> 1) Protects experienced senior teachers. You might not think this is important, but guess what? Older, experienced teachers are generally more expensive and have more political influence. Hip new administrator comes in, wants to to change things up, slim down the budget. Get rid of the older teachers first beacuse the younger are cheaper and easier to control.
And yet the way the system actually works in practice? Young teachers with interesting new ideas get forced out of the system. The system is very hostile to people trying to do something different or interesting. It grinds you down and makes you quit.
> 2) Protects good teachers. You know the ones that actually teach and care about education, and don't just give A's to everyone for showing up and sitting at their desk. Actual teaching and enforcing academic standards tends to upset certain kinds of parents. Administrators don't like vocal and upset parents.
Well, this is true. But it protects good and bad teachers equally.
> 3) Protects teachers that push against the administration. Not teaching to the test, enriching the curriculum, doing what might be considered risky things by some ( lab experiments, field trips, etc). Administration often doesn't want this, because it creates headaches for them, but teachers want it because it enhances the education of their students.
Hah.
Hahahaahahaha.
Ah.
> 4) In areas with strong influence by outside political groups, protects teachers that teach controversial subjects. Science vs. creationism is one example, but certainly not the only one. History, economics, literature, art...all of these can have controversial topics. Of course, we don't really teach these anymore, but that is a different topic.
Again, doesn't happen in practice.
Source: I've been an evaluator for school districts for over a decade.
>If you want to improve the quality of teachers, we need to be looking at the evaluation systems that are in place, whether they exist, and why they may or may not be working. Most teachers simply are never evaluated ever, or they are evaluated in completely useless ways. Address that, and then maybe we can deal more easily with underperforming teachers, adjusting the tenure rules as necessary but keeping its major benefits.
Now you're talking my language.
There's a lot of fairly easy ways to test the performance of teachers, such as taking the delta of students' standardized test scores from the previous year and from the current year. Classroom observations and the like (which I'm sure you were referring to) are universally subjective and pointless. The reason we don't have a systematic method of evaluating teacher performance boils down entirely to the issue of teachers unions blocking them. Without data, it's hard to say who the bad teachers are, and the process of firing them is so convoluted and lengthy that most districts don't even bother.
>THERE WERE NO GAMES RELEASED FOR THE PSP WORTH BUYING, OR EVEN PLAYING.
Final Fantasy Tactics was released for the PSP well before it was re-released on the PS3, and it had very nice artwork added to it that made the game a lot better, that didn't get put into the PS3 re-release (IIRC).
Tactics Ogre and Dissidia were also good games for the PSP, from what I hear.
>"A better coding for data error correction and redundancy than Reed-Solomon" - this is News for Nerds after all.
Well, yeah. There's lots of things better than Reed-Solomon for doing video encoding in a lossy environment. I worked on such a project at UCSD in 1998 or so with John Rogers and Paul Chu that could eat pretty impressive amounts of noise and still have a usable video signal without retransmissions. It's start getting pretty muddy looking when you really cranked up the losses, but unlike JPEG or something like that, a frame was still renderable even if you took out any particular chunk of the data.
>. Its so frustrating to hear people on the news talk about how a doctor wouldn't treat them because he didn't take "obamacare". There is no single policy that can be catagorised as "obamacare"
You're probably misunderstanding what is said, or the reporters are saying it wrong. The ACA cut $200B from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, and some doctors stopped accepting such patients when they did the math and found it would cause them to take a loss, or not be worth their time.
>So... donating to the campaigns of congressmen that'll vote for things you want is now bribery?
No, don't be silly. The rights of individuals to support politicians should not be infringed.
What *should* be totally and completely eliminated is the current right of entities that *cannot* vote be given control over democratic elections, and by that I mostly mean corporations.
> Theoretically you could have a nuclear powered desalinization plant that might be economically competitive but I'm not aware that anyone has done this yet.
A group was going to build one in the Central Valley of California, but the fucking idiots in our state government blocked it.
We have a serious problem with selenium contaminating our groundwater, so the plant would boil the water to strip out the selenium, and then sell the purified water and excess power.
