According to the Constitution the Government is not supposed to be doing either. The government exists to protect your rights. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have the right to wireless internet, and contrary to current policies, corporations do not have rights.
Your post assumes I'm from Japan...which I'm not...never even been there. It is possible to respect a nation without being one of it's citizens.
It's quite possible that someone who did commit a warcrime is buried at veterans shrine...in Japan or in any other country that has ever fought a war. But that fact shouldn't stop anyone from visiting those shrines to pay respect to all the others who gave their lives serving their country with honor.
States debts get more attention since they don't make the money...literally. The feds can do pretty much whatever they want to give themselves more money, but the states have less power, and thus have less options to cover their debt.
Also many states are required by their own laws to balance their budgets.
"There is a difference between nulear and atomic bombs."
Nuked is the common use term for being the victim of any fission or fusion type explosive device.
And anyway there isn't really a difference, since a nuclear weapon is "a weapon whose destructive power derives from an uncontrolled nuclear reaction", and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan fit that description.
However there is a difference between a "nulear" bomb and an atomic bomb...there is no such thing as a "nulear" bomb. Please, if you're going to nit-pick...at least proof read for typos.
Re:H_2 or O_3?
on
Killer Ozone?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, I think the submitter was referring to the Hummer2 not diatomic hydrogen.
But hydrogen is what I thought at first glance too...
99.9% of the current population of Japan had nothing to do with WWII, so trying to blame them for it, or hold them responsible for it is bullshit. Your history is also a bit off...since you seem to have forgotten that Japan is the only country that has ever actually been nuked. And there were warcrimes trials after WWII in Japan, same as in Germany...and the guilty have been punished. Imperial Japan paid for its crimes long ago.
The current nation of Japan is an upstanding world citizen, and shouldn't be compared to nations such as China, which are committing crimes against humanity as we speak.
The past is past, we should learn its lessons and not make its mistakes again, but dwelling on it continually only gets you into clusterfucks like we have in the middle east.
Hmmm....5'11" and 135lbs is probably similarly skinny...
But we should be comparing BMI really...mine is 18.8, yours is 18.0...so I guess you "win". (for others who want to calculate, just google it...there are many online gizmos for BMI) 18.5 is considered the boundary between healthy and underweight, but there are exceptions to every rule.
"You sort of suspect that Californians and New Yorkers might be a tad more educated and informed than Montanans and Kansans?"
And you would sort of not be right.
According to the Education State Rankings Annual Survey, New York does indeed rank higher at 6th, with Montana at 10th, Kansas at 15th, and California dragging in at 43rd.
Basically, though, you just picked a couple bad examples, since most of the "Red" states do come in the bottom half...
However, that survey mainly looks at k-12 education quality...maybe not quite what we're looking for.
According to the census, the rankings for high school and college graduates as a percent of total population are as follows (in that order):
So MT and KS have more high school graduates, but less college graduates (although they are above average, unlike NY and CA on HS grads). Seems pretty inconclusive either way.
My personal observations growing up in a blue upper midwest state (rural), and living in a red western state (rural), blue midwest state (urban), and a red midwest state (urban), spending significant time in an eastern blue state (urban), and spending the last 7+ years at institutions of higher learning are:
1) There are idiots in equal quantities everywhere without any regard to political affiliation. 2) People in rural areas tend to have a better understanding of urban issues than urban residents do of rural issues, although I wouldn't consider the majority of either group well informed about the other. 3) People in the rural west are more socially liberal and fiscally conservative than those in the rural midwest. Urban dwellers are more socially and fiscally liberal than both. 4) Degrees don't necessarily mean someone is informed or intelligent.
While I agree with your general opinion that the US elections system is FUBAR, I have a couple bones to pick...
Regarding the electoral college, and your vote not counting: In a direct popular election, you could say that every vote for the loser doesn't count...since it doesn't matter whether you win by one vote or 1,000,000, you'd still be President. So which is worse, the losing party votes in each state "not couting" or the losing party votes for the whole country "not couting"? In the end, the presidency is a winner take all election...there's no way around it.
