on nothing but pure ignorance of your own past.
"I can't think of anything more likely to validate the government's actions in the eyes of its socially conservative constituents."
I hate to shatter your world view like this but our current government who are trying to implement this are progressive, pro-union, pro-abortion, spend like drunken sailors metro left wing.
Otherwise known as the Australian Labour Party.
The "social conservatives" just spent 12 years in power and the closest they ever came to implementing something like this was telling ISPs they had to offer Net Nanny as a download to their customers who wanted it. In the (gasp) conservative belief that mass censorship is wrong.
The coalition just spent 12 years in power and despite pressure for this from various angles never gave it much notice, instead telling people to install their own software.
The left wing come into power and it's pretty much first on the agenda.
And somehow on the boards like this, it still gets twisted to be about the right wing.
The last government we had which was deeply conservative refused to implement a system like this, instead pointing people to the multitude of private solutions that they could implement on their own machines.
The current government - Labour - is left wing, pro-abortion, pro-union and now pro-censorship and have already censored anti-abortion websites.
I'm sorry if object reality is the exact opposite of what you and the individuals who modded you up wish that it were but this is not being implemented and abused by the mythical whipping boy of the internet the conservative right wing. No, the biggest censorship push in our history is being implemented and abused by the allegedly cool, metro, technocrat left wing.
Which bit of that quote from a multi billion dollar companies senior programmer's personal experience is funny?
But then, deep within your comments I found this: "I am a web developer and I know lots of PHP"
Me thinks you're just trying to be cool, kinda like the kid who laughs at the losers when he's around the cool kids but then goes to sleep overs at the losers house on the weekend because he hasn't really got any friends.
Nice try you PHP *web developer* but you're busted.
In the 90's people used to make exactly the same types of comments about Perl. Perl and Perl Devs were the whipping boy of the language snobs.
Now PHP has stomped Perl into the dirt, for very good reasons IMO having written many CGI apps and maintenance / glue scripts with Perl for many years. Now that PHP is the new king of the useful / accessible language world somehow Perl has become something "great". Apparently being sidelined and teetering on obsolescence now makes it something wonderful. So great that nobody uses it anymore in any real sense except purely due to a small amount of inertia and a fraction of server side maintenance scripts that are now quickly being eaten by Python and... PHP/CLI.
Perl is just as much of a mess as PHP, though in different ways and most who whinge about PHP are just used to Perls BS and don't even notice it anymore.
The fact of the matter is PHP *is* one of the most productive languages around otherwise it wouldn't have absolutely blown Perl away in less than 4 years from when it was introduced. For years hosting companies used to have Perl and only Perl available, now it's not even on the radar. Yes PHP is simple, it's easy to program in, easy to maintain (even the worst PHP is better than most average Perl code I've ever had to delve into over the years) and of course inherently easy for noobs to write dodgy broken applications in.
Python and Ruby will always be niche as they are developed by ideology, not by practicality.
The @ symbol suppresses warnings, just like programming in Perl without -w. And in 11 years I've never seen it used as a "try catch block" and I've seen a hell of a lot of code, which makes me understand that you've never actually programmed in PHP and are just regurgitating off old troll lists. Also PHP has had exceptions for over half a decade now...
Finally PHP doesn't need to be compared to Perl or Python or Ruby, it's now at a place and running some of the biggest sites in the world along side Java a place where Perl once was and Python and Ruby will *never* be. (How's that performance going Ruby?).
Such is the state of reality at this point from a Java first / PHP second / Occassional-Python (the more I use it the less I like it) Assembly for microcontrollers, very Ex-Perl programmers point of view.
Good teachers were purged in the 80's then again in the early 90's when the last hold outs from the old guard (pre baby boomer) who believed that their profession was about teaching and not about cultural and social indoctrination were forced into retirement, sidelined or outright maligned.
