Kirk is not especially corrupt. He is a standard issue machine Republican and I hate most of what he does, but he is no more currupt that any other senator playing the money game. (which is a different issue)
I still will never vote for him, he tows the Republican line FAR too much, but I'm glad (if shocked) he is co-sponsoring this bill.
you cant just walk away from a student loan like you can a house.
You have to declare bankrupcy & be able to show 'undue hardship'.
This of course turns the students into indentured servants to the banks or government, but let's not worry about the young. After all, we all know it is the baby boomers who really matter
Perhaps the reason analysts thought that is because there would be no point whatsoever of having a service that JUSt stores pictures and music when other out there do everything already.
My intro CS prof always told us that "The first rule of programming is.... the user is an idiot."
He's wrong. Totally, 180 degrees, wrong.
Users know what they want..
Whoah, let's just stop right there. In what universe do you live in that users know what they want. Side effects and complexity aside, I have never seen a project (infrastructure OR coding) where the users didnt come in halfway through and ask for things to change because they did not understand their own damn requirements.
I have seen business process people actually break down and start yelling on the phone because Suzie and Tom insist that they said the EXACT oppisite of what they really said during the vetting of the processes to be built into the ERP software. I have personally lost sleep because a user changed the requirements for the sizing of a data warehouse a week before go live..
Users ARE idiots. So are developers and administrators, but at least most of us realize it and admit to it.
Not accurate. The States that seceded attepted to setup a federal government, which included a constitution. They may not have tried to rule the ENTIRE US, but that does not mean it was not a civil war.
In Sudan for instance, the South recently gained independance from the north. They ever tried to control the north. But it was still called a civili war.
The only people who dont call the Civil War a civil war are Southerners who wish to revise history to make their forefathers look like heros and not the biggoted traitors that they were.
you have obviously never worked in the military or government. Here are some ideas you might be unfamiliar with...
1) It is standard procedure to remove someone under investgaiton from their post. Pretty much ANY investigation, criminal, civil, related to their job or not.
2) Is it very posssible the reason why he did not get his old job back was because it was filled during his leave. If a position is considered critical it would be filled ASAP. (It is also possible there are other reasons, but to assume he was simply fired shows ignorance of process)
3) If he was found guilty of any wrong doing he would never have been reinstated in ANY form. And if it was a criminal issue he would not ever work for the government again in any fashion. If he was found to have perpetrated scientific falsehoods, he would never have worked in the field again, anywhere.
4) It does sound like PEER is advocating for the scientist, so that part of the summary is misleading. But the Bush administration had a long history of acqusations of muzzling scientists on this exact subject, so the presumption that there was an ulterior motive is reasonable: (first example in google) http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1555183
5) The important point of this article was not the few misleading points, but that there was a serious effort to muzzle anti climate scientists who went against the party line. And if you are foolish enough to think that such an investigation would not have a chilling effect on other government scientists, you are seriously naieve.
Almost everyone hates change, period. The change in question doesnt matter. You could have the best UI in the world and people would hate it. Because it makes them have to learn and most people dont see value in learning something when the ROi on the time investment would be more than 1 minute.
We humans are hard wired to not see the long term.
I would like to see the techincal details on this, in particular the damage the neutrons and gamma rays escaping the reactor would do to the alloys. Many become brittle in reactors with water to moderate most of the neutrons and some of the energy form the gamma rays.
I am guessing that these guys have information on this, and Im not implying that they didnt take this into account, I am just curious how they plan to account for it and how it might change the maintenance and life cycle of the plants parts.
This is a good explination, but the implication that the only way mating took place in the 'animal human' era was by rape ignore the reality of animal life. Rape is an act of violence which has very little to do with sex and mating. Many primates take mates, some even premanantly.
Now, you could argue that consent was never given in such a situation, but as you pointed out, there was no free will, so consent was not really possible. We dont say that one ape rapes another. We can call it dominant behavior, alpha behavior, mating rituals, etc. But not rape.
