"The vast majority of gun owners couldn't give two shits about high-powered assault rifles"
Er, you really don't understand American gun owners. Or guns. Gun owners don't like assault rifle bans because they are arbitrary and pointless, and are mostly about cosmetic features that make little difference - plus, of course, any bans on personal weapons also violate human rights.
Also, way to go Pirate Party! There is yet a spark of hope in the world!
May I suggest Personal Representation, in which each citizen can choose their own personal representative who will vote on their behalf, in much the same way that shares are voted at a stockholder's meeting. Alternately, a person could hold on to their own vote and vote as they like, but only representatives with a minimum number of votes would be allowed a seat in Congress or allowed to sponsor a bill - everyone else would have to submit their votes remotely.
With this system, almost everyone would have a representative that they approve of. Persons with multiple, conflicting personalities would still be out of luck.
"As far as I can tell, the people in charge today would junk the entire bill of rights"
What do you mean, "would"? They already have, excepting the 3rd.
And yet the current system, in which human rights are violated across the whole United States, just means that it is even more difficult to move to a different locality (outside the United States) that respects them.
From the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages the world did not modernize much. True, most of the modernization in that period was done in the Islamic sphere, even as Europe actually slid backwards - but it was little compared to the change that has happened since the late 1400s when Johannes Gutenberg invented his press.
The Gutenberg Press was the internet of its age. Sure, it was Net.01 - a far cry from the world-spanning information exchange we have now - but it was the driving force of European modernization. It allowed ideas to be exchanged and compared and criticized in ways that had never happened before. There were plenty of church reformers before Martin Luther, but Luther had the printing press and that made all the difference.
Europe has had the printing press for over 500 years now, but much of the Islamic world has not. Europe had religious wars for two centuries - but that was a long time ago. Europeans and their descendants have had time for cultural changes to happen slowly, to allow people to gradually come to terms with new ideas - the Islamic world has not.
Even so, MOST Muslims have adapted well. I've talked to Muslims in or from many countries, and most are peaceful and civilized.
Naturally, this idiocy about threatening Matt and Trey offends me - and the absurdity of these imbeciles thinking that they are needed to defend their god because presumably he cannot defend himself - well, it beggars belief. Such ideas need to die a well-deserved death.
That said, we should be careful not to tar all Muslims with this brush. Many of THEM are offended by such nonsense too, and from what I have seen online, Muslim youth around the world are busy using the internet to try to close that modernity gap. They ARE modernizing at a speed that is lovely to behold, but we shouldn't expect it to happen with smooth perfection or unerring grace.
In fact, almost as jarring to me is the way that I have seen some Muslims trying to signal their modernity by latching on to western luxury brands, as if spending one's money on over-priced goods will signal anything other than that one is a sucker. Still, I have seen similar attempts to claim modernity by proxy in Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures that were slow to modernize, where the people have a cargo cult type of understanding of what it means to be modern, mistaking one form of modernity for its substance.
The cargo cults have died out. The generation that came after the cargo cults look at their parents and wonder how they thought those things - but they have had the advantage of growing up in a modern world. They did not grow up in a stone-age culture only to be introduced suddenly to technology that appeared magical. The Islamic world will adapt too, will be better for it, and will even, I think, better understand what their prophet attempted to teach them.
Agreed. Most U.S. border guards are quite courteous. The problem is, if you run into a bad one you're liable to be screwed, and as this case demonstrates the U.S. legal system is a joke. If Watts gets any time, Beaudry should certainly get life in prison - but it ain't gonna happen.
I assume the original poster meant the Ice Shelves, and if any submarines have been there, no one's been talking.
But a few reasons why manned subs might not go underneath the Antarctic ice shelves:
(1) Said submarines would almost certainly be military, and the military presence in Antarctica is severely limited due to the Antarctic Treaty.
(2) The ice at the North Pole is thin, and in an emergency a submarine could probably find a way to surface. The ice shelves are thick (600 feet where they bored this hole) and if a submarine ran into problems the bubbleheads wouldn't have a chance of survival.
