Because every damn one of them gets shot down by some green organization.
Ok, I'll bite. This is a statement that would be a whole lot more convincing if you provided some factual support. Please provide one example of a power plant project being shot down because of "green" opposition.
Tried a bunch of searches, without much success. Plug in "slashdot", for example, and you don't get slashdot. Same with the other two searches I tried.
That's pure bullshit. Sure, you can pull strings to get accepted, but i'd like to see someone with a "head full of lettuce" actually graduate
Actually, it's a whole lot easier to graduate than to get accepted in the first place. And it's easier to get accepted if a parent is an alum. I went to one of these schools, and am sorry to say that there are more than a few people with heads full of lettuce there.
Of course, whether Bush has a head full of lettuce is different question...
The bias here is basically that.com/.org/.net domains (gTLDs) should only be owned by legitimate businesses, who can afford premises and separate phone numbers.
True. Although, at the same time, it doesn't cost much for an individual to aquire a seperate address and phone number. (I.e., you don't actually have to buy a building.) Get a PO Box and a cheap pager.
probably the same way the feds can 'auction' off electromagnetic spectrum to the highest bidder.
Actually, they aren't auctioning the spectrum, they're auctioning the use of the spectrum. Much better than having a hundred different companies trying to use the same frequency at once, no?
Um, no, that's not what I said, so don't jump all over me. If you read closer, you'll see that I voted for Nader (via proxy in Texas). I'm just pointing out a "what if": If Nader didn't run (and all other factors remained equal), Gore would have won the election decisively.
Gore doesn't own my vote. My vote for Nader didn't take anything away from Gore because Gore never earned it.
I still can't decide which of the dumbass twins i'd prefer in office.
No doubt that's true. Not all Nader supporters would have voted for Gore next. My father, for instance, told me he supports Nader and then Bush. Nevertheless, I think it's pretty clear that most Nader voters would have supported the more "liberal" of the two major candidates. Gore, with all his flaws, matches this description.
When you're not voting your concience, what's the point of voting at all...
Actually, I voted my concience. I voted for Nader via proxy. I found someone in Texas who would have voted for Gore, and so we arranged that I would use his Gore vote in PA, while he would cast my Nader vote in TX. There's an element of trust involved of course, but if we discount the possibility of cheating, then there's no question that my vote matched my concience.
The predictions are based on exit polls and not actual vote counts. It really doesn't matter when the actual polls close, as long as the exit polls used have similar demographics to the voting electorate. Having said that, I agree the networks were dumb and arrogant to predict a winner in what turned out to be an extraordinarily close race.
Note that if Bush does pull off a victory in Florida (which at this point, I suspect is likely), then we will conclusively be able to say that Ralph Nader cost Gore the election. Had Nader not been running, most of his 3% in Florida would have gone to Gore, giving the veep the presidency.
I can't decide whether I'm pleased or upset by this potential outcome. I live in Pennsylvania and swapped my Nader vote for a Texas Gore vote, so it's not my fault.:)
witness the huge amount of people voting strictly along party lines, even though that really shouldn't mean very much
I disagree. Voting along party lines makes sense if you believe one party represents your values better than the other party. If, on the other hand, you think the two major parties are "tweedledum" and "tweedledee" (to paraphrase Nader), then party distinctions don't mater. But for many people there are real differences between the two parties.
Typically, major media outlets rely on exit polls to predict elections, rather than the counted vote. Not 100% accurate, but pretty close, and it allows them to predict the result well in advance of when the vote count is complete.
Well, my account name was 14 letters long, so I suspect rather than Hotmail sells the addresses themselves as an extra revenue stream..
I suspect this is true, because I've experienced the same thing. A Hotmail address that I gave to nobody has received an incredible amount of spam. The only conclusion is that the spammers got the address from Hotmail itself. (Oh well, you get what you pay for, I guess...)
What I wonder is whether this actaully backfires on Hotmail? In one of my accounts I get upwards of 30 spam messages a day. Multiply this by a few million accounts, and you need some serious hardware to store and process all these messages. Surely in the long run it would have been cheaper not to sell the addresses in the first place?