But our fucking idiots think that we have too much water and power already.
See, this is why we need to boost funding for the government!
All these spinoffs! It's given us velcro, the microwave, handheld diagnostic devices, heat shields, radiant barriers, brainwave monitoring, real time tracking of the populace, the license plate database, live interception capabilities on all foreign leaders, the space shuttle, data mining tools, radiant barriers, Stuxnet, improved rocket engine designs, automated facial recognition, new anti-icing formulas, access to the data in the cloud, oxygen sensors for bioreactors, speech recognition, micro-accelerometers, the ability to recover data off a dead hard drive, behavior prediction tools, sensors that enable plants to text farmers, graphing all social connections in America based on phone calls, photocatalytic surfaces, satellite maps for more realistic gaming (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130009018.pdf) and US soldiers (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120001904.pdf)... NSA, NASA, what's the difference?
>Actually, there have been a few people executed that were proven innocent posthumously.
Indeed. With DNA testing and the like.
The survey posted is just a statistical study that looked at no actual cases, that estimated the number of people that would get off or have their sentences reduced if they had more money to spend on lawyers.
>Secondly, what about the estimated 4% of people on death row who are innocent. There are people who, for various reasons (e.g. overzealous prosecutors, incompetent defense attorneys, corrupt police planting/hiding evidence, etc), were convicted of crimes that they didn't commit
Though the internet urban legend machine exploded with this myth, that's not what the study proved.
It showed nothing more or less than there's a correlation between how much money you spend on lawyers, and how likely you are to get your sentence reduced or acquitted.
So if you threw infinite money at lawyers, maybe 4% more people on death row would get resentenced to life in prison.
This doesn't actually mean they are innocent, kemosabe.
>why it's neither breaking any laws nor easy to make laws it would break without unintended and potentially very nasty side effects.
It's very easy to fix, actually. You just have to do away with the notion of taxing profits. There's still side effects, of course.
As Hollywood has taught us, there are a million and one ways to shift money around to avoid having profits, even when a reasonable individual would say a company is profitable.
So you just tax 10% of revenue, and call it a day.
The side effect is, of course, that companies that really are breaking even right now would go under (if they can't get a loan), and with our ludicrously high corporate tax rate it incentivizes corporations to spend money. It's like you get to buy everything at a 40% discount, after all.
But a revenue tax would stop all manners of shady profit shifting and hiding.
>hey aren't trying to push him off his ranch, they're trying to enforce a valid court order that says he can't graze his cattle on BLM managed lands without paying the appropriate fees.
Fine, push him off "the grazing lands his family has been using since the 1800s", since he doesn't own it.
But that's not my point. Look at the attitudes expressed in those sentences, and then try to imagine Harry Reid saying them. With the exception of the 4th statement (which was said by Toyotomi Hideyoshi at the advent of the Sword Hunt) you can't.
There has been a serious and significant culture shift in the Democrat party since the 1960s. The claim that they have moved "to the right" is nonsensical, unless you equate right-wing to mean "anything I don't like" (which, to be fair, seems to be in the current parlance on here). If you look at Uberbah's idiotic response to me below, you'll see him claim that to him "right wing" means torture, unilateral military action, and not prosecuting bankers. Which, as I think we can all agree, has shit-all to actually do with the traditional left-right divide.
>Reagan increased taxes to reduce the deficit while Obama continued Bush's budget busting tax cuts.
Only someone with no understanding of history or current events would be so ignorant to make a statement like that.
Do you know what actually happened? Reagan negotiated with the Democrats to allow a tax increase in exchange for spending cuts. That never happened. Fast forward to the Fiscal Cliff debates, and the Democrats tried the exact same fucking tactic again, with the media floating the proposal to the public like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.
Obama pushed hard to raise taxes in a number of areas, which the Republicans agreed to in some areas, so taxes are now higher than they were under Bush.
>Reagan signed a treaty requiring the prosecution of those who commit torture, Obama grants them immunity.