(3) The thickness of the ice shelves would force any submarines to go quite deep to get under them, as opposed to a few feet. Huge difference in pressure at those depths.
This doesn't surprise me too much. The SCINI Project has been finding neat stuff for some time now, even while they were just testing their equipment.
Microbes have even been found living in the ice of the polar plateau (at constant temperatures around -50C).
And check out Anoxycalyx Joubini (Volcano Sponge), some specimens of which are thought to be 15,000 years old and still living. These are animals that make those Sequoia look like juveniles.
Having travelled around the world, I can tell you that the taxi drivers in MANY cities do this tourists.
For example, locals will tell me that I should not pay more than 2X amount to go to a certain destination, but no taxi driver will take me there for less than 3X, and many try to get me to pay even more. They figure that as a foreigner I'm easy prey.
I've had taxi drivers insult me when I refuse to go with them, and I've gotten to the point where I enjoy pissing them off. I've walked miles with 25 kg of luggage rather than take a taxi. In one case, I knew what bus I wanted, and a taxi driver stepped in to "help" and told the ticket seller I was going somewhere else, so I paid many times the real rate for my bus ticket. I couldn't do much because they were both speaking Romanian and the taxi driver was pretending to be my interpreter despite my objections (and Bucharest has a really weird way of buying bus tickets - you can't buy them on the bus). I've heard of far worse - several of these instances were at the train station in Bucharest, where the gypsy taxi drivers are about as corrupt and downright thieving as they get, and they refuse to leave foreigners alone, even when asked to go away. I was told by a hotel owner that when the currency there had more zeros and was quite confusing, one taxi driver charged a confused guest over 400 euros for a 1 km trip, and the guest had to go home the next day because they had no more money.
But while the taxi drivers may be more polite in other places, almost everywhere a large number of them will attempt to overcharge - sometimes by great amounts. Unfortunately, in some places taxis are unavoidable, but I certainly don't take them when an alternative is available because I don't want to give them the satisfaction.
It's not necessarily that tourists are suckers, but when you're in a foreign city where everyone speaks a foreign language, what are you going to do about a taxi driver who rips you off? Go to the police, where the taxi driver will just complain that you tried to stiff him while you're still trying to say "hello" in the local language? Stiff them and risk attack? Attack them and risk dealing with a police force that is usually also corrupt? Complain to the police and find out that I managed to find the one case where I missed some local custom and the taxi driver is right (or at least that the police will back them up)? Or do you just pay the corrupt taxi driver surcharge and swear never to return to that godforsaken city again?
(Actually, Bucharest was OK except for the taxi drivers at the train station, though another taxi driver did take me the long way around once. They do have one nice idea: each taxi can set their own rates, as long as they are prominently advertised. Those who were fair with me got big tips. But the same general rule holds for other types of corruption: I don't intend to return to the UAE, Zambia, or Bali - and ESPECIALLY not Thailand, despite the fact that the taxi drivers there appear to be the only people who ARE honest - because I don't like dealing with a populace that treats visitors as prey.)
Presumably there has been a schism, and the Jedis in the movies belong to a different sect that does not require headgear.
Much like the difference between Mennonite women and Baptist women - one requires headgear, one does not, but both are not only Christian but Protestant.
To be more accurate, though, underground (well, under-ice) parking is convenient next door in the Logistics and Maintenance Arches, it's just that it's a pain going up and down all those stairs to get from the subsurface arch to the elevated station.
The safety devices on the elevator don't work in those temperatures, so it can be used for supplies but not for people.
And here you thought you'd run off a one-liner and be done. Hah!
My first thought, too. Regardless of the quality of the broadband connections, it's population density that matters.
Europeans tend to live in geographically compact cities. Americans are less likely to live in a large city, and if they do live in a large city the population density is probably much lower than in a European city (some exceptions: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, other "old" cities). For some other comparisons, Australians are more likely to live in a large city than in most countries, but those large cities have VERY low population density; Japan and South Korea have highly urbanized populations that live in a very small area - Japan is the approximately the same size as California, but only about 15% of the land is usable (the rest being too mountainous) and it has a population of around 120 million. High density means less fiber, and probably less hardware, is needed to connect everyone.
