Maybe you don't remember that far back, but the DC Sniper story was front page news for weeks. Inability of police to catch the criminals, fear among the general public of that region, and worry about when they would strike next. Not a good thing at all, but I only list it as an example of what havoc an armed person can create. Your original posted intoned that armed people couldn't stand up to our government. I am just thinking of the reaction to 30 million armed people standing up to our government instead of just 2 nutjobs.
You are right, it is not very likely to happen. We have seen our rights slowly trampled on for quite a few years now and nobody really takes offense at it anymore. I doubt Bush was the first President to spy on us, just the most open and obvious about doing it. And it would take something insane to get armed citizens to stand up to the government. I hope nothing like that ever occurs, but if it did, it most likely would only occur after most of the guns had been removed from individual ownership.
On Iraq, you kind went astray from the whole issue there - I merely pointed out that the same AK-47 you characterized as ineffective, is the small arm of choice of the insurgents in Iraq. If such a small country with a limited number of insurgents and weapons causes the problems for our army that it does, wouldn't a country of our size be able to resist an army at least as well?
If 2 individuals with a single semiautomatic weapon can with paralyze most of the Beltway area of DC/Maryland, then maybe we need to rethink this argument. Two people, one semiautomatic weapon (and not even a real sniper rifle at that!), and three weeks of fear back in October of 2002.
If you multiply that times a 30 million armed US citizens, then, yes, the government would have something to fear.
The AK-47 you mention seems to be the exact weapon giving our troops in Iraq such a problem. (There are other weapons in use there as well, but the prolific small arm seems to be the AK.)
One armed individual as you stated wouldn't make a difference. An armed nation like the founders intended would give the government pause before grossly violating our rights.
The cheaper aspect is debatable, but the real question should be "Is it better?"
I have heard many stories of the Canadian healthcare system since I live in a border area that the only decent hospital within 100 miles of the border.
In our local hospital, a serious heart condition can get you same day tests and hospital admittance and frequently surgery scheduled for a day or two away. Across the border in Canada, a similar heart condition can get you scheduled for testing a few weeks in the future. I guess if you die before you are diagnosed and approved for surgery, it is much cheaper for the overall system there.
Our local hospital opened a cardiac surgery unit a few years back. One of the reasons it is successful is that those who have the money to pay for it can come across the border and pay cash to get their heart surgery done in a timely manner.
Don't get me wrong, I have also heard that for minor problems, preventive care, and prescriptions, Canadian health care is great. It's just when you actually need it for something serious that it has a tendency to fail.
To me, quality of care is nearly as important as cost. Healthcare costs do need a reality check, but if you aren't alive to pay the bills, you won't have a chance to complain about them.
Part of your problem may be that you need to get the Expo right.
If we are talking about the same expo that I attended, then you probably attended Expo 86 in Vancouver. I think this was the latest one held in Canada. If you get the Expo right, the clerks might be less inclined to argue on the currency with you.
As one such left handed person, I use the mouse with my left hand and right hand. At the same time.
Yes, you read right. At the same time. Well, almost at the same time anyway. I find it very convenient to have 2 mice plugged into the computer with one on each side of the keyboard. I am ambidextrous enough with mousing (though not much else) to be able to use either fairly well. Generally, I have not found many problems with recent MS OS's accepting two or more mice at the same time (haven't tried it on linux, but I will have to now that I think about it). Generally, I use a PS2 and a USB mouse in combo but you can add multiple USB mice as well.
Many good reasons to use two mice - spreading the mousing load between two hands helps at least reduce the fatigue and other effects mentioned in the article, some mouse/key combos are easier with particular hands, and if one of the righties wants to borrow my computer there is no need to move the mouse to accomodate them.
Give it a try sometime, I am convinced that many of the RSI injuries are a result of years of continuous mousing with only one hand and being able to give your hand/wrister/shoulder a break while you use your other side certainly could only help.
It just isn't worth the time to put much effort into fixing problems. I CAN spend hours tracking down a hardware/OS problem, possibly requiring a reformat in the end anyway, but by the time I have reached that point, there is half the price for a new low-end Dell/HP/whatever computer.