It's all very boring. Good normal people won't go in en-masse because the teaching profession is chock full of psuedo-science and slightly unhinged useful idiots. They figure that out during Uni and get the hell out. No normal person wants to go into a classroom full of children 5 days a week completely disarmed and without any sort of authority and real disciplinary regime to back them up ("contracts" I LOLed as a teenager). Anybody who actually does attempt to teach outside of the mandated and bizarre "whole child" policy guidelines are very unpopular individuals and go no where in a hurry.
My most memorable teachers were the ones who would bark at the trouble makers (me included) and mean it. They no longer exist, even the most conservative private schools don't do punitive discipline anymore.
This keeps cropping up but nobody ever takes it to it's conclusion.
Every civilisation has declined over the course of generations.
Perhaps each generation notices that the next is lazy because it really is true, historically speaking it certainly is anyway. Countries rarely implode, rather they mostly just dribble away into irrelevance as each generation pisses away the freedoms, legacy, prosperity, luck, whatever, of the couple of generations before them that put in the extremely hard yards to build the place up to its peak.
Great Britain is the latest victim. America will be the next and perhaps western civilisation in general is about to be eclipsed by Asia purely because they have the hunger that our grandfathers and greatgrandfathers did to build something amazing and we're to busy worrying about whether cooking crabs alive is a deep moral question that actually requires significant thought and time. Not to mention are binding ourselves up in so much legislation, petty beuracracy and infantile ideological "warfare" while borrowing money from Asia to fund our impossible state programs - while they go without and run their states far more frugally and realistically.
So parents apply pressure to make schools do the very thing they (allegedly) exist to do. Upon doing so they find out that the school has been not teaching their children literacy and numeracy but instead hazing their childrens minds with this years "Social Indoctrination: Experiment #5165" and go ballistic when their children fail academic tests...
What's the problem with the parents again? Oh let me guess your wife doesn't want to teach the boring stuff, like rote times table memorization, etc. Just the fun "social" stuff because she got into the job to "mold young minds" and not drill boring mathematical rules into them.
If the school doesn't teach children enough to pass these so called tough academic tests, then what the hell do children sit in the bulding for 6 hours a day for? And how in any possible reality is that the parents fault (who are allegedly pushing for tougher standards for their kids).
Teachers really do come up with some BS excuses - Parents pushing for tougher standards and demanding improvements in grades when their kids fail is apparently the problem with education. Not the school and teacher whose sole job it is to teach the children.
The historic curse on the children of the idle rich has finally reached the masses in western countries - minds trained from cradle to grave with an attitude of sheer laziness.
That post wasn't arguing that education is worthless.
Just that American Colleges have become little better than online degree mills.
All a degree says for at least 70% of people now is that they may be suitably qualified for some sort of middle class, white collar office job that involves pushing paper around, going to meetings and being stereotypically ironic and "witty" on facebook, bebo, etc.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Out of the other 30% maybe 10% become doctors, 10% become (surplus and now unwanted) engineers and 10% actually push things forward via research.
The 70% lives on the backs of the 30%, farmers, blue collar workers and small business men.
This will of course go down very well here, in a place absolutely full to the brim of the 70%.
If you ever managed to get to a stage where you can even *produce* enough solar panels to provide say even just 20% of the power that oil currently produces the magnitude of production required to mine, build, install and maintain those energy converters, the factories, strip mines and enviromental damage from the huge areas of land covered by them etc, etc could easily be far greater than just digging oil up and setting it on fire...
Your thinking small time, it's easy to say that solar is less polluting now because it's a fart in a gale when compared to oils output. Try and bring it up to the same output and I bet it'll become an environmental disaster.
Nuclear is the only hope to output as much a oil does cleanly, and the greenies killed it.
I have 4 mod points, but I've just got to reply to this.
All the things the GP listed (bar one) are organised by the distant and (from a view point here over the ocean) corrupt as hell, inefficient US Federal Government.
All the things you list (bar one) are controlled by the various local and state governments.