You mention the lunacy of of that CA ballot issue, but fail to see that the electoral college was designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing. The people* of less populous colonies were afraid that the large states would try to impose their will on them, and thus forced the Senate and electoral college to be included before they would ratify the Constitution.
* Note the "people" was only the rich landed white males, but that has been fixed (mostly, still working on the rich part) by the very government they designed.
Of course, many things have changed since those days, but I think the EC has served us well, and still continues to do so. The US is still a federation of states, albeit with considerably less sovereignty than earlier (and whether that is good or bad is another discussion altogether). When you vote in CA, you are voting to decide what candidate your state will support for president, because the president is elected by the states, not the people. The people are the citizens of the states, and the states are the citizens of the federal government (weighted according to the Constitution to protect the minority, but respect the majority).
But walking into a Post Office and sending child porn pics to 10,000,000 people from a forged address, would be sure to draw some attention. Not to mention how expensive it would be, the enormous time involved, the fact that there are video cameras at most PO's, and you're sure to leave some type of physical evidence on the envelopes.
Anonymous mass snail-mailing is just not feasible at the scale it is possible via e-mail.
"Former Governor Racicot, as chairman of the Republican Party, said he thought that the Patriot Act has to be changed and fixed."
I've seen this quote used several times in various places, but everyone misses the most dramatic part: Marc Racicot (pronounced: Ras-coe), was first on the list for AG...ahead of Ashcroft. But he turned down the position because he was just finishing two terms as Gov. of MT, and wanted time off to spend with his family. This didn't get much coverage in the news, except in MT.
Now, imagine how different things would be if somebody who didn't like the PATRIOT Act was charged with enforcing it...
I'll answer both parts: 1) It could also have the opposite effect...a Kerry supporters see Kerry is behind and get out the vote to try to make up the difference. Given the state of partisanship this election, I think this is more likely. 2) I doubt any state is really 100%, it's just a matter of rounding to the nearest integer.
What I find confusing about the Stanford page is their coloring of the map...why is MO red with only 77% and CO yellow with 100%? I'd think the line between red-yellow-blue should be something constant, like 95% or so....
Also it's interesting to see I'm in the second most up-for-grabs state (OH)...the Bush and Kerry ads every commercial break on TV could have told me that as well, but I like numbers. Personally, I'll be throwing a wrench in the works and voting for Badnarik. Take that pseudo-Democracy!
It's just a survey of what they claim to have, not whether any of it works. For example, my sister is a PhD candidate at Temple (#4) and says their IT is the most backward she has ever seen (dot matrix printers in student labs, for example)....
A more useful survey would be one of the computing experiences of the outgoing class at different colleges, that would give a picture of what was really going on, rather than who has a buzzword savy PR department.
You have hit upon the basic principle of Americans...independence.
If somebody (especially somebody we don't know) tells us to do something, even if we wouldn't mind doing it, we say no. We like being different, and contrary...and we're damn stubborn about it. In this way America is a lot like a two year old...we can be convinced, but you have to be careful about it, because if you start sounding bossy we plug our ears and just yell, NO, NO, NO, NO!
The solution, for you fer'ners out there who would like us to listen to you a bit more, is simply don't act like you're right (even when you are). Present your opinion as an opinion, and don't imply in any way that your opinion should be ours as well. We'll listen to what you think, and then do what we want...and sometimes what you think will affect the outcome. And sometimes is better than never, which is what you get when you try to tell us what we should do.
They weren't adware...but still damn annoying...came preinstalled on my laptop, and using the "uninstall" option didn't really uninstall, as Ad-aware was needed to clean it out.
In any case, the types of games involved aren't going to be played by computer gamers on/., even if there wasn't adware attached. These companies are aiming for the non-computer savy (and cheap) people out there, who play low quality "free" online games and couldn't tell adware from from underwear.
Re:farsighted
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's actually fairly common...when you have a bunch of smart people working on difficult problems they tend to breeze through the easy parts, and don't necessarily double check each other's work because of "Jim has 2 PhD's...he'll get that right" syndrome.