So it's quite possible that a majority of Europeans have better broadband (or not) than most Americans, but it is still comparing apples and oranges.
In any case, 2400 baud would be plenty good enough, if we could just stop these websites from using graphics! ASCII rocks! Get off my lawn!
In the past 40 years we've more than doubled spending-per-student and the results are getting worse each year.
It ain't the money.
I have at home a couple books published in 1880 for ten year olds. Many of today's college students would have trouble understanding them.
The teachers at that time were frequently young women just out of high school (or the equivalent) who taught for a couple years before getting married.
It ain't the money, it ain't the techniques, it ain't even usually how smart the teachers are.
It's the system. It's designed to fail, and it's working exactly as it was intended.
Let the money follow the students, and we'll begin to see better results.
A former teacher who won awards as Teacher-of-the-Year for both New York City and New York State, Gatto has looked into the history of education in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Education system is working exactly as it was designed.
However, the U.S. education system was designed to prepare students to be cogs in the industrial machine, and that requires workers who have some basic skills but no independence or spirit of inquiry. In short, it requires workers who are half-educated - no more, no less - and so countless reforms never work because the system is already working exactly as intended.
These little piddling changes will make no difference. Allow the money to follow the students, that might make a difference. The government monopoly on schools will just continue on its old course.
Slashdot Mirror
"The vast majority of gun owners couldn't give two shits about high-powered assault rifles"
Er, you really don't understand American gun owners. Or guns. Gun owners don't like assault rifle bans because they are arbitrary and pointless, and are mostly about cosmetic features that make little difference - plus, of course, any bans on personal weapons also violate human rights.
Also, way to go Pirate Party! There is yet a spark of hope in the world!
It's still better than most publications, but ten years ago it was great.
I have noticed a decline in the quality of their reporting, and a greater willingness to toe the government line.
I recently let my subscription lapse.
May I suggest Personal Representation, in which each citizen can choose their own personal representative who will vote on their behalf, in much the same way that shares are voted at a stockholder's meeting. Alternately, a person could hold on to their own vote and vote as they like, but only representatives with a minimum number of votes would be allowed a seat in Congress or allowed to sponsor a bill - everyone else would have to submit their votes remotely.
With this system, almost everyone would have a representative that they approve of. Persons with multiple, conflicting personalities would still be out of luck.
I tried to stir up some interest on Facebook, but didn't have much luck:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/I-want-Personal-Representation-in-Congress/109651832401918
Hard to say. Grover Cleveland was good. Possibly Warren Harding?
New York - poorest state in the USA, NYC - poorest city, when calculated by purchasing power parity.
"Last I checked, everyone in the U.S. is required to attend a free program of pro-government indoctrination up through high school."
There, fixed that for you.
Depending on the job, I sometimes have to pay for parking, and it is quite usual in my trade for workers to provide most of the tools that are used.
"As far as I can tell, the people in charge today would junk the entire bill of rights" What do you mean, "would"? They already have, excepting the 3rd.
And yet the current system, in which human rights are violated across the whole United States, just means that it is even more difficult to move to a different locality (outside the United States) that respects them.
From the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages the world did not modernize much. True, most of the modernization in that period was done in the Islamic sphere, even as Europe actually slid backwards - but it was little compared to the change that has happened since the late 1400s when Johannes Gutenberg invented his press.
The Gutenberg Press was the internet of its age. Sure, it was Net .01 - a far cry from the world-spanning information exchange we have now - but it was the driving force of European modernization. It allowed ideas to be exchanged and compared and criticized in ways that had never happened before. There were plenty of church reformers before Martin Luther, but Luther had the printing press and that made all the difference.
Europe has had the printing press for over 500 years now, but much of the Islamic world has not. Europe had religious wars for two centuries - but that was a long time ago. Europeans and their descendants have had time for cultural changes to happen slowly, to allow people to gradually come to terms with new ideas - the Islamic world has not.