I keep seeing this argument where one person lists massively corrupt, inefficient, and in many cases hurtful Federal programs they want scrapped and instantly others spring up and thinking that they're oh so witty turn on the sarcasm..."ohoh and roads and police and the military too!" thinking that they are ever so clever...not seeing the absolute ignorance they are displaying to the whole world about their own countries system of governance...
Here's a lesson from a foreigner, your state governments are responsible for building roads, the police and ambulance.
Your Federal Governments number one job is a common defence of the States, rather than each state having a standing army, they all pool their resources and have just one big one. It's number two job is making sure that the states play nice with each other. That is pretty much the entirety of the purpose the states created it for.
It's the Federal Government now thinking it can *do anything it wants* that small government types have 99% of a problem with.
Perhaps you and the dimwits who modded you up should go and learn a little bit about Federalism and the foundation upon which it was built. Hint: it wasn't an all powerful single central government that can do anything it wants.
You say far right (I assume you sit on the left so it makes you feel morally superior) but political belief is a circle not a line.
There's a point far enough to the right or left where they run into each other. And to burst your little bubble, the far left have just as many authoritarian and disgusting beliefs as the far right.
Many on the "far left" support the pillars of Fascism, and I must say your little definition above is quite infantile and incomplete.
And the Nazi national motto was "Community before the individual".
Sounds a lot like the beliefs of the far left to me, from healthcare to education, population control, eugenics and regulation on every tiny aspect of human life, there's *nothing* the far left doesn't think the state should be involved in. And the health and continuance of the state are far more important than the individuals in it. (Read some of the "solutions" to Global Warming that come from the far left to see Fascists truly unmasked).
Go far enough in either direction and both "sides" beliefs and talking points start to look awfully similar to one another.
Also the right has had no power in your country for over a year now (three years since they had any real clout). And if you believe there's no thuggery coming from the far left who currently have absolute power over the United States then you're living in an absolute delusion.
"the government didn't want to pay as much as Rio Tinto wanted to charge"
Which is the crux of the issue with China that I pray people in the west start waking up to.
When you do business in China, you're doing business with the corrupt and totalitarian Chinese Government - a nasty operation that has no intent of *ever* being any less corrupt and ruthless than it is now. The separation between any so called "private" business and the government (especially big business) in China is whatever the party leaders say it is at any given moment. Rio thought they were negotiating a tough iron ore deal with the Chinese foundries as they would do with any private business in any western democracy, that is they played hardball with them.
The problem is, the Chinese government decided it didn't like said foundries being negotiated with in such a harsh manner (who does this pip squeak company think it is embarrassing us internationally!) and so threw the top man Rio man in China in gaol where it then took three months to even bother *charging* him.
And of course we know the upstanding state of justice in the Chinese legal system...
Dear corporate west, if you deal with the totalitarian devil you will eventually get burned.
A lesson that should have been learned once and for all in the 1930s.
No more kooky than thinking that pink fairies live on the moon. You can think whatever you like, but what you think had better be backed by some solid evidence and reason as to why that's better.
Retribution against a person who has violated another by placing them in cold hard prisons is the only way to quench the primal *need* for retribution by the victim, the victims people and the victims community.
Ignore humanities primal needs at your peril, justice will be done either through the state apparatus in an orderly fashion, or in the style it was largely done before the 1900's; by the victims people metting out quick, harsh, brutal justice (occasionally against the wrong person). You see the state convinces the individuals in it that it's preferable to let it met out justice. But to be sure, if it fails to give a sense of justice to those wronged then the individuals will take the dishing out of justice back into their own hands.
And *I think* that you and the tiny fraction of people that think like you are just western middle class individuals who've been swaddled in cotton wool for your entire lives and have never suffered true violation at the hand of another. Not only that you have been led to believe that criminals are the true victims of the crime that they commit, and the victims are inanimate objects, whose feelings and needs are completely irrelevant to the matter. As you have just inferred.
