>>Their claim is that we are less dense that quite a few countries (UK, Japan, France, Germany, South Korea) but that a higher fraction of our population is "urban" (82%, seems high, like to know how they define "urban")
While our population is clustered into cities, these cities tend to be further away from each other. For example, San Francisco to San Diego is about the entire length of the island of Great Britain. This matters when planning things like roads and trains. Most Europeans don't really appreciate the difference of scale when they suggest that America build everything out the European way.
>>I would much rather live in a proper city (they're not all slums) than a suburb or exurb.
I lived in San Francisco for four years. While there's a lot to recommend it (especially the food), ultimately it's just not a pleasant experience to be crowded in cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of sketchy hygiene-agnostic folks on the Muni. I ended up moving to Daly City, which was a lot more pleasant than the city (trees! ocean! less traffic! less dirty! less homeless!) and then eventually to Fresno, which is sort of the antithesis of San Francisco. We still go back to the Bay Area every couple months to visit friends, and when we hit the 101, reminds me each time why Fresno is a better place to live.
>>(And thus, hopefully, more than needed to handle the excessive load without causing them to shut down).
This was actually the root cause of their problem. Bell routers back in the day had the same kind of problem - they'd fail, and their failover model would cause other routers to fail, leading to a catastrophic collapse of the system. Their supernodes should have simply stopped accepting new connections, instead of shutting down and dumping their load on all the other supernodes.
The Bell collapse was also caused by a software bug - they were demonstrating at a conference how their redundant failover systems would make it impossible to crash the system when they entered the email address from someone in the audience to test it. His!email!address!was!too!long (because routing was baked into the address at the time), and so it buffer overflowed the first router the system tried. The failover model then kicked in, and they tried the next router, which promptly crashed, and so forth, until their "foolproof" system had proceeded to kill the entire network.
That was a fun lecture in my graduate level fault tolerant systems class.
>>When people start thinking that Nazis were anything other than a radical right-wing movement, our country is truly fucked.
No. As soon as the radical right-wing starts thinking like Nazis, our country is truly fucked.
The Tea Partiers are about the only significant force in American politics that still believe in a market economy. Nazis, Neocons, and Democrats do not.
>>Duh. I'm obviously quite aware of the small details as I've demonstrated mastery of the complicated ones. Had you any insight at all, you might have noticed that Hitler Blitzed straight through Poland and into the Russians.
Ok, you've now completely demonstrated your total fucking ignorance.
Hitler didn't "blitz straight through Poland into the Russians". They held joint parades after they divided up Poland between themselves.
>>And your point is? If we paid them a living wage to begin with, they would not need government assistance. The buying power of minimum wage is steadily dropping.
The point is that people keep repeating the myth that the poor bear the lion's share of the tax burden, when they actually get substantial negative taxes.
No matter how many times you rub people's faces in the actual numbers, they keep repeating the same misinformation they once heard from other ignorant fucks.
>>You do realise that the sides in WW2 were fairly clearly drawn between Liberalism (America, France, etc) and the Left (USSR etc) versus the Right: Fascism (Italy) Nazism (Germany) and Hereditary Monarchy (Imperial Japan).
LOL. LOL. LOL.
Wow. You're an ignorant fuck, aren't you?
You do know that Stalin wanted to enter the alliance with Germany as the 4th Axis power, right? And that Hitler and Stalin were allies at the outset of WWII, dividing Poland up between them?
The USSR was only marginally better than Hitler in the eyes of the US, and was only an "Ally" in the sense that Stalin had 10 million people he could throw in the wood-chipper of the Germany military after Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. General Patton, for example, wanted to continue the American push into the USSR to free Eastern Europe from what would become the Iron Curtain.
The difference between National Socialism and International Socialism is right there in the name - Nationalism. Nazis were racist and, well, nationalistic to an extreme. Nationalism is hardly a right-wing phenomenon (witness the love for "Mother Russia" and all that). Hitler hated capitalists, called himself a Socialist as in "Marxism", and stated that national control of industry was the solution to the working man's woes. Try to explain that away all you like.