Even so, MOST Muslims have adapted well. I've talked to Muslims in or from many countries, and most are peaceful and civilized.
Naturally, this idiocy about threatening Matt and Trey offends me - and the absurdity of these imbeciles thinking that they are needed to defend their god because presumably he cannot defend himself - well, it beggars belief. Such ideas need to die a well-deserved death.
That said, we should be careful not to tar all Muslims with this brush. Many of THEM are offended by such nonsense too, and from what I have seen online, Muslim youth around the world are busy using the internet to try to close that modernity gap. They ARE modernizing at a speed that is lovely to behold, but we shouldn't expect it to happen with smooth perfection or unerring grace.
In fact, almost as jarring to me is the way that I have seen some Muslims trying to signal their modernity by latching on to western luxury brands, as if spending one's money on over-priced goods will signal anything other than that one is a sucker. Still, I have seen similar attempts to claim modernity by proxy in Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures that were slow to modernize, where the people have a cargo cult type of understanding of what it means to be modern, mistaking one form of modernity for its substance.
The cargo cults have died out. The generation that came after the cargo cults look at their parents and wonder how they thought those things - but they have had the advantage of growing up in a modern world. They did not grow up in a stone-age culture only to be introduced suddenly to technology that appeared magical. The Islamic world will adapt too, will be better for it, and will even, I think, better understand what their prophet attempted to teach them.
Agreed. More like assault and battery.
Agreed. Most U.S. border guards are quite courteous. The problem is, if you run into a bad one you're liable to be screwed, and as this case demonstrates the U.S. legal system is a joke. If Watts gets any time, Beaudry should certainly get life in prison - but it ain't gonna happen.
I assume the original poster meant the Ice Shelves, and if any submarines have been there, no one's been talking.
But a few reasons why manned subs might not go underneath the Antarctic ice shelves:
(1) Said submarines would almost certainly be military, and the military presence in Antarctica is severely limited due to the Antarctic Treaty.
(2) The ice at the North Pole is thin, and in an emergency a submarine could probably find a way to surface. The ice shelves are thick (600 feet where they bored this hole) and if a submarine ran into problems the bubbleheads wouldn't have a chance of survival.
(3) The thickness of the ice shelves would force any submarines to go quite deep to get under them, as opposed to a few feet. Huge difference in pressure at those depths.
I suspect it's mostly #2 and #3.
This doesn't surprise me too much. The SCINI Project has been finding neat stuff for some time now, even while they were just testing their equipment.
Microbes have even been found living in the ice of the polar plateau (at constant temperatures around -50C).
And check out Anoxycalyx Joubini (Volcano Sponge), some specimens of which are thought to be 15,000 years old and still living. These are animals that make those Sequoia look like juveniles.
Wouldn't that be sufficient cause to get rid of the medallion system, which would lower prices across the board?
Having travelled around the world, I can tell you that the taxi drivers in MANY cities do this tourists.
For example, locals will tell me that I should not pay more than 2X amount to go to a certain destination, but no taxi driver will take me there for less than 3X, and many try to get me to pay even more. They figure that as a foreigner I'm easy prey.
I've had taxi drivers insult me when I refuse to go with them, and I've gotten to the point where I enjoy pissing them off. I've walked miles with 25 kg of luggage rather than take a taxi. In one case, I knew what bus I wanted, and a taxi driver stepped in to "help" and told the ticket seller I was going somewhere else, so I paid many times the real rate for my bus ticket. I couldn't do much because they were both speaking Romanian and the taxi driver was pretending to be my interpreter despite my objections (and Bucharest has a really weird way of buying bus tickets - you can't buy them on the bus). I've heard of far worse - several of these instances were at the train station in Bucharest, where the gypsy taxi drivers are about as corrupt and downright thieving as they get, and they refuse to leave foreigners alone, even when asked to go away. I was told by a hotel owner that when the currency there had more zeros and was quite confusing, one taxi driver charged a confused guest over 400 euros for a 1 km trip, and the guest had to go home the next day because they had no more money.