Then again I've never seen one of "those" "self-righteous conservative christians" make any claim that you suggest regarding rape except to be horrified by it, and to be compassionate to the victims. And given that I attended church for the first 20 years of my life and was surrounded by quite a few "self-righteous conservative christians" who oddly enough were about one quarter as self righteous as most of the "metro cool" group who have an irrational bone to pick with them I can bet 100 to 1 that my eduacted opinion of them is about 100% more accurate then your wishful thinking and tribalism.
I'm afraid your mind is lost in a maze of hatred.
And no I'm not a Christian.
(Here comes a mod down, never violate the sanctity of the two minutes of hate against evil white christians on the Internet by the oh-so rebellious middle class white set).
Slashdot Mirror
Jo-Ham, until this point I was going to write you off as a typical international victim of the echo chambers of Digg, Reddit, etc.
But after this: "Even Sarah Palin has to duck across the border to canada to afford medicine." you reveal yourself as an absolute partisan hack out to score worthless political points rather advance any sort of debate.
To those who don't know, in 1957 when Sarah Palin was a child living out in the middle of nowhere her father took her brother over the border once because they couldn't get out of their town by road or plane to the nearest Alaskan hospital after he burned himself. The train went over the border so they went with it.
It's *disgraceful* that you try and portray that in the way that you have here; as though recently she went over and that it was a matter of cost. You are disgustingly void of anything resembling intellectual honesty, this is the level of "discourse" in the political left at present and it SUCKS.
I hate to break it to you but the NHS is the worst of all the western public healthcare systems.
I'll take the Australian, German or French system any day over the abomination that is the NHS.
And I'm sure that you're aware that most states in the US (which of course are as populous and economically large as most European countries) have various forms of public insurance and public public care, so much so that even the "worst case" "victims" the administration keep bringing out to show how awful the current US healthcare system is have all been covered and receiving full treatment in their respective states public systems. Something the administration always conveniently neglect to mention.
The current rigmarole in the United States regarding healthcare is not about public / private, it's about the Federal Government moving into areas that it's does not have the authority to legislate. It's directly comparable to if (when) the European Union decides it's going to "take over" all of its member states discrete healthcare systems and run them from Brussels.
When that happens the EU *certainly* won't choose the UK model, and given how noisy and condescending you Brits have been about the Americans unwillingness to allow complete take over of healthcare by their Federal government don't expect any sympathy when the EU (yes they are talking about it http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_overview/co_operation/mobility/patient_mobility_en.htm) comes to take over yours.
As soon as Obama was inaugurated the 24/7 American Patriot Dissent Machine renamed itself as the 24/7 American Obama Patriot Machine.
Any dissent which days before was front and center on every blog, newspaper, cable news outlet, protest headquarters, faculty meeting, etc effective immediately became vile racist treachery and that had to be denounced if uttered in relation to Obama.
Many moderate supporters of Obama such as myself were bitten by this turn around. Opinions and views that just weeks earlier had been "metro and cool" when Bush was president were suddenly cause for outrage, mocking and hyperbole if aired now that Obama was president. Where we were recently (according to our "betters") the educated and sophisticated "independents", we suddenly were finding ourselves as a group being denounced from the very same media for simply daring to air the same uncertainties that were so popular to talk about under the last administration.
And so a new generation of everyman has learned a sharp lesson about the "cool" metro left, a lesson last learned in the late 70's:
Don't trust them as far as you can throw them. For despite the front of being "tolerant" and "compassionate" and "inclusive", in reality they are absolutely ruthless. They make the likes of Karl Rove and the Freepers and Fox News look like tame puppies in comparison. One needs only look at the locked down, utterly bizarre world of the average University Campus to see a microsim of the outcome of the progressive lefts policies.
And this "moderate" who got many a +5 insightful on this site in the lead up to the election arguing for Obama, will *never* fall for the siren song of progressive left should it ever arise again.