Chinese characters are not ideograms. The characters are not little pictures. They contain no special amount of semantic content compared to alphabetic word roots. Chinese is not monosyllabic. Each Chinese character is not a complete word. Chinese characters are not indispensible. Chinese does not have to be written with Chinese characters. Japanese not only doesn't have to be written with Chinese characters, it's hard to imagine a language for which Chinese characters would be more unsuited. Chinese characters are more suited to writing English than to writing Japanese. Chinese people don't have to 'sight read'. Chinese characters are not devoid of phonetic information. They contain 'sound' information the same as any other writing. Chinese characters do not facilitate some special level of intercommunication between the different languages that employ them, at least not to any extent further than the common use of the Latin alphabet conveys a special level of intercommunication between the western languages that employ it.
No, no, no. Your mistake is using absolutes when you should have used "some" instead.
1) Some characters are ideograms. According to my handy shelf of Chinese reference books, it's around 10% or so. On top of that, most characters have a clue to their 1) meaning and 2) pronunciation in the form of radicals. Put the woman radical next to the sound radical for ma (horse) and you get "mom" (pronounced like horse, except with a different tone). A great deal of Chinese characters are either direct ideographs or partial ideographs.
2) Older Chinese words (and a lot of commonly used words) are monosyllabic. 'I' 'You' 'Is' (wo3, ni3, shi4), etc. are all monosyllabic. The trend toward using two syllables to represent a word is a modern trend (relatively speaking). If you knew anything about the Chinese language, as you claim to, you'd know this.
3) The reason the Chinese didn't ditch characters for pinyin as Mao wanted them to is because characters really are indispensible. With the 400 or so possible syllables in the language, there's a lot of overloading of meaning. You need to know which character something is. That's why you'll hear Chinese people asking each other, "Which Ma is it? Mother-ma? Horse-ma? Marijuana-Ma?" etc.
4) *Some* Chinese characters contain pronunciation guides. Not all of them. And a lot of the pronunciation-guide radicals are wrong. They're either for the wrong dialect, or they're from the way people spoke things back a thousand years ago.
5) Chinese characters do facilitate a small degree of interoperability between languages. Korean, Japanese, and to a lesser extent the other Asian nations utilize Chinese characters.
>>Chinese characters are just a bitch to store, encode, print, look up
Eh, well the looking up bit, I'll give you. It can be really annoying using a Chinese dictionary sometimes if you don't know the pronunciation... searching by radical and stroke count takes forever. I use the similar characters method via the website at www.zhongwen.com (and have their book as well, which was invaluable when I was in China) - it lets me look up new words by looking up words that kind of look like it.
But it doesn't take much more time to type things in Chinese than it does in English, once you get used to the tools.
>The "right" is against NN because they are paranoid of increased government powers.
Wow you have been brainwashed.
If you had three brain cells to rub together, you'd have understood that I was using the third person in my quote. *I* don't believe that Net Neutrality is a takeover of the government. People like Glen Beck, Matt Drudge and Rush (the "right") do. I'm explaining their stance, not endorsing that.
You'd have been able to figure that out if you thought for a second before making fucking moronic kneejerk posts.
>>But seriously, if you have even the slightest bit of integrity you will apologize to everyone who had to read that and offer up something better.
>>It is also why real socialists are international socialists.
No shit. They wanted to differentiate their brand of socialism (National Socialism) from the International Socialism based in the USSR. Look up the COMINTERN and so forth and educate yourself.
>>Even 60+ years later you seem to believe the propaganda they wrote.
Rather I don't believe the propaganda spread by the USSR. You should try educating yourself a little bit more on the subject before you post and embarrass yourself.
They're already paying negative taxes when people like you claim they're bearing the majority of the tax burden while the rich skate away tax-free. How much more detached from reality can you be? Do you even know what a negative tax rate means? We're paying them to work.