Torture is not a right wing or left wing issue. It's a liberty vs. statism issue, and both Bush 2.0 and Obama are major statists.
If you would like to prove me wrong by finding contravening planks in the RNC and DNC platforms or talking points, go right ahead.
>Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, while Obama has made arrangements to continue the Afghanistan war through two terms of Obama's successor.
That's one of the dumbest cherry picks I've ever seen. Reagan invaded Grenada in Urgent Fury, and engaged in nation building there. He pulled the marines of Lebanon a couple months after the suicide bombing, and did so in order to launch artillery strikes and bombing runs on Lebanon, and also engaged in nation building.
>Reagan adamantly insisted that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, whereas Obama constantly tries to cut it.
Are you just talking about the changes to how inflation is calculated? If so, that's idiotic hyperbole.
>Reagan never started a war without Congressional authorization, like Obama did with Libya and all the people he's bombing that the CIA doesn't even bother to claim have Al Qaeda ties.
How is starting a war without an authorization a "right-wing" feature? Again, point to me the plank in the RNC platform that calls for unilateral military action.
>Reagan started DOJ investigations that sent 800 banking executives to jail for the S&L crisis. Not only has Obama not prosecuted a single banker for a fraud 70 times as large as the S&L's, he spent billions of taxpayer money bailing them out.
Ditto. None of the things you've mentioned make Obama right wing.
>When modern democrats are far, far to the right of Ronald Reagan, that's some pretty pathetic willful ignorance of history, with a sideshow of irrelevant quotes that have nothing to do with policy.
Actually, the quotes I provided are far more germane. It's laughable to even imagine Obama talking about guns being used to defend yourself from an encroachment of rights by the federal government (instead Obama says, "If you hear those voices, don't listen to them.")
There has been a very serious culture shift in the Democrat party since the 1960s, that resulted in them adopting the various socialist and statist views that reflected the ideological shift in the social sciences in our colleges.
>He's also well to the right of most republicans from forty years ago, but there again, so are most democrats today - and practically all republicans now.
Let's test this thesis of yours. With an actual test.
Who said this?
1) "Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
Was it: A) Cliven Bundy, B) John F. Kennedy, C) Rush Limbaugh, or D) Ted Nugent?
2) "Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
Was it: A) Obama, B) Hubert Humphrey, C) Ronald Reagan, or D) The Tea Party?
3) "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Was it: A) Antonin Scalia, B) John F. Kennedy, C) Che Guevara, or D) Al Gore?
Ok, that might have been too easy. How about this one:
4) "The people of the United States should be forbidden to have in their possession any firearms, or any other type of weapon. The possession of weapons can make it difficult to collect taxes and dues and supports rebellion."
Was it: A) FDR, B) Al Gore, C) Truman, or D) Harry Reid?
But more importantly, think about your thought processes as you try to answer them. Nobody would seriously think that Obama would ever in a thousand years say something like #2 (in fact, if you didn't laugh at that option, you probably don't have much of a sense of humor). But we'd seriously have to consider if it was Al Gore or Harry Reid that said that, since, again, the older Democrats were far to the right of the modern party.
JFK fought with Nixon in the debates over who was more anti-communist, and LBJ had that whole Vietnam thing. Modern Democrats are far, far to the left of the older Democrat party on most issues. Read LBJ talk about how the federal government shouldn't be in the business of law enforcement some time, and then contrast that against Harry Reid calling in snipers to try to push Cliven Bundy off his ranch.
>The power company already knows how much I use and when. In fact they send me this energy statement saying I'm using 10% more than my neighbors.
Yeah. I just can't see the value in shelling out 40 bucks a person (which can be a substantial chunk of their revenue, okay maybe not for PG&E but in sane parts of the country) when they already have time of day usage stats, and have upgraded to SmartMeters in most places.
>Steam doesn't indicate on a game's store page if said game is DRM-free
If you get the Enhanced Steam addon for Firefox, it will tag any game you look at with if it has bonus DRM or not. Or shit like UPlay.
It also shows you historic price data for every game, so you know you're paying three times the Spring Sale price, or twice the GOG price or if you're getting a good deal.