In 1910 there was 10% literacy???
Hint: If you're going to pull a number out of your backside try to go for something that at least sounds semi-reasonable to the average man.
I will say if you're the product of one "of the other things funded by government taxation" over the past century then you prove the parents point I'm sorry to say.
Also in the early 1800's (to go back two hundred years in case you can't count either) there was about 80-90% literacy and the average ten year old who spent three days a week at the local parish school getting rapped over the knuckles for not deciphering Shakespeare correctly was more literate, articulate and well versed in logic, debate and reason than the vast majority of individuals coming out of the public education system at present.
Sorry to bring a fact into your hazed pop-culture oriented distortion of history.
Whatever is necessary to advance your political religion right?
Organised Crime? I suppose that's a good a label as any for the Chinese Government and its "grey market" factories who have total support of said government in their counterfeit output.
Go back to 1910?
I hate to shock you but it was hardly the wild west.
Erm 100 years ago was 1910, not 1610 and hardly as uncivilised as you assume it was. The majority most definitely could read and write, life wasn't fundamentally that different than it is now. It was in the middle of the industrial revolution, compulsory education had been around for awhile and creature comforts were starting to flood into the home.
Second, food preservation has been around since the early 1600s, using glass jars to preserve fruit and veges has been in the home since the mid 1800s. In fact I have a food preservation boiler passed down to me from my great, great grandfather that was made in 1890 and he was a poor as poor convict farmer who took up a 200 acre selection in the mountains when he was pardoned in 1850.
Third my family is spread across the world and most of that movement was started from about 1830. Poverty came in the depression but before that the "average person" was reasonably well off and could most certainly travel. Otherwise just who exactly populated the US, Canada and Australia? The majority were certainly not just the European aristocrats. My great great grandmother for example brought herself over from Ireland in 1847. The travel cost wasn't the problem, the six months at sea was why people didn't often do it.
You really should read a few proper history books and not simply assume that because you think something that it's true.
In fact it's extremely chauvinistic that you just write the past off like that based on nothing but pure ignorance of your own past.
So very very ignorant.
"I can't think of anything more likely to validate the government's actions in the eyes of its socially conservative constituents."
I hate to shatter your world view like this but our current government who are trying to implement this are progressive, pro-union, pro-abortion, spend like drunken sailors metro left wing.
Otherwise known as the Australian Labour Party.
The "social conservatives" just spent 12 years in power and the closest they ever came to implementing something like this was telling ISPs they had to offer Net Nanny as a download to their customers who wanted it. In the (gasp) conservative belief that mass censorship is wrong.
The coalition just spent 12 years in power and despite pressure for this from various angles never gave it much notice, instead telling people to install their own software.
The left wing come into power and it's pretty much first on the agenda.
And somehow on the boards like this, it still gets twisted to be about the right wing.
Cognitive dissonance.
Nice try at painting this as a right wing failure but it's actually *anti-abortion* sites that are already on the blacklist http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/acma-anti-abortion-prohibited/ .
The last government we had which was deeply conservative refused to implement a system like this, instead pointing people to the multitude of private solutions that they could implement on their own machines.
The current government - Labour - is left wing, pro-abortion, pro-union and now pro-censorship and have already censored anti-abortion websites.
I'm sorry if object reality is the exact opposite of what you and the individuals who modded you up wish that it were but this is not being implemented and abused by the mythical whipping boy of the internet the conservative right wing. No, the biggest censorship push in our history is being implemented and abused by the allegedly cool, metro, technocrat left wing.
So where are you going to look at it from now?
Which bit of that quote from a multi billion dollar companies senior programmer's personal experience is funny?
But then, deep within your comments I found this: "I am a web developer and I know lots of PHP"
Me thinks you're just trying to be cool, kinda like the kid who laughs at the losers when he's around the cool kids but then goes to sleep overs at the losers house on the weekend because he hasn't really got any friends.