Agreed. Not to mention, just one mob in Dustwallow? Lame. Let's see him run that sucker in Twilight Highlands doin' the dailies out there. Or on FTA/FTH run...or in AV..... I agree, finger flicks and/or face gestures (sticking my tongue out to pop hero/bloodlust...oh yea...). Call me when I can fake a yawn to thunderfk people off a bridge.
Ah, that's right. I knew there was a reason I didn't go back into WoW for Cata.
>>1) Not all conservatives / libertarians oppose net neutrality
Very true. TFA - a Daily KOS piece - is mostly focusing on Glen Beck / Rush Limbaugh, who are being pretty paranoid about it.
So far, I think the FCC has been doing a pretty good job keeping the anti-competitive practices of the concessioned monopolies (like Comcast) in check, without overstepping their bounds.
>>"The right" is against NN for the same reason "the right" rejects global warming: the rich and powerful don't want it.
No, not at all. Not in the slightest.
The "right" is against NN because they are paranoid of increased government powers. The power to regulate is the power to destroy, and all that.
They don't want global warming because 1) They don't believe in it, and 2) Because their electrical bills will double or triple under most of the idiotic policies our benevolent overlords have come up with for regulating CO2 emissions.
The only issue where the rank and file Republicans fought for rights for "the rich" was during the recent tax rate struggle, and that was mainly for the reason that they're against tax increases at all.
Personally, I disagree with both 'the left' and 'the right' on all three of these issues, so I don't know what kind of comforting label I can choose for myself, but don't show your ignorance by misrepresenting the stances of others.
>>Fox "News" viewers are the most misinformed people when it comes to pretty much everything, so it's hardly surprising that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about on this either.
If by misinformed, you mean, "Disagree with how the pollsters think reality works" then sure.
That study, and the earlier Iraq issues study, were both horribly done and quite unprofessional.
So what is it about Feudal Theocracies, Nazism, and Fascism that you find so wonderful? These are the examples of right wing governments that have existed. If you do so hate Liberalism, which as a right winger you do by definition, why would you choose to live in a country like America that is entirely defined by Liberalism? Why wouldn't you move somewhere like Iran or Saudi Arabia or some other place that already shares your right wing values?
Or are you like most of the rest of the idiots in America who describe themselves as right wing in spite of the fact that our grandparents fought 2 world wars against right wing ideology and you can't be bothered to take the 5 minutes it would take to inform yourself even slightly on the issue?
I mean seriously, if you weren't so deeply ignorant, you might have the decency to be a bit embarrassed about your support of totalitarianism.
Yes, those damn National Socialists were totally right wing.
If you weren't so deeply ignorant, you might stop to think about the ideas that have been spoon fed to you through your soft spot.
>>As an outsider, I'd like to point out that while I agree with this on paper, there's a problem - the people who've paid in the most have always been the poorest (their individual tax burdens far outweigh those of the extremely wealthy), yet those are also the same people getting the least back.
What? Historically, sure. But not now.
Your average working poor family receives a net subsidy from the federal government, and doesn't pay any income taxes at all. Look up the EITC and CTC.
In 1970, a poor family with two kids paid a combined 8.5% of their income toward income tax and payroll tax (i.e. medicare/social security). In 2002 they paid a total of -15.6% of their income in taxes.
>>And ghandi_2 was doing so well before he revealed he was insane.
Actually, he's right. Hitler doesn't exactly fall into the traditional left-wing / right-wing divide we have here in America, but in terms of being a pro-gun control, media-controlling, strong government sort of fellow, he falls into the left wing category more than the right. I'm not saying he'd vote Democrat, but he doesn't really match, say, a Tea Partier's view of limited government and lower taxes.
The only reason people *think* that he's right wing is because he's been very successfully branded that way by a bunch of idiot college students yelling "Fascist" at cops that take their marijuana away.
>>You keep missing this, if it is possible to compute the function simulate() then the universe is by definition deterministic, and no agent can act in a manner contrary to the results of the simulate() function. >>If there exists a function simulate() which predicts the future of some universe there cannot exist in that universe an entity which acts contrary to this function.