>Steam mandates use of a client. Even if you want to run the game outside of the client, you need the Steam client for downloading as well as updates. GOG has a client but you can easily download everything from a game's landing page once purchased. You then have an installer you can backup and the game runs via your regular desktop/Start menu shortcut. Much cleaner I think as I can then download and organize files in the way I want without dealing with the problems that can arise by using an unnecessary client.
I actually prefer installing things on Steam, rather than going through the tedious InstallShield process for each and every game I download. The only annoying thing about Steam is that it reinstalls DirectX every time you install a game, but even that is hidden from the user. Uninstalling is also easier. I can see if my saves are backed up to the Steam cloud (so I don't need to hunt around for my Save Games location and manually back them up), and then one click uninstall them.
As the GP said, the weakness in Steam is when you're trying to play two games at once, but they've actually got a solution for this now (http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/). My wife can play Oblivion while I play Payday 2, for example, using their Family Share plan.
>But that doesn't mean that the person you get when you call back will always be the same person who used the phone to call.
So? My point is that the media has been portraying this as an "anonymous tip", like someone left a post-it on the door of the police station or something. This guy called in to report a reckless driver running him off the road, and so, if they cared, they could track down the witness to get them to testify in adversarial court proceedings.
Slashdot Mirror
> 1) Protects experienced senior teachers. You might not think this is important, but guess what? Older, experienced teachers are generally more expensive and have more political influence. Hip new administrator comes in, wants to to change things up, slim down the budget. Get rid of the older teachers first beacuse the younger are cheaper and easier to control.
And yet the way the system actually works in practice? Young teachers with interesting new ideas get forced out of the system. The system is very hostile to people trying to do something different or interesting. It grinds you down and makes you quit.
> 2) Protects good teachers. You know the ones that actually teach and care about education, and don't just give A's to everyone for showing up and sitting at their desk. Actual teaching and enforcing academic standards tends to upset certain kinds of parents. Administrators don't like vocal and upset parents.
Well, this is true. But it protects good and bad teachers equally.
> 3) Protects teachers that push against the administration. Not teaching to the test, enriching the curriculum, doing what might be considered risky things by some ( lab experiments, field trips, etc). Administration often doesn't want this, because it creates headaches for them, but teachers want it because it enhances the education of their students.
Hah.
Hahahaahahaha.
Ah.
> 4) In areas with strong influence by outside political groups, protects teachers that teach controversial subjects. Science vs. creationism is one example, but certainly not the only one. History, economics, literature, art...all of these can have controversial topics. Of course, we don't really teach these anymore, but that is a different topic.
Again, doesn't happen in practice.
Source: I've been an evaluator for school districts for over a decade.
>If you want to improve the quality of teachers, we need to be looking at the evaluation systems that are in place, whether they exist, and why they may or may not be working. Most teachers simply are never evaluated ever, or they are evaluated in completely useless ways. Address that, and then maybe we can deal more easily with underperforming teachers, adjusting the tenure rules as necessary but keeping its major benefits.
Now you're talking my language.
There's a lot of fairly easy ways to test the performance of teachers, such as taking the delta of students' standardized test scores from the previous year and from the current year. Classroom observations and the like (which I'm sure you were referring to) are universally subjective and pointless. The reason we don't have a systematic method of evaluating teacher performance boils down entirely to the issue of teachers unions blocking them. Without data, it's hard to say who the bad teachers are, and the process of firing them is so convoluted and lengthy that most districts don't even bother.
>THERE WERE NO GAMES RELEASED FOR THE PSP WORTH BUYING, OR EVEN PLAYING.
Final Fantasy Tactics was released for the PSP well before it was re-released on the PS3, and it had very nice artwork added to it that made the game a lot better, that didn't get put into the PS3 re-release (IIRC).
Tactics Ogre and Dissidia were also good games for the PSP, from what I hear.
>"A better coding for data error correction and redundancy than Reed-Solomon" - this is News for Nerds after all.