You also ignore othe factors which lead to the rise of civilization. Agriculture in particular. Aside from the interpersonal linkages, communities fought because of scarce resources. With the advent of agriculture (and animal husbandry/domestication) you vastly increased the resources available in a very localized geographical space because even if you went beyond the 150 personal interpersonal limit you could still feed and house the entire group. This, plus the ability to decentralize power (because of a social heirarchy) added to the abiliity to create communities. There is also the idea of larger groups being more safe from other groups and predators.
Im not saying you are wrong in your assessment of the place religion had in the groweth of civilization, Im saying you simply things WAY too much.
It looks like the tree has 4 braches, each with 5 cells.
The flat array has 20 as well.
What strikes me is the surface area taken by the tree versus flat. If I can get 2x as many cells per unit of area in a flat design, would it actually be better?
Follow up experiments would be good. What kind of branch density can you get? How does height affect possible density? As someone pointed out, what if you have all 20 flat cells rotation to point at the sun 24/7.
I moved my entire 401k to 'cash' 2 weeks ago when I read that a downgrade was likely even if a deal was completed. If others were too stupid to do the same, that is their fault.
That having been said, I thnk it is funny that the same people who would not accpet a 3% tax increase will be hit the hardest by the market plunge.
huge flaw in your statement. We already pay interest on the debt we have. If the interest rates fgo up, the cost of servicing that debt will rise. We could balance that budget tomorrow and still have to pay a lot more money.
Actually there is a LARGE ammount of blame to put on the credit agencies. Here is how it worked:
S&P et al, gave a AAA rating to mortgage based securities which should never have gotten them. They ignored the details and fundamentals of the mortgage backed investments, which caused a large ammount of money to go into those investments. People thought they were uber safe. As safe as treasury bills, but at a high return %.
The value of those investments went up as money flowed into them. Which meant the investment banks put more such securities together to float on the market. This cycle continued until the crash, more and more securities being floated as AAA.
The market for securities this cycle created meant that the banks were encouraged to give out more and more loans. Because the market for mortgages has a limited supply of buyers with high credit, the policies for those loans got more and more lax, and that the banks ignored peoples credit and ability to pay. It also meant that a large number of banks took rather shady action by convincing people that they could afford those mortgages. This was done because the banks knew they could just sell off the mortgages to Wall Street as a AAA investment. There was no risk to the bank or mortgage company itself.
Then, when the collapse of those securities occured, the ARM's went up in interest by several %. This put the mortgage costs way out of range for many people. THIS is what caused many defailts.
In the end the inability of the bond companies to accurately gauge the value of the investments created and fostered by the bubble and the AA rating earlier investments were given that perpetuated the cycle.
I am not saying that people were not stupid. But people have always been stupid. In the past however, we had safety mechanisms in place to prevent mass stupidity (down payment requirements, fairly high credit rating requirements). Because of the AAA rating those investments got (plus some other factors like the rampant buying and selling of mortgages to create those investments and congress encouraging the big credit houses to lend to high risk people) those safety mechanisms broke down.
Short version, the GP is right, is the credit agencies had accurately gauged the value and risk of those mortgage backed securities, the housing bubble would not have been NEARLY as bad.
Why would saving small town life be a good thing. Small towns seem to breed ignorance and hatred. They require far more resources than they provide(especially infrastructure costs) , and add almost nothing of cultural or socieital value.
Oddly, even is we wanted to switch to an OSS alternative, it is not an option. And not just because of the training issues. (although that would be tough)
1) All of finance would have to rebuild their complex macro driven sheets to work with the new solution. (This is an issue with new office versions too, but not as bad) 2) Users with tiny access databases would have the same issue (training them on an alternative would be a nightmare) 3) This is the biggie. All 3rd party applications that interact with Office would not work. This includes HR, finance, IT, demand forecasting, data warehousing, legal, and other apps. 4) Lastly, communicaiton with external partners (legal, sales, marketing, R&D) would be hindered greatly because of format incompatability.
#3 alone is enough to scare off most IT departments.
As much as it would be great from a cost standpoint (even with training costs) in th long run, the cost to the business just doesnt make sense.