Your counterargument is identical to the (incorrect) argument against the Halting Thesis, namely that if a machine M halts given input I, that it is impossible for machine M to simulate itself on the input, and return the opposite result (i.e. halting when halt() returns false, not halting when halt() returns true). In fact, if we eliminate the time element from simulate, and just ask it if our little robot friend will halt inside of our pocket universe, you'll see why the argument works, as counterintuitive as it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Their claim is that we are less dense that quite a few countries (UK, Japan, France, Germany, South Korea) but that a higher fraction of our population is "urban" (82%, seems high, like to know how they define "urban")
While our population is clustered into cities, these cities tend to be further away from each other. For example, San Francisco to San Diego is about the entire length of the island of Great Britain. This matters when planning things like roads and trains. Most Europeans don't really appreciate the difference of scale when they suggest that America build everything out the European way.
>>I would much rather live in a proper city (they're not all slums) than a suburb or exurb.
I lived in San Francisco for four years. While there's a lot to recommend it (especially the food), ultimately it's just not a pleasant experience to be crowded in cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of sketchy hygiene-agnostic folks on the Muni. I ended up moving to Daly City, which was a lot more pleasant than the city (trees! ocean! less traffic! less dirty! less homeless!) and then eventually to Fresno, which is sort of the antithesis of San Francisco. We still go back to the Bay Area every couple months to visit friends, and when we hit the 101, reminds me each time why Fresno is a better place to live.
Hell, we can even afford a house in Fresno.
>>You must make it available
"You must make it available" != "You must ensure it is available."
>>What exactly is your stance on "the right's" idea that the FCC is doing some sort of power grab
Paranoia.
>>when they were egging the Bush administration during it's 8 years of power grabs?
Irrelevant to the issue at hand, though people like the EFF have been pretty consistent in their stances over the years, and I support the EFF.
>>(And thus, hopefully, more than needed to handle the excessive load without causing them to shut down).
This was actually the root cause of their problem. Bell routers back in the day had the same kind of problem - they'd fail, and their failover model would cause other routers to fail, leading to a catastrophic collapse of the system. Their supernodes should have simply stopped accepting new connections, instead of shutting down and dumping their load on all the other supernodes.
The Bell collapse was also caused by a software bug - they were demonstrating at a conference how their redundant failover systems would make it impossible to crash the system when they entered the email address from someone in the audience to test it. His!email!address!was!too!long (because routing was baked into the address at the time), and so it buffer overflowed the first router the system tried. The failover model then kicked in, and they tried the next router, which promptly crashed, and so forth, until their "foolproof" system had proceeded to kill the entire network.
That was a fun lecture in my graduate level fault tolerant systems class.
If you've ever doubted the impact of the WoW and 4Chan communities...
>>When people start thinking that Nazis were anything other than a radical right-wing movement, our country is truly fucked.
No. As soon as the radical right-wing starts thinking like Nazis, our country is truly fucked.
The Tea Partiers are about the only significant force in American politics that still believe in a market economy. Nazis, Neocons, and Democrats do not.
>>Duh. I'm obviously quite aware of the small details as I've demonstrated mastery of the complicated ones. Had you any insight at all, you might have noticed that Hitler Blitzed straight through Poland and into the Russians.
Ok, you've now completely demonstrated your total fucking ignorance.
Hitler didn't "blitz straight through Poland into the Russians". They held joint parades after they divided up Poland between themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi-Soviet_military_parade_in_Brze%C5%9B%C4%87
But, hey, don't let facts get in the way of your crazy beliefs.
>>And your point is? If we paid them a living wage to begin with, they would not need government assistance. The buying power of minimum wage is steadily dropping.
The point is that people keep repeating the myth that the poor bear the lion's share of the tax burden, when they actually get substantial negative taxes.
No matter how many times you rub people's faces in the actual numbers, they keep repeating the same misinformation they once heard from other ignorant fucks.
>>You do realise that the sides in WW2 were fairly clearly drawn between Liberalism (America, France, etc) and the Left (USSR etc) versus the Right: Fascism (Italy) Nazism (Germany) and Hereditary Monarchy (Imperial Japan).