Nice try you PHP *web developer* but you're busted.
Their entire business is built on PHP.
In the 90's people used to make exactly the same types of comments about Perl. Perl and Perl Devs were the whipping boy of the language snobs.
Now PHP has stomped Perl into the dirt, for very good reasons IMO having written many CGI apps and maintenance / glue scripts with Perl for many years. Now that PHP is the new king of the useful / accessible language world somehow Perl has become something "great". Apparently being sidelined and teetering on obsolescence now makes it something wonderful. So great that nobody uses it anymore in any real sense except purely due to a small amount of inertia and a fraction of server side maintenance scripts that are now quickly being eaten by Python and ... PHP/CLI.
Perl is just as much of a mess as PHP, though in different ways and most who whinge about PHP are just used to Perls BS and don't even notice it anymore.
The fact of the matter is PHP *is* one of the most productive languages around otherwise it wouldn't have absolutely blown Perl away in less than 4 years from when it was introduced. For years hosting companies used to have Perl and only Perl available, now it's not even on the radar. Yes PHP is simple, it's easy to program in, easy to maintain (even the worst PHP is better than most average Perl code I've ever had to delve into over the years) and of course inherently easy for noobs to write dodgy broken applications in.
Python and Ruby will always be niche as they are developed by ideology, not by practicality.
The @ symbol suppresses warnings, just like programming in Perl without -w. And in 11 years I've never seen it used as a "try catch block" and I've seen a hell of a lot of code, which makes me understand that you've never actually programmed in PHP and are just regurgitating off old troll lists. Also PHP has had exceptions for over half a decade now...
Finally PHP doesn't need to be compared to Perl or Python or Ruby, it's now at a place and running some of the biggest sites in the world along side Java a place where Perl once was and Python and Ruby will *never* be. (How's that performance going Ruby?).
Such is the state of reality at this point from a Java first / PHP second / Occassional-Python (the more I use it the less I like it) Assembly for microcontrollers, very Ex-Perl programmers point of view.
Flame on!
Good teachers were purged in the 80's then again in the early 90's when the last hold outs from the old guard (pre baby boomer) who believed that their profession was about teaching and not about cultural and social indoctrination were forced into retirement, sidelined or outright maligned.
It's all very boring. Good normal people won't go in en-masse because the teaching profession is chock full of psuedo-science and slightly unhinged useful idiots. They figure that out during Uni and get the hell out. No normal person wants to go into a classroom full of children 5 days a week completely disarmed and without any sort of authority and real disciplinary regime to back them up ("contracts" I LOLed as a teenager). Anybody who actually does attempt to teach outside of the mandated and bizarre "whole child" policy guidelines are very unpopular individuals and go no where in a hurry.
My most memorable teachers were the ones who would bark at the trouble makers (me included) and mean it. They no longer exist, even the most conservative private schools don't do punitive discipline anymore.
Allegedly a child can do no wrong.
Weep for the west.
This keeps cropping up but nobody ever takes it to it's conclusion.
Every civilisation has declined over the course of generations.
Perhaps each generation notices that the next is lazy because it really is true, historically speaking it certainly is anyway. Countries rarely implode, rather they mostly just dribble away into irrelevance as each generation pisses away the freedoms, legacy, prosperity, luck, whatever, of the couple of generations before them that put in the extremely hard yards to build the place up to its peak.
Great Britain is the latest victim. America will be the next and perhaps western civilisation in general is about to be eclipsed by Asia purely because they have the hunger that our grandfathers and greatgrandfathers did to build something amazing and we're to busy worrying about whether cooking crabs alive is a deep moral question that actually requires significant thought and time. Not to mention are binding ourselves up in so much legislation, petty beuracracy and infantile ideological "warfare" while borrowing money from Asia to fund our impossible state programs - while they go without and run their states far more frugally and realistically.