People said the same thing about atomic weapons when they were developed, and where did that big scare lead us?: no where.
Of course, atomic weapons are one of those fields that's just about as "closed source" as you can get. Admitttedly the things have been around for half a century now, so nukes aren't as secret as they used to be. Still, one could argue that the reason we haven't had to worry about nuclear weapons is that the few nations that have had them have generally worked pretty hard to make sure no one else acquired them.
The Discover article mentions the Doomsday Argument. This is an interesting statistical argument that aims to measure the probability of extinction. There's a nice summary here, from which I quote the basic idea:
"Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about humankind's prospects and realize that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought."
The automobile insurance analogy is an interesting one to explore. I agree that worse drivers should pay more in insurance. But what does "worse" mean?
Typically (in the US at least) drivers get charged different amounts depending on their sex and age, two attributes very few people have any control over. I can how I drive, but I can't choose to be female. <insert AC comments here> The reason females get charged less is because as a group, they get in fewer accidents and cause fewer claims. However this means that a any individual is not being charged according to his or her actions, but according to the actions of everyone like him. Why should a 20 year old man with a clean driving record pay more than a 20 year old woman with a clean driving record? Just because all other 20 year old males are shitty drivers?
This has always struck me as unfair, and actually I'm surprised this kind of discrimination is still legal in the US.
Re:Wow, i think this is Reuters messing up.
on
High-Speed Greed
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· Score: 2
I think that reuters screwed the story up. I bet this is AT&T saying that they will offer placement and full hosting
I think you must be right. It's virtually impossible to tax transactions that don't originate somehow on AT&T's own servers. How exactly is AT&T going to figure out that those encrypted packets coming from my machine and going to some IP in Washington make up my $100 order from, say, amazon.com? And if amazon and AT&T don't have any agreement or contract, how exactly is AT&T going to bill them....? You can't send a bill to an IP address, can you? (What port would that be?)
Good question, and in fact, it's been done. And discussed in this slashdot article. It's not exactly what you describe, and costs well more than $1000/wall, but it's in the right direction.
The thing is.. most of Singapore's laws make *sense*.
I tend to agree. Although lot's of Singapore's laws and policies have elicited ridicule or criticism in the west, they have, for the most part, been successful in creating a prosperous and surprisingly free society. For a forceful and rational discussion of Singapore's policies by the man who crafted many of them, read Lee Kuan Yew's new memoirs.
I'm very sympathetic to your struggle. There must be only a few ten thousands of companies that use some flavor of Unix today... and what a mighty, mighty challenge it must be, figuring out which companies.
Here's a wacky idea: try going to hotjobs.com|monster.com, and search for jobs containing the words "unix" and "intern". Just a thought. Or here's a more complicated idea: search for jobs that contain the word "unix" and then contact those company's hr depts about possible internships. If you have trouble with either idea, just feel free to ask slashdot again.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'll bite. This is a statement that would be a whole lot more convincing if you provided some factual support. Please provide one example of a power plant project being shot down because of "green" opposition.
Thanks.
This link provides better search results than TheIndex.com.
I think I'll stick with google.
Actually, it's a whole lot easier to graduate than to get accepted in the first place. And it's easier to get accepted if a parent is an alum. I went to one of these schools, and am sorry to say that there are more than a few people with heads full of lettuce there.
Of course, whether Bush has a head full of lettuce is different question...
True. Although, at the same time, it doesn't cost much for an individual to aquire a seperate address and phone number. (I.e., you don't actually have to buy a building.) Get a PO Box and a cheap pager.
Actually, they aren't auctioning the spectrum, they're auctioning the use of the spectrum. Much better than having a hundred different companies trying to use the same frequency at once, no?
Um, no, that's not what I said, so don't jump all over me. If you read closer, you'll see that I voted for Nader (via proxy in Texas). I'm just pointing out a "what if": If Nader didn't run (and all other factors remained equal), Gore would have won the election decisively.
No doubt that's true. Not all Nader supporters would have voted for Gore next. My father, for instance, told me he supports Nader and then Bush. Nevertheless, I think it's pretty clear that most Nader voters would have supported the more "liberal" of the two major candidates. Gore, with all his flaws, matches this description.