The term limits might not even be required. I have often said (during demates with friends) that limiting the House to its current low value severely impacts politics
Here is the simple argument:
If you had # of reps based upon a set number of people rather than % of population, you would end up with many more reps. Let's call it 10x for easy numbers With 10x the number of reps, the population each rep would be beholden to would be 1/10th the size. This would mean that individuals would have ~10x as much voice (perhaps more because the signal to noise ratio would go down a lot). You would have a harder time jerrymandering because the number would fluctuate only with populaiton growth and shift. It would still occur, but with much small districts it would be harder for one party to screw over voters You would also allow for a much greater chance to have 3rd party or independant candidates. Elections would depend far less on mass media if the target audience was that small, and truely local elections would be held. Lastly and most importantly, the lobby money would be diluated an insane ammount. Which would make it harder to buy votes.
Personally I would not mind having 10x or even 100x the number of reps. 1 rep for every 10000 or even 100000 people seems reasonable. You would have to modify the lawmaking process a bit, otherwise you might get swamped with bills, and you would need to reconfigure/alter the actual physical house, but Im on with that.
Having 1 rep for 750k people is silly. How can someone represent me AND 750,000 other people in a fair and reasonable manner.
The validity of those comments depends solely upon the content of her email/letter. I will assume from the fact that you call hm/her an obama rubber stamp that they are Dem and you are not. I will then assume further that something untoward was said in the letter.
Yes I am assuming here, but I would be shocked if I were wrong.
You assume that equality is tax payment was the intent of the amendment to the constitution which enabled incomes to be collected to begin with, which is just not true. Look at the tax rates from inception of income tax to now. It has ALWAYS been graduated.
WW II was primarily paid for by rich people. The tax rates went through the roof during that time. What happened to taxes during the last 2 wars? they went DOWN. Of course debt was going to skyrocket!!
Lastly, you assume that high taxes on the rich hurts GDP. This is also not true
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Kirk is not especially corrupt. He is a standard issue machine Republican and I hate most of what he does, but he is no more currupt that any other senator playing the money game. (which is a different issue)
I still will never vote for him, he tows the Republican line FAR too much, but I'm glad (if shocked) he is co-sponsoring this bill.
you cant just walk away from a student loan like you can a house.
You have to declare bankrupcy & be able to show 'undue hardship'.
This of course turns the students into indentured servants to the banks or government, but let's not worry about the young. After all, we all know it is the baby boomers who really matter
Perhaps the reason analysts thought that is because there would be no point whatsoever of having a service that JUSt stores pictures and music when other out there do everything already.
My intro CS prof always told us that "The first rule of programming is.... the user is an idiot."
He's wrong. Totally, 180 degrees, wrong.
Users know what they want..
Whoah, let's just stop right there. In what universe do you live in that users know what they want. Side effects and complexity aside, I have never seen a project (infrastructure OR coding) where the users didnt come in halfway through and ask for things to change because they did not understand their own damn requirements.
I have seen business process people actually break down and start yelling on the phone because Suzie and Tom insist that they said the EXACT oppisite of what they really said during the vetting of the processes to be built into the ERP software. I have personally lost sleep because a user changed the requirements for the sizing of a data warehouse a week before go live..
Users ARE idiots. So are developers and administrators, but at least most of us realize it and admit to it.
yes, because Im totally ok with a picture of me drunk on a Saturday night floating around the State of Illinois' databases.....
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/civil+war
civil war
noun
a war between political factions or regions within the same country.
Not accurate. The States that seceded attepted to setup a federal government, which included a constitution. They may not have tried to rule the ENTIRE US, but that does not mean it was not a civil war.
In Sudan for instance, the South recently gained independance from the north. They ever tried to control the north. But it was still called a civili war.
The only people who dont call the Civil War a civil war are Southerners who wish to revise history to make their forefathers look like heros and not the biggoted traitors that they were.
you have obviously never worked in the military or government. Here are some ideas you might be unfamiliar with...
1) It is standard procedure to remove someone under investgaiton from their post. Pretty much ANY investigation, criminal, civil, related to their job or not.
2) Is it very posssible the reason why he did not get his old job back was because it was filled during his leave. If a position is considered critical it would be filled ASAP. (It is also possible there are other reasons, but to assume he was simply fired shows ignorance of process)
3) If he was found guilty of any wrong doing he would never have been reinstated in ANY form. And if it was a criminal issue he would not ever work for the government again in any fashion. If he was found to have perpetrated scientific falsehoods, he would never have worked in the field again, anywhere.