Reminds me of taking caculus exams...it was always something dumb like switching +/- or "1+1=3" that I got wrong...not the partial differentials.
It just shows that no matter how smart you are, if you hurry and don't pay attention to every trivial detail you'll make mistakes.
In Columbus the city well field sits near the Scioto river downstream from the the sewage treatment plant outflow. I don't have the numbers in front of me now, but the city gets a large percentage of it's water from these wells, which draw a large percentage of their water from the river, which gets a large percentage of it's dischage from the sewage outflow. In the end reckoning most people in Columbus, are drinking what went down their own drains.
I'm sure there are similar situations all around the world.
No need for major concern though...thanks to strict EPA standards, sewage outflows are some of the cleanest water on the planet. There are malfunctions of course, which is why you hear about boil water orders from time to time.
You should be more concerned about your water quality if you have a private well and a septic system...that is where the real problems with bacterial contamination are. You just don't hear about them because the don't affect 1,000's of people at once.
I think the result would be a third party candidate being elected. Since the R&D's are pretty much even in numbers, and hate each other, they would all vote +1 for their guy and -1 for the other guy, effectively making their score 0. Any better known third party candidates (like Nader) would get a good number of -1's from the party they tend to draw from (a spite vote, you could say). But somebody like Badnarik, who has decent support but nobody really bothers disliking, could get enough +1's (even though the vast majority voted 0) to win.
Of course this would only work once...then the R&D's would realize they can't ignore third parties and would smear them just like they do each other.
Slashdot Mirror
And the worst thing:
According to the Constitution the Government is not supposed to be doing either. The government exists to protect your rights. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have the right to wireless internet, and contrary to current policies, corporations do not have rights.
Your post assumes I'm from Japan...which I'm not...never even been there. It is possible to respect a nation without being one of it's citizens.
It's quite possible that someone who did commit a warcrime is buried at veterans shrine...in Japan or in any other country that has ever fought a war. But that fact shouldn't stop anyone from visiting those shrines to pay respect to all the others who gave their lives serving their country with honor.
"It's entirely possible to come up with a system for tracking how much you drive, without tracking where you drive."
We already have...it's called an ODOMETER...and they come standard in every car.
States debts get more attention since they don't make the money...literally. The feds can do pretty much whatever they want to give themselves more money, but the states have less power, and thus have less options to cover their debt.
Also many states are required by their own laws to balance their budgets.
"There is a difference between nulear and atomic bombs."
Nuked is the common use term for being the victim of any fission or fusion type explosive device.
And anyway there isn't really a difference, since a nuclear weapon is "a weapon whose destructive power derives from an uncontrolled nuclear reaction", and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan fit that description.
However there is a difference between a "nulear" bomb and an atomic bomb...there is no such thing as a "nulear" bomb. Please, if you're going to nit-pick...at least proof read for typos.
Actually, I think the submitter was referring to the Hummer2 not diatomic hydrogen.
But hydrogen is what I thought at first glance too...
Insightful? More like flamebait....
99.9% of the current population of Japan had nothing to do with WWII, so trying to blame them for it, or hold them responsible for it is bullshit. Your history is also a bit off...since you seem to have forgotten that Japan is the only country that has ever actually been nuked. And there were warcrimes trials after WWII in Japan, same as in Germany...and the guilty have been punished. Imperial Japan paid for its crimes long ago.
The current nation of Japan is an upstanding world citizen, and shouldn't be compared to nations such as China, which are committing crimes against humanity as we speak.
The past is past, we should learn its lessons and not make its mistakes again, but dwelling on it continually only gets you into clusterfucks like we have in the middle east.
For an example of how cheapassed most people are, see exhibit A: "Walmart".
Hmmm....5'11" and 135lbs is probably similarly skinny...
But we should be comparing BMI really...mine is 18.8, yours is 18.0...so I guess you "win". (for others who want to calculate, just google it...there are many online gizmos for BMI) 18.5 is considered the boundary between healthy and underweight, but there are exceptions to every rule.