Well, yeah. There's lots of things better than Reed-Solomon for doing video encoding in a lossy environment. I worked on such a project at UCSD in 1998 or so with John Rogers and Paul Chu that could eat pretty impressive amounts of noise and still have a usable video signal without retransmissions. It's start getting pretty muddy looking when you really cranked up the losses, but unlike JPEG or something like that, a frame was still renderable even if you took out any particular chunk of the data.
>. Its so frustrating to hear people on the news talk about how a doctor wouldn't treat them because he didn't take "obamacare". There is no single policy that can be catagorised as "obamacare"
You're probably misunderstanding what is said, or the reporters are saying it wrong. The ACA cut $200B from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, and some doctors stopped accepting such patients when they did the math and found it would cause them to take a loss, or not be worth their time.
>So... donating to the campaigns of congressmen that'll vote for things you want is now bribery?
No, don't be silly. The rights of individuals to support politicians should not be infringed.
What *should* be totally and completely eliminated is the current right of entities that *cannot* vote be given control over democratic elections, and by that I mostly mean corporations.
Stupid laws are stupid laws, whether it is in Japan or New Jersey or DC.
>Because guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people.
People with no bullets don't kill people.
This is as ridiculous as that guy in DC who got arrested for having a fucking *spent shell* in his house.
>Still, planning to build a nuclear plant in a state with a "moratorium" on new nuclear plants (since 1976) is a pretty dicey business plan.
What???
That's crazy talk. The moratorium is on nuclear *power plants*.
They're building a nuclear *desalination plant*.
Selling electricity is just a nice side effect. =)
You found the wrong project, dude.
http://www.fresnonewenergy.com...
>Farmers in the desert use about 20 times as much water as California urbanites.
Not quite. 80% is ag, 10% residential, 10% industrial.
In exchange, California earns about $17B from farms just in the San Joaquin, and supplies half the fruit in the nation.
> Theoretically you could have a nuclear powered desalinization plant that might be economically competitive but I'm not aware that anyone has done this yet.
A group was going to build one in the Central Valley of California, but the fucking idiots in our state government blocked it.
We have a serious problem with selenium contaminating our groundwater, so the plant would boil the water to strip out the selenium, and then sell the purified water and excess power.
But our fucking idiots think that we have too much water and power already.
He stole their prized, proprietary, "Horse Armor" technology.
See, this is why we need to boost funding for the government!
All these spinoffs! It's given us velcro, the microwave, handheld diagnostic devices, heat shields, radiant barriers, brainwave monitoring, real time tracking of the populace, the license plate database, live interception capabilities on all foreign leaders, the space shuttle, data mining tools, radiant barriers, Stuxnet, improved rocket engine designs, automated facial recognition, new anti-icing formulas, access to the data in the cloud, oxygen sensors for bioreactors, speech recognition, micro-accelerometers, the ability to recover data off a dead hard drive, behavior prediction tools, sensors that enable plants to text farmers, graphing all social connections in America based on phone calls, photocatalytic surfaces, satellite maps for more realistic gaming (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130009018.pdf) and US soldiers (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120001904.pdf)... NSA, NASA, what's the difference?
>Actually, there have been a few people executed that were proven innocent posthumously.
Indeed. With DNA testing and the like.
The survey posted is just a statistical study that looked at no actual cases, that estimated the number of people that would get off or have their sentences reduced if they had more money to spend on lawyers.
>Secondly, what about the estimated 4% of people on death row who are innocent. There are people who, for various reasons (e.g. overzealous prosecutors, incompetent defense attorneys, corrupt police planting/hiding evidence, etc), were convicted of crimes that they didn't commit
Though the internet urban legend machine exploded with this myth, that's not what the study proved.
It showed nothing more or less than there's a correlation between how much money you spend on lawyers, and how likely you are to get your sentence reduced or acquitted.
So if you threw infinite money at lawyers, maybe 4% more people on death row would get resentenced to life in prison.
This doesn't actually mean they are innocent, kemosabe.
>Yes. This addon was specifically developed for FF29 to deal with the new GUI.
If past experience is any guide, FF30 will break functionality for extensions that allow you to use the old GUI.