4) It does sound like PEER is advocating for the scientist, so that part of the summary is misleading. But the Bush administration had a long history of acqusations of muzzling scientists on this exact subject, so the presumption that there was an ulterior motive is reasonable:
(first example in google)
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1555183
5) The important point of this article was not the few misleading points, but that there was a serious effort to muzzle anti climate scientists who went against the party line. And if you are foolish enough to think that such an investigation would not have a chilling effect on other government scientists, you are seriously naieve.
Almost everyone hates change, period. The change in question doesnt matter. You could have the best UI in the world and people would hate it. Because it makes them have to learn and most people dont see value in learning something when the ROi on the time investment would be more than 1 minute.
We humans are hard wired to not see the long term.
I would like to see the techincal details on this, in particular the damage the neutrons and gamma rays escaping the reactor would do to the alloys. Many become brittle in reactors with water to moderate most of the neutrons and some of the energy form the gamma rays.
I am guessing that these guys have information on this, and Im not implying that they didnt take this into account, I am just curious how they plan to account for it and how it might change the maintenance and life cycle of the plants parts.
This is a good explination, but the implication that the only way mating took place in the 'animal human' era was by rape ignore the reality of animal life. Rape is an act of violence which has very little to do with sex and mating. Many primates take mates, some even premanantly.
Now, you could argue that consent was never given in such a situation, but as you pointed out, there was no free will, so consent was not really possible. We dont say that one ape rapes another. We can call it dominant behavior, alpha behavior, mating rituals, etc. But not rape.
You also ignore othe factors which lead to the rise of civilization. Agriculture in particular. Aside from the interpersonal linkages, communities fought because of scarce resources. With the advent of agriculture (and animal husbandry/domestication) you vastly increased the resources available in a very localized geographical space because even if you went beyond the 150 personal interpersonal limit you could still feed and house the entire group. This, plus the ability to decentralize power (because of a social heirarchy) added to the abiliity to create communities. There is also the idea of larger groups being more safe from other groups and predators.
Im not saying you are wrong in your assessment of the place religion had in the groweth of civilization, Im saying you simply things WAY too much.
It looks like the tree has 4 braches, each with 5 cells.
The flat array has 20 as well.
What strikes me is the surface area taken by the tree versus flat. If I can get 2x as many cells per unit of area in a flat design, would it actually be better?
Follow up experiments would be good. What kind of branch density can you get? How does height affect possible density? As someone pointed out, what if you have all 20 flat cells rotation to point at the sun 24/7.
Good start though!
I am more impressed by the documentation and accreditation on the website!
except that the government can create more inches easily enough by raising taxes. Or require less inches by cutting spending.
Preferably both.
I moved my entire 401k to 'cash' 2 weeks ago when I read that a downgrade was likely even if a deal was completed. If others were too stupid to do the same, that is their fault.
That having been said, I thnk it is funny that the same people who would not accpet a 3% tax increase will be hit the hardest by the market plunge.
huge flaw in your statement. We already pay interest on the debt we have. If the interest rates fgo up, the cost of servicing that debt will rise. We could balance that budget tomorrow and still have to pay a lot more money.
Actually there is a LARGE ammount of blame to put on the credit agencies. Here is how it worked:
S&P et al, gave a AAA rating to mortgage based securities which should never have gotten them. They ignored the details and fundamentals of the mortgage backed investments, which caused a large ammount of money to go into those investments. People thought they were uber safe. As safe as treasury bills, but at a high return %.
The value of those investments went up as money flowed into them. Which meant the investment banks put more such securities together to float on the market. This cycle continued until the crash, more and more securities being floated as AAA.
The market for securities this cycle created meant that the banks were encouraged to give out more and more loans. Because the market for mortgages has a limited supply of buyers with high credit, the policies for those loans got more and more lax, and that the banks ignored peoples credit and ability to pay. It also meant that a large number of banks took rather shady action by convincing people that they could afford those mortgages. This was done because the banks knew they could just sell off the mortgages to Wall Street as a AAA investment. There was no risk to the bank or mortgage company itself.