But while the taxi drivers may be more polite in other places, almost everywhere a large number of them will attempt to overcharge - sometimes by great amounts. Unfortunately, in some places taxis are unavoidable, but I certainly don't take them when an alternative is available because I don't want to give them the satisfaction.
It's not necessarily that tourists are suckers, but when you're in a foreign city where everyone speaks a foreign language, what are you going to do about a taxi driver who rips you off? Go to the police, where the taxi driver will just complain that you tried to stiff him while you're still trying to say "hello" in the local language? Stiff them and risk attack? Attack them and risk dealing with a police force that is usually also corrupt? Complain to the police and find out that I managed to find the one case where I missed some local custom and the taxi driver is right (or at least that the police will back them up)? Or do you just pay the corrupt taxi driver surcharge and swear never to return to that godforsaken city again?
(Actually, Bucharest was OK except for the taxi drivers at the train station, though another taxi driver did take me the long way around once. They do have one nice idea: each taxi can set their own rates, as long as they are prominently advertised. Those who were fair with me got big tips. But the same general rule holds for other types of corruption: I don't intend to return to the UAE, Zambia, or Bali - and ESPECIALLY not Thailand, despite the fact that the taxi drivers there appear to be the only people who ARE honest - because I don't like dealing with a populace that treats visitors as prey.)
me neither. More like almost every time I get in a cab. I got sick of it. I'll walk several miles now, rather than take a cab.
Presumably there has been a schism, and the Jedis in the movies belong to a different sect that does not require headgear.
Much like the difference between Mennonite women and Baptist women - one requires headgear, one does not, but both are not only Christian but Protestant.
The new building is quite nice.
To be more accurate, though, underground (well, under-ice) parking is convenient next door in the Logistics and Maintenance Arches, it's just that it's a pain going up and down all those stairs to get from the subsurface arch to the elevated station.
The safety devices on the elevator don't work in those temperatures, so it can be used for supplies but not for people.
And here you thought you'd run off a one-liner and be done. Hah!
. . . about damn time.
and you can just string wires between poles and no one seems to care.
Have you been to Bucharest? Seriously, wires EVERYWHERE!
My first thought, too. Regardless of the quality of the broadband connections, it's population density that matters.
Europeans tend to live in geographically compact cities. Americans are less likely to live in a large city, and if they do live in a large city the population density is probably much lower than in a European city (some exceptions: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, other "old" cities). For some other comparisons, Australians are more likely to live in a large city than in most countries, but those large cities have VERY low population density; Japan and South Korea have highly urbanized populations that live in a very small area - Japan is the approximately the same size as California, but only about 15% of the land is usable (the rest being too mountainous) and it has a population of around 120 million. High density means less fiber, and probably less hardware, is needed to connect everyone.
So it's quite possible that a majority of Europeans have better broadband (or not) than most Americans, but it is still comparing apples and oranges.
In any case, 2400 baud would be plenty good enough, if we could just stop these websites from using graphics! ASCII rocks! Get off my lawn!
Do moral compasses work that far north?
Perhaps it's time to invest in moral GPS.
In the past 40 years we've more than doubled spending-per-student and the results are getting worse each year.
It ain't the money.
I have at home a couple books published in 1880 for ten year olds. Many of today's college students would have trouble understanding them.
The teachers at that time were frequently young women just out of high school (or the equivalent) who taught for a couple years before getting married.
It ain't the money, it ain't the techniques, it ain't even usually how smart the teachers are.
It's the system. It's designed to fail, and it's working exactly as it was intended.
Let the money follow the students, and we'll begin to see better results.
I suggest the works of John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
A former teacher who won awards as Teacher-of-the-Year for both New York City and New York State, Gatto has looked into the history of education in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Education system is working exactly as it was designed.
However, the U.S. education system was designed to prepare students to be cogs in the industrial machine, and that requires workers who have some basic skills but no independence or spirit of inquiry. In short, it requires workers who are half-educated - no more, no less - and so countless reforms never work because the system is already working exactly as intended.
These little piddling changes will make no difference. Allow the money to follow the students, that might make a difference. The government monopoly on schools will just continue on its old course.