For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
>why it's neither breaking any laws nor easy to make laws it would break without unintended and potentially very nasty side effects.
It's very easy to fix, actually. You just have to do away with the notion of taxing profits. There's still side effects, of course.
As Hollywood has taught us, there are a million and one ways to shift money around to avoid having profits, even when a reasonable individual would say a company is profitable.
So you just tax 10% of revenue, and call it a day.
The side effect is, of course, that companies that really are breaking even right now would go under (if they can't get a loan), and with our ludicrously high corporate tax rate it incentivizes corporations to spend money. It's like you get to buy everything at a 40% discount, after all.
But a revenue tax would stop all manners of shady profit shifting and hiding.
>hey aren't trying to push him off his ranch, they're trying to enforce a valid court order that says he can't graze his cattle on BLM managed lands without paying the appropriate fees.
Fine, push him off "the grazing lands his family has been using since the 1800s", since he doesn't own it.
But that's not my point. Look at the attitudes expressed in those sentences, and then try to imagine Harry Reid saying them. With the exception of the 4th statement (which was said by Toyotomi Hideyoshi at the advent of the Sword Hunt) you can't.
There has been a serious and significant culture shift in the Democrat party since the 1960s. The claim that they have moved "to the right" is nonsensical, unless you equate right-wing to mean "anything I don't like" (which, to be fair, seems to be in the current parlance on here). If you look at Uberbah's idiotic response to me below, you'll see him claim that to him "right wing" means torture, unilateral military action, and not prosecuting bankers. Which, as I think we can all agree, has shit-all to actually do with the traditional left-right divide.
>Reagan increased taxes to reduce the deficit while Obama continued Bush's budget busting tax cuts.
Only someone with no understanding of history or current events would be so ignorant to make a statement like that.
Do you know what actually happened? Reagan negotiated with the Democrats to allow a tax increase in exchange for spending cuts. That never happened. Fast forward to the Fiscal Cliff debates, and the Democrats tried the exact same fucking tactic again, with the media floating the proposal to the public like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.
Obama pushed hard to raise taxes in a number of areas, which the Republicans agreed to in some areas, so taxes are now higher than they were under Bush.
>Reagan signed a treaty requiring the prosecution of those who commit torture, Obama grants them immunity.
Torture is not a right wing or left wing issue. It's a liberty vs. statism issue, and both Bush 2.0 and Obama are major statists.
If you would like to prove me wrong by finding contravening planks in the RNC and DNC platforms or talking points, go right ahead.
>Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, while Obama has made arrangements to continue the Afghanistan war through two terms of Obama's successor.
That's one of the dumbest cherry picks I've ever seen. Reagan invaded Grenada in Urgent Fury, and engaged in nation building there. He pulled the marines of Lebanon a couple months after the suicide bombing, and did so in order to launch artillery strikes and bombing runs on Lebanon, and also engaged in nation building.
>Reagan adamantly insisted that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, whereas Obama constantly tries to cut it.
Are you just talking about the changes to how inflation is calculated? If so, that's idiotic hyperbole.
>Reagan never started a war without Congressional authorization, like Obama did with Libya and all the people he's bombing that the CIA doesn't even bother to claim have Al Qaeda ties.
How is starting a war without an authorization a "right-wing" feature? Again, point to me the plank in the RNC platform that calls for unilateral military action.
>Reagan started DOJ investigations that sent 800 banking executives to jail for the S&L crisis. Not only has Obama not prosecuted a single banker for a fraud 70 times as large as the S&L's, he spent billions of taxpayer money bailing them out.
Ditto. None of the things you've mentioned make Obama right wing.
>When modern democrats are far, far to the right of Ronald Reagan, that's some pretty pathetic willful ignorance of history, with a sideshow of irrelevant quotes that have nothing to do with policy.
Actually, the quotes I provided are far more germane. It's laughable to even imagine Obama talking about guns being used to defend yourself from an encroachment of rights by the federal government (instead Obama says, "If you hear those voices, don't listen to them.")