LOL. LOL. LOL.
Wow. You're an ignorant fuck, aren't you?
You do know that Stalin wanted to enter the alliance with Germany as the 4th Axis power, right? And that Hitler and Stalin were allies at the outset of WWII, dividing Poland up between them?
No? You don't?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Axis_talks
The USSR was only marginally better than Hitler in the eyes of the US, and was only an "Ally" in the sense that Stalin had 10 million people he could throw in the wood-chipper of the Germany military after Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. General Patton, for example, wanted to continue the American push into the USSR to free Eastern Europe from what would become the Iron Curtain.
The difference between National Socialism and International Socialism is right there in the name - Nationalism. Nazis were racist and, well, nationalistic to an extreme. Nationalism is hardly a right-wing phenomenon (witness the love for "Mother Russia" and all that). Hitler hated capitalists, called himself a Socialist as in "Marxism", and stated that national control of industry was the solution to the working man's woes. Try to explain that away all you like.
No, no, no. Your mistake is using absolutes when you should have used "some" instead.
1) Some characters are ideograms. According to my handy shelf of Chinese reference books, it's around 10% or so. On top of that, most characters have a clue to their 1) meaning and 2) pronunciation in the form of radicals. Put the woman radical next to the sound radical for ma (horse) and you get "mom" (pronounced like horse, except with a different tone). A great deal of Chinese characters are either direct ideographs or partial ideographs.
2) Older Chinese words (and a lot of commonly used words) are monosyllabic. 'I' 'You' 'Is' (wo3, ni3, shi4), etc. are all monosyllabic. The trend toward using two syllables to represent a word is a modern trend (relatively speaking). If you knew anything about the Chinese language, as you claim to, you'd know this.
3) The reason the Chinese didn't ditch characters for pinyin as Mao wanted them to is because characters really are indispensible. With the 400 or so possible syllables in the language, there's a lot of overloading of meaning. You need to know which character something is. That's why you'll hear Chinese people asking each other, "Which Ma is it? Mother-ma? Horse-ma? Marijuana-Ma?" etc.
4) *Some* Chinese characters contain pronunciation guides. Not all of them. And a lot of the pronunciation-guide radicals are wrong. They're either for the wrong dialect, or they're from the way people spoke things back a thousand years ago.
5) Chinese characters do facilitate a small degree of interoperability between languages. Korean, Japanese, and to a lesser extent the other Asian nations utilize Chinese characters.
>>Chinese characters are just a bitch to store, encode, print, look up
Eh, well the looking up bit, I'll give you. It can be really annoying using a Chinese dictionary sometimes if you don't know the pronunciation... searching by radical and stroke count takes forever. I use the similar characters method via the website at www.zhongwen.com (and have their book as well, which was invaluable when I was in China) - it lets me look up new words by looking up words that kind of look like it.
But it doesn't take much more time to type things in Chinese than it does in English, once you get used to the tools.
If you had three brain cells to rub together, you'd have understood that I was using the third person in my quote. *I* don't believe that Net Neutrality is a takeover of the government. People like Glen Beck, Matt Drudge and Rush (the "right") do. I'm explaining their stance, not endorsing that.
You'd have been able to figure that out if you thought for a second before making fucking moronic kneejerk posts.
>>But seriously, if you have even the slightest bit of integrity you will apologize to everyone who had to read that and offer up something better.
The irony is killing me.
>>It is also why real socialists are international socialists.
No shit. They wanted to differentiate their brand of socialism (National Socialism) from the International Socialism based in the USSR. Look up the COMINTERN and so forth and educate yourself.
>>Even 60+ years later you seem to believe the propaganda they wrote.
Rather I don't believe the propaganda spread by the USSR. You should try educating yourself a little bit more on the subject before you post and embarrass yourself.
>>they need more help
They're already paying negative taxes when people like you claim they're bearing the majority of the tax burden while the rich skate away tax-free. How much more detached from reality can you be? Do you even know what a negative tax rate means? We're paying them to work.