Then, when the collapse of those securities occured, the ARM's went up in interest by several %. This put the mortgage costs way out of range for many people. THIS is what caused many defailts.
In the end the inability of the bond companies to accurately gauge the value of the investments created and fostered by the bubble and the AA rating earlier investments were given that perpetuated the cycle.
I am not saying that people were not stupid. But people have always been stupid. In the past however, we had safety mechanisms in place to prevent mass stupidity (down payment requirements, fairly high credit rating requirements). Because of the AAA rating those investments got (plus some other factors like the rampant buying and selling of mortgages to create those investments and congress encouraging the big credit houses to lend to high risk people) those safety mechanisms broke down.
Short version, the GP is right, is the credit agencies had accurately gauged the value and risk of those mortgage backed securities, the housing bubble would not have been NEARLY as bad.
Why would saving small town life be a good thing. Small towns seem to breed ignorance and hatred. They require far more resources than they provide(especially infrastructure costs) , and add almost nothing of cultural or socieital value.
A Spiderman with non-white ethnic background is just diverse. Anyone can get bitten by a radioactive spider.
Wouldn't a Japanese Spiderman have been more likely.
...and I thought the US government was clueless.
The data on the law must have been encrypted...
Oddly, even is we wanted to switch to an OSS alternative, it is not an option. And not just because of the training issues. (although that would be tough)
1) All of finance would have to rebuild their complex macro driven sheets to work with the new solution. (This is an issue with new office versions too, but not as bad)
2) Users with tiny access databases would have the same issue (training them on an alternative would be a nightmare)
3) This is the biggie. All 3rd party applications that interact with Office would not work. This includes HR, finance, IT, demand forecasting, data warehousing, legal, and other apps.
4) Lastly, communicaiton with external partners (legal, sales, marketing, R&D) would be hindered greatly because of format incompatability.
#3 alone is enough to scare off most IT departments.
As much as it would be great from a cost standpoint (even with training costs) in th long run, the cost to the business just doesnt make sense.
They did the same thing with oil. Look it up. Government fostering new technology is NOT a bad thing.
The term limits might not even be required. I have often said (during demates with friends) that limiting the House to its current low value severely impacts politics
Here is the simple argument:
If you had # of reps based upon a set number of people rather than % of population, you would end up with many more reps. Let's call it 10x for easy numbers
With 10x the number of reps, the population each rep would be beholden to would be 1/10th the size.
This would mean that individuals would have ~10x as much voice (perhaps more because the signal to noise ratio would go down a lot).
You would have a harder time jerrymandering because the number would fluctuate only with populaiton growth and shift. It would still occur, but with much small districts it would be harder for one party to screw over voters
You would also allow for a much greater chance to have 3rd party or independant candidates.
Elections would depend far less on mass media if the target audience was that small, and truely local elections would be held.
Lastly and most importantly, the lobby money would be diluated an insane ammount. Which would make it harder to buy votes.
Personally I would not mind having 10x or even 100x the number of reps. 1 rep for every 10000 or even 100000 people seems reasonable. You would have to modify the lawmaking process a bit, otherwise you might get swamped with bills, and you would need to reconfigure/alter the actual physical house, but Im on with that.
Having 1 rep for 750k people is silly. How can someone represent me AND 750,000 other people in a fair and reasonable manner.
The validity of those comments depends solely upon the content of her email/letter. I will assume from the fact that you call hm/her an obama rubber stamp that they are Dem and you are not. I will then assume further that something untoward was said in the letter.
Yes I am assuming here, but I would be shocked if I were wrong.
You assume that equality is tax payment was the intent of the amendment to the constitution which enabled incomes to be collected to begin with, which is just not true. Look at the tax rates from inception of income tax to now. It has ALWAYS been graduated.
WW II was primarily paid for by rich people. The tax rates went through the roof during that time. What happened to taxes during the last 2 wars? they went DOWN. Of course debt was going to skyrocket!!
Lastly, you assume that high taxes on the rich hurts GDP. This is also not true
http://www.slate.com/id/2245781/