So parents apply pressure to make schools do the very thing they (allegedly) exist to do. Upon doing so they find out that the school has been not teaching their children literacy and numeracy but instead hazing their childrens minds with this years "Social Indoctrination: Experiment #5165" and go ballistic when their children fail academic tests...
What's the problem with the parents again? Oh let me guess your wife doesn't want to teach the boring stuff, like rote times table memorization, etc. Just the fun "social" stuff because she got into the job to "mold young minds" and not drill boring mathematical rules into them.
If the school doesn't teach children enough to pass these so called tough academic tests, then what the hell do children sit in the bulding for 6 hours a day for? And how in any possible reality is that the parents fault (who are allegedly pushing for tougher standards for their kids).
Teachers really do come up with some BS excuses - Parents pushing for tougher standards and demanding improvements in grades when their kids fail is apparently the problem with education. Not the school and teacher whose sole job it is to teach the children.
Right.
I think you're wrong.
I think it's just pure unadulterated laziness.
The historic curse on the children of the idle rich has finally reached the masses in western countries - minds trained from cradle to grave with an attitude of sheer laziness.
That post wasn't arguing that education is worthless.
Just that American Colleges have become little better than online degree mills.
All a degree says for at least 70% of people now is that they may be suitably qualified for some sort of middle class, white collar office job that involves pushing paper around, going to meetings and being stereotypically ironic and "witty" on facebook, bebo, etc.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Out of the other 30% maybe 10% become doctors, 10% become (surplus and now unwanted) engineers and 10% actually push things forward via research.
The 70% lives on the backs of the 30%, farmers, blue collar workers and small business men.
This will of course go down very well here, in a place absolutely full to the brim of the 70%.
Depends.
If you ever managed to get to a stage where you can even *produce* enough solar panels to provide say even just 20% of the power that oil currently produces the magnitude of production required to mine, build, install and maintain those energy converters, the factories, strip mines and enviromental damage from the huge areas of land covered by them etc, etc could easily be far greater than just digging oil up and setting it on fire...
Your thinking small time, it's easy to say that solar is less polluting now because it's a fart in a gale when compared to oils output. Try and bring it up to the same output and I bet it'll become an environmental disaster.
Nuclear is the only hope to output as much a oil does cleanly, and the greenies killed it.
I have 4 mod points, but I've just got to reply to this.
All the things the GP listed (bar one) are organised by the distant and (from a view point here over the ocean) corrupt as hell, inefficient US Federal Government.
All the things you list (bar one) are controlled by the various local and state governments.
I keep seeing this argument where one person lists massively corrupt, inefficient, and in many cases hurtful Federal programs they want scrapped and instantly others spring up and thinking that they're oh so witty turn on the sarcasm..."ohoh and roads and police and the military too!" thinking that they are ever so clever...not seeing the absolute ignorance they are displaying to the whole world about their own countries system of governance...
Here's a lesson from a foreigner, your state governments are responsible for building roads, the police and ambulance.
Your Federal Governments number one job is a common defence of the States, rather than each state having a standing army, they all pool their resources and have just one big one. It's number two job is making sure that the states play nice with each other. That is pretty much the entirety of the purpose the states created it for.
It's the Federal Government now thinking it can *do anything it wants* that small government types have 99% of a problem with.
Perhaps you and the dimwits who modded you up should go and learn a little bit about Federalism and the foundation upon which it was built. Hint: it wasn't an all powerful single central government that can do anything it wants.
Which merely means that by the time they do decide that they're going to install cameras in your house, you won't be able to do anything to stop them.
Too late.
http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/4731329.Croydon_Council_plans_to_install_snooper_cameras_in_homes/
Orwell had it slightly wrong. There will be cameras in everyones homes, but they'll be pointing into their neighbours houses.
You say far right (I assume you sit on the left so it makes you feel morally superior) but political belief is a circle not a line.