Ah, that's right. I knew there was a reason I didn't go back into WoW for Cata.
The players.
>>1) Not all conservatives / libertarians oppose net neutrality
Very true. TFA - a Daily KOS piece - is mostly focusing on Glen Beck / Rush Limbaugh, who are being pretty paranoid about it.
So far, I think the FCC has been doing a pretty good job keeping the anti-competitive practices of the concessioned monopolies (like Comcast) in check, without overstepping their bounds.
>>"The right" is against NN for the same reason "the right" rejects global warming: the rich and powerful don't want it.
No, not at all. Not in the slightest.
The "right" is against NN because they are paranoid of increased government powers. The power to regulate is the power to destroy, and all that.
They don't want global warming because 1) They don't believe in it, and 2) Because their electrical bills will double or triple under most of the idiotic policies our benevolent overlords have come up with for regulating CO2 emissions.
The only issue where the rank and file Republicans fought for rights for "the rich" was during the recent tax rate struggle, and that was mainly for the reason that they're against tax increases at all.
Personally, I disagree with both 'the left' and 'the right' on all three of these issues, so I don't know what kind of comforting label I can choose for myself, but don't show your ignorance by misrepresenting the stances of others.
>>Fox "News" viewers are the most misinformed people when it comes to pretty much everything, so it's hardly surprising that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about on this either.
If by misinformed, you mean, "Disagree with how the pollsters think reality works" then sure.
That study, and the earlier Iraq issues study, were both horribly done and quite unprofessional.
>>That's why Britain has sky-high crime rates compared to execution-happy Texas.
They also under-report a lot of their crimes, as much as 50%. Do some research on the topic.
Yes, those damn National Socialists were totally right wing.
If you weren't so deeply ignorant, you might stop to think about the ideas that have been spoon fed to you through your soft spot.
>>As an outsider, I'd like to point out that while I agree with this on paper, there's a problem - the people who've paid in the most have always been the poorest (their individual tax burdens far outweigh those of the extremely wealthy), yet those are also the same people getting the least back.
What? Historically, sure. But not now.
Your average working poor family receives a net subsidy from the federal government, and doesn't pay any income taxes at all. Look up the EITC and CTC.
In 1970, a poor family with two kids paid a combined 8.5% of their income toward income tax and payroll tax (i.e. medicare/social security). In 2002 they paid a total of -15.6% of their income in taxes.
>>And ghandi_2 was doing so well before he revealed he was insane.
Actually, he's right. Hitler doesn't exactly fall into the traditional left-wing / right-wing divide we have here in America, but in terms of being a pro-gun control, media-controlling, strong government sort of fellow, he falls into the left wing category more than the right. I'm not saying he'd vote Democrat, but he doesn't really match, say, a Tea Partier's view of limited government and lower taxes.
The only reason people *think* that he's right wing is because he's been very successfully branded that way by a bunch of idiot college students yelling "Fascist" at cops that take their marijuana away.
>>The SSN isn't required. You won't go to jail for not giving them your SSN.
At my college (UCSD) SSN is not only required, but it is legal for them to demand your SSN on the application.
I wanted to do the same backseat lawyering as you, until I actually looked it up and saw they had a grandfather exemption.
>>You keep missing this, if it is possible to compute the function simulate() then the universe is by definition deterministic, and no agent can act in a manner contrary to the results of the simulate() function.
>>If there exists a function simulate() which predicts the future of some universe there cannot exist in that universe an entity which acts contrary to this function.
Your counterargument is identical to the (incorrect) argument against the Halting Thesis, namely that if a machine M halts given input I, that it is impossible for machine M to simulate itself on the input, and return the opposite result (i.e. halting when halt() returns false, not halting when halt() returns true). In fact, if we eliminate the time element from simulate, and just ask it if our little robot friend will halt inside of our pocket universe, you'll see why the argument works, as counterintuitive as it seems.
>>Meanwhile this particular end has nothing to do with what the DMCA "was made for" or "the original spirit of the act."
Man... who could have thought the government actually would have run down that slippery slope when it came to its citizens' rights?