Actually, I voted my concience. I voted for Nader via proxy. I found someone in Texas who would have voted for Gore, and so we arranged that I would use his Gore vote in PA, while he would cast my Nader vote in TX. There's an element of trust involved of course, but if we discount the possibility of cheating, then there's no question that my vote matched my concience.
The predictions are based on exit polls and not actual vote counts. It really doesn't matter when the actual polls close, as long as the exit polls used have similar demographics to the voting electorate. Having said that, I agree the networks were dumb and arrogant to predict a winner in what turned out to be an extraordinarily close race.
Everyone who said that your vote doesn't count was right, unless you happen to live in Florida.
I can't decide whether I'm pleased or upset by this potential outcome. I live in Pennsylvania and swapped my Nader vote for a Texas Gore vote, so it's not my fault. :)
Wooho. I invoke Godwin's Law. This thread is over.
I disagree. Voting along party lines makes sense if you believe one party represents your values better than the other party. If, on the other hand, you think the two major parties are "tweedledum" and "tweedledee" (to paraphrase Nader), then party distinctions don't mater. But for many people there are real differences between the two parties.
Typically, major media outlets rely on exit polls to predict elections, rather than the counted vote. Not 100% accurate, but pretty close, and it allows them to predict the result well in advance of when the vote count is complete.
The Onion's election coverage.
I suspect this is true, because I've experienced the same thing. A Hotmail address that I gave to nobody has received an incredible amount of spam. The only conclusion is that the spammers got the address from Hotmail itself. (Oh well, you get what you pay for, I guess...)
What I wonder is whether this actaully backfires on Hotmail? In one of my accounts I get upwards of 30 spam messages a day. Multiply this by a few million accounts, and you need some serious hardware to store and process all these messages. Surely in the long run it would have been cheaper not to sell the addresses in the first place?
Of course, atomic weapons are one of those fields that's just about as "closed source" as you can get. Admitttedly the things have been around for half a century now, so nukes aren't as secret as they used to be. Still, one could argue that the reason we haven't had to worry about nuclear weapons is that the few nations that have had them have generally worked pretty hard to make sure no one else acquired them.
"Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about humankind's prospects and realize that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought."
For those who haven't seen it, the interview is available on the Comedy Central web site. Or just click here.
The automobile insurance analogy is an interesting one to explore. I agree that worse drivers should pay more in insurance. But what does "worse" mean?
Typically (in the US at least) drivers get charged different amounts depending on their sex and age, two attributes very few people have any control over. I can how I drive, but I can't choose to be female. <insert AC comments here> The reason females get charged less is because as a group, they get in fewer accidents and cause fewer claims. However this means that a any individual is not being charged according to his or her actions, but according to the actions of everyone like him. Why should a 20 year old man with a clean driving record pay more than a 20 year old woman with a clean driving record? Just because all other 20 year old males are shitty drivers?
This has always struck me as unfair, and actually I'm surprised this kind of discrimination is still legal in the US.
I think you must be right. It's virtually impossible to tax transactions that don't originate somehow on AT&T's own servers. How exactly is AT&T going to figure out that those encrypted packets coming from my machine and going to some IP in Washington make up my $100 order from, say, amazon.com? And if amazon and AT&T don't have any agreement or contract, how exactly is AT&T going to bill them....? You can't send a bill to an IP address, can you? (What port would that be?)
This story just doesn't make sense...
Good question, and in fact, it's been done. And discussed in this slashdot article. It's not exactly what you describe, and costs well more than $1000/wall, but it's in the right direction.
I tend to agree. Although lot's of Singapore's laws and policies have elicited ridicule or criticism in the west, they have, for the most part, been successful in creating a prosperous and surprisingly free society. For a forceful and rational discussion of Singapore's policies by the man who crafted many of them, read Lee Kuan Yew's new memoirs.
Here's a wacky idea: try going to hotjobs.com|monster.com, and search for jobs containing the words "unix" and "intern". Just a thought. Or here's a more complicated idea: search for jobs that contain the word "unix" and then contact those company's hr depts about possible internships. If you have trouble with either idea, just feel free to ask slashdot again.