"You sort of suspect that Californians and New Yorkers might be a tad more educated and informed than Montanans and Kansans?"
And you would sort of not be right.
According to the Education State Rankings Annual Survey, New York does indeed rank higher at 6th, with Montana at 10th, Kansas at 15th, and California dragging in at 43rd.
Basically, though, you just picked a couple bad examples, since most of the "Red" states do come in the bottom half...
However, that survey mainly looks at k-12 education quality...maybe not quite what we're looking for.
According to the census, the rankings for high school and college graduates as a percent of total population are as follows (in that order):
New York: 82.0% (t-33), 29.3% (12)
California: 79.0% (t-44), 28.5% (13)
Montana: 88.3% (7), 24.8% (t-23)
Kansas: 87.5% (12), 26.7% (18)
So MT and KS have more high school graduates, but less college graduates (although they are above average, unlike NY and CA on HS grads). Seems pretty inconclusive either way.
My personal observations growing up in a blue upper midwest state (rural), and living in a red western state (rural), blue midwest state (urban), and a red midwest state (urban), spending significant time in an eastern blue state (urban), and spending the last 7+ years at institutions of higher learning are:
1) There are idiots in equal quantities everywhere without any regard to political affiliation.
2) People in rural areas tend to have a better understanding of urban issues than urban residents do of rural issues, although I wouldn't consider the majority of either group well informed about the other.
3) People in the rural west are more socially liberal and fiscally conservative than those in the rural midwest. Urban dwellers are more socially and fiscally liberal than both.
4) Degrees don't necessarily mean someone is informed or intelligent.
Don't visit American websites....
Buh-bye!
While I agree with your general opinion that the US elections system is FUBAR, I have a couple bones to pick...
Regarding the electoral college, and your vote not counting: In a direct popular election, you could say that every vote for the loser doesn't count...since it doesn't matter whether you win by one vote or 1,000,000, you'd still be President. So which is worse, the losing party votes in each state "not couting" or the losing party votes for the whole country "not couting"? In the end, the presidency is a winner take all election...there's no way around it.
You mention the lunacy of of that CA ballot issue, but fail to see that the electoral college was designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing. The people* of less populous colonies were afraid that the large states would try to impose their will on them, and thus forced the Senate and electoral college to be included before they would ratify the Constitution.
* Note the "people" was only the rich landed white males, but that has been fixed (mostly, still working on the rich part) by the very government they designed.
Of course, many things have changed since those days, but I think the EC has served us well, and still continues to do so. The US is still a federation of states, albeit with considerably less sovereignty than earlier (and whether that is good or bad is another discussion altogether). When you vote in CA, you are voting to decide what candidate your state will support for president, because the president is elected by the states, not the people. The people are the citizens of the states, and the states are the citizens of the federal government (weighted according to the Constitution to protect the minority, but respect the majority).
An interesting analogy....
But walking into a Post Office and sending child porn pics to 10,000,000 people from a forged address, would be sure to draw some attention. Not to mention how expensive it would be, the enormous time involved, the fact that there are video cameras at most PO's, and you're sure to leave some type of physical evidence on the envelopes.
Anonymous mass snail-mailing is just not feasible at the scale it is possible via e-mail.
"Former Governor Racicot, as chairman of the Republican Party, said he thought that the Patriot Act has to be changed and fixed."
I've seen this quote used several times in various places, but everyone misses the most dramatic part: Marc Racicot (pronounced: Ras-coe), was first on the list for AG...ahead of Ashcroft. But he turned down the position because he was just finishing two terms as Gov. of MT, and wanted time off to spend with his family. This didn't get much coverage in the news, except in MT.
Now, imagine how different things would be if somebody who didn't like the PATRIOT Act was charged with enforcing it...
I'll answer both parts:
1) It could also have the opposite effect...a Kerry supporters see Kerry is behind and get out the vote to try to make up the difference. Given the state of partisanship this election, I think this is more likely.
2) I doubt any state is really 100%, it's just a matter of rounding to the nearest integer.