There's a point far enough to the right or left where they run into each other. And to burst your little bubble, the far left have just as many authoritarian and disgusting beliefs as the far right.
Many on the "far left" support the pillars of Fascism, and I must say your little definition above is quite infantile and incomplete.
The best most poignant description of Fascism comes from the man himself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini: "Everything inside the State, nothing outside the State.".
And the Nazi national motto was "Community before the individual".
Sounds a lot like the beliefs of the far left to me, from healthcare to education, population control, eugenics and regulation on every tiny aspect of human life, there's *nothing* the far left doesn't think the state should be involved in. And the health and continuance of the state are far more important than the individuals in it. (Read some of the "solutions" to Global Warming that come from the far left to see Fascists truly unmasked).
Go far enough in either direction and both "sides" beliefs and talking points start to look awfully similar to one another.
Also the right has had no power in your country for over a year now (three years since they had any real clout). And if you believe there's no thuggery coming from the far left who currently have absolute power over the United States then you're living in an absolute delusion.
"the government didn't want to pay as much as Rio Tinto wanted to charge"
Which is the crux of the issue with China that I pray people in the west start waking up to.
When you do business in China, you're doing business with the corrupt and totalitarian Chinese Government - a nasty operation that has no intent of *ever* being any less corrupt and ruthless than it is now. The separation between any so called "private" business and the government (especially big business) in China is whatever the party leaders say it is at any given moment. Rio thought they were negotiating a tough iron ore deal with the Chinese foundries as they would do with any private business in any western democracy, that is they played hardball with them.
The problem is, the Chinese government decided it didn't like said foundries being negotiated with in such a harsh manner (who does this pip squeak company think it is embarrassing us internationally!) and so threw the top man Rio man in China in gaol where it then took three months to even bother *charging* him.
And of course we know the upstanding state of justice in the Chinese legal system...
Dear corporate west, if you deal with the totalitarian devil you will eventually get burned.
A lesson that should have been learned once and for all in the 1930s.
No more kooky than thinking that pink fairies live on the moon. You can think whatever you like, but what you think had better be backed by some solid evidence and reason as to why that's better.
Retribution against a person who has violated another by placing them in cold hard prisons is the only way to quench the primal *need* for retribution by the victim, the victims people and the victims community.
Ignore humanities primal needs at your peril, justice will be done either through the state apparatus in an orderly fashion, or in the style it was largely done before the 1900's; by the victims people metting out quick, harsh, brutal justice (occasionally against the wrong person). You see the state convinces the individuals in it that it's preferable to let it met out justice. But to be sure, if it fails to give a sense of justice to those wronged then the individuals will take the dishing out of justice back into their own hands.
And *I think* that you and the tiny fraction of people that think like you are just western middle class individuals who've been swaddled in cotton wool for your entire lives and have never suffered true violation at the hand of another. Not only that you have been led to believe that criminals are the true victims of the crime that they commit, and the victims are inanimate objects, whose feelings and needs are completely irrelevant to the matter. As you have just inferred.
That's what I think.
"as you'll be told by those self-righteous conservative christians that call themselves human"
As opposed to forward thinking "empathetic" progressives such a yourself: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg
Or followers of Islam: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2008/11/2008111201216476354.html
Then again I've never seen one of "those" "self-righteous conservative christians" make any claim that you suggest regarding rape except to be horrified by it, and to be compassionate to the victims. And given that I attended church for the first 20 years of my life and was surrounded by quite a few "self-righteous conservative christians" who oddly enough were about one quarter as self righteous as most of the "metro cool" group who have an irrational bone to pick with them I can bet 100 to 1 that my eduacted opinion of them is about 100% more accurate then your wishful thinking and tribalism.
I'm afraid your mind is lost in a maze of hatred.
And no I'm not a Christian.
(Here comes a mod down, never violate the sanctity of the two minutes of hate against evil white christians on the Internet by the oh-so rebellious middle class white set).