There has been a very serious culture shift in the Democrat party since the 1960s, that resulted in them adopting the various socialist and statist views that reflected the ideological shift in the social sciences in our colleges.
>He's also well to the right of most republicans from forty years ago, but there again, so are most democrats today - and practically all republicans now.
Let's test this thesis of yours. With an actual test.
Who said this?
1) "Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
Was it: A) Cliven Bundy, B) John F. Kennedy, C) Rush Limbaugh, or D) Ted Nugent?
2) "Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
Was it: A) Obama, B) Hubert Humphrey, C) Ronald Reagan, or D) The Tea Party?
3) "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Was it: A) Antonin Scalia, B) John F. Kennedy, C) Che Guevara, or D) Al Gore?
Ok, that might have been too easy. How about this one:
4) "The people of the United States should be forbidden to have in their possession any firearms, or any other type of weapon. The possession of weapons can make it difficult to collect taxes and dues and supports rebellion."
Was it: A) FDR, B) Al Gore, C) Truman, or D) Harry Reid?
If you want to cheat, these quotes can be found here: http://catb.org/~esr/guns/quot...
But more importantly, think about your thought processes as you try to answer them. Nobody would seriously think that Obama would ever in a thousand years say something like #2 (in fact, if you didn't laugh at that option, you probably don't have much of a sense of humor). But we'd seriously have to consider if it was Al Gore or Harry Reid that said that, since, again, the older Democrats were far to the right of the modern party.
JFK fought with Nixon in the debates over who was more anti-communist, and LBJ had that whole Vietnam thing. Modern Democrats are far, far to the left of the older Democrat party on most issues. Read LBJ talk about how the federal government shouldn't be in the business of law enforcement some time, and then contrast that against Harry Reid calling in snipers to try to push Cliven Bundy off his ranch.
>The power company already knows how much I use and when. In fact they send me this energy statement saying I'm using 10% more than my neighbors.
Yeah. I just can't see the value in shelling out 40 bucks a person (which can be a substantial chunk of their revenue, okay maybe not for PG&E but in sane parts of the country) when they already have time of day usage stats, and have upgraded to SmartMeters in most places.
>Steam doesn't indicate on a game's store page if said game is DRM-free
If you get the Enhanced Steam addon for Firefox, it will tag any game you look at with if it has bonus DRM or not. Or shit like UPlay.
It also shows you historic price data for every game, so you know you're paying three times the Spring Sale price, or twice the GOG price or if you're getting a good deal.
>Steam mandates use of a client. Even if you want to run the game outside of the client, you need the Steam client for downloading as well as updates. GOG has a client but you can easily download everything from a game's landing page once purchased. You then have an installer you can backup and the game runs via your regular desktop/Start menu shortcut. Much cleaner I think as I can then download and organize files in the way I want without dealing with the problems that can arise by using an unnecessary client.
I actually prefer installing things on Steam, rather than going through the tedious InstallShield process for each and every game I download. The only annoying thing about Steam is that it reinstalls DirectX every time you install a game, but even that is hidden from the user. Uninstalling is also easier. I can see if my saves are backed up to the Steam cloud (so I don't need to hunt around for my Save Games location and manually back them up), and then one click uninstall them.
As the GP said, the weakness in Steam is when you're trying to play two games at once, but they've actually got a solution for this now (http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/). My wife can play Oblivion while I play Payday 2, for example, using their Family Share plan.
>When the FCC chairman used to be a lobbyist for the companies he's now regulating... well, what did we expect would happen? I
This. This is what we expected.
I'm only surprised it took him this long to stick a knife into net neutrality.
This is not what he claimed, however.
He said that science, quote, "Rules out" the possibility of the Christian religion being true, which is utter and complete bullshit.
It does not.
>But that doesn't mean that the person you get when you call back will always be the same person who used the phone to call.
So? My point is that the media has been portraying this as an "anonymous tip", like someone left a post-it on the door of the police station or something. This guy called in to report a reckless driver running him off the road, and so, if they cared, they could track down the witness to get them to testify in adversarial court proceedings.