What I find confusing about the Stanford page is their coloring of the map...why is MO red with only 77% and CO yellow with 100%? I'd think the line between red-yellow-blue should be something constant, like 95% or so....
Also it's interesting to see I'm in the second most up-for-grabs state (OH)...the Bush and Kerry ads every commercial break on TV could have told me that as well, but I like numbers. Personally, I'll be throwing a wrench in the works and voting for Badnarik. Take that pseudo-Democracy!
This is Apple we're talking about...inexpensive is not in their vocabulary.
If they do come out with a flash-based iPod, they'll still want $500 for it.
Forget flogging, chop off a finger for each offense...I'd like to see them hack without fingers.
It's just a survey of what they claim to have, not whether any of it works. For example, my sister is a PhD candidate at Temple (#4) and says their IT is the most backward she has ever seen (dot matrix printers in student labs, for example)....
A more useful survey would be one of the computing experiences of the outgoing class at different colleges, that would give a picture of what was really going on, rather than who has a buzzword savy PR department.
You have hit upon the basic principle of Americans...independence.
If somebody (especially somebody we don't know) tells us to do something, even if we wouldn't mind doing it, we say no. We like being different, and contrary...and we're damn stubborn about it. In this way America is a lot like a two year old...we can be convinced, but you have to be careful about it, because if you start sounding bossy we plug our ears and just yell, NO, NO, NO, NO!
The solution, for you fer'ners out there who would like us to listen to you a bit more, is simply don't act like you're right (even when you are). Present your opinion as an opinion, and don't imply in any way that your opinion should be ours as well. We'll listen to what you think, and then do what we want...and sometimes what you think will affect the outcome. And sometimes is better than never, which is what you get when you try to tell us what we should do.
They weren't adware...but still damn annoying...came preinstalled on my laptop, and using the "uninstall" option didn't really uninstall, as Ad-aware was needed to clean it out.
/., even if there wasn't adware attached. These companies are aiming for the non-computer savy (and cheap) people out there, who play low quality "free" online games and couldn't tell adware from from underwear.
In any case, the types of games involved aren't going to be played by computer gamers on
It's actually fairly common...when you have a bunch of smart people working on difficult problems they tend to breeze through the easy parts, and don't necessarily double check each other's work because of "Jim has 2 PhD's...he'll get that right" syndrome.
Reminds me of taking caculus exams...it was always something dumb like switching +/- or "1+1=3" that I got wrong...not the partial differentials.
It just shows that no matter how smart you are, if you hurry and don't pay attention to every trivial detail you'll make mistakes.
In Columbus the city well field sits near the Scioto river downstream from the the sewage treatment plant outflow. I don't have the numbers in front of me now, but the city gets a large percentage of it's water from these wells, which draw a large percentage of their water from the river, which gets a large percentage of it's dischage from the sewage outflow. In the end reckoning most people in Columbus, are drinking what went down their own drains.
I'm sure there are similar situations all around the world.
No need for major concern though...thanks to strict EPA standards, sewage outflows are some of the cleanest water on the planet. There are malfunctions of course, which is why you hear about boil water orders from time to time.
You should be more concerned about your water quality if you have a private well and a septic system...that is where the real problems with bacterial contamination are. You just don't hear about them because the don't affect 1,000's of people at once.
IAAHydrogeologist
This would be an interesting system...
I think the result would be a third party candidate being elected. Since the R&D's are pretty much even in numbers, and hate each other, they would all vote +1 for their guy and -1 for the other guy, effectively making their score 0. Any better known third party candidates (like Nader) would get a good number of -1's from the party they tend to draw from (a spite vote, you could say). But somebody like Badnarik, who has decent support but nobody really bothers disliking, could get enough +1's (even though the vast majority voted 0) to win.
Of course this would only work once...then the R&D's would realize they can't ignore third parties and would smear them just like they do each other.
You forget how the US really works...
Voters are an inconvenient technicality that has to be worked around to ensure the proper outcome of elections.
By now it should be clear that Roland is either one of the slashdot editors in disguise, or a close friend of one of them.