Likewise, for removing virus/spyware from a computer, updating Windows, installing Firefox, installing an anti-virus product and walking a customer through everything we are talking about several hours of billable time. Formatting and reinstalling is brutal if the customer hasn't had every little document backed up, but the time savings can be worth it.
Reminds me of cars today - what used to be an expensive fender-bender now totals a car because the labor and parts to get a car back to like new condition is more than the value of the car.
One I used to use (before I actually checked that a domain existed for it) was test@test.com - at 8,410 results it should rank pretty highly in this list.
And unless you pay the $2200 don't even think about getting Redhat to provide support for it (a big consideration in the corporate environments it was designed for.)
Not quite. Living in a border town with a decent hospital, I do hear quite a bit about the health care in Canada (B.C. to be specific).
Yes, many things are better/cheaper in Canada - dental care is much cheaper, laser eye surgery is cheaper, and many drugs are much cheaper. Frequently we head to Canada for these things.
However, procedures are frequently MUCH slower to be performed - seeing a doctor, getting tests done/results back, actually having the surgery done all can take a lot longer than here in the States. Especially if you need an MRI.
And hope that you never get injured while in the States - it's patch you up until your stable and then wait until you can have a surgery back in Canada (even if you could have the surgery immediately in the same hospital that you are staying in while you wait for transportation back to Canada.)
I know one person that waited nearly a month for a treadmill test for diagnosing a heart condition - in the US, that test would have been done probably the day the heart pain was reported and surgery/pacemaker implantation would have occurred within a couple of days. This is only of many stories I have heard of this, but medical testing and examination and surgery can frequently be much slower than in the States.
And just who was the last person that you heard of that chose to go to Canada for any serious medical procedure? I understand our hospital appreciates greatly all the revenue from Canadians that come this way to get procedures performed quickly.
The frequent saying I hear is that "Canadian health care is great unless you really need it" - meaning that for anything minor Canadian health care is at least as good as the US system and appears cheaper to the consumer, but if you need serious medical attention, you had better think about having it done in the States.
I would have to disagree somewhat with your statement that they had not yet gained full faculty to make their own judgement.
As I recall, 13 is the age a Jewish boy is considered an adult (feel free to correct me if I am wrong there). So these children would have to be younger than 13, but it there were 42 of them, and they came out of the city to mock Elisha, then they must not have been too much younger (assuming that parents wouldn't allow infants to wander outside the city).
If a boy is considered to have his full faculty to make judgement at 13 then these children must be considered to have enough mental faculties to know better than to mock a prophet of God.
Maybe not the full experience and judgement of someone with more age, but certainly enough know what they were doing was wrong.
At what age did you or I know not to mock a pastor or rabbi to his face? I doubt it took us until adulthood to learn basic respect.
Total agreement with that here - I have found that NU or SW are great products if you are advanced enough to know what they are doing and when you should/shouldn't use them. Of course, if you are at that level do you really need these specific tools?
The problem comes from the slightly more knowledgeable users who say - "I have a problem. These tools are supposed to be good, so let's give them a try." And end up causing no end of trouble. Most of the time, the people who these tools are marketed to are the very ones who shouldn't be using them.
With the changes to the crew/cast and to the Cylons, it really doesn't resemble the original enough to warrant being given the same name.
I think I would welcome it if they just gave it a new name and didn't try to manufacture a few similarities between it and the original. In its own right it isn't too terrible, but just make it a spin-off of the original rather than a remake.
If he is using a touchscreen for input it may make the cheating a bit more difficult - I doubt there would be much typing involved with the touchscreen, more likely just a multiple choice selection, so the immediate problem would be finding a method for getting input into the system. Not impossible of course, just more difficult.
Although the encryption on the Wi-Fi would have to be fairly strong otherwise the next class period's students would have a good time trying to intercept all the exam questions and answers.
Similar experience here. I had my 19 inch monitor at work get rained for a whole weekend due to a leak in the roof. Dried it out, let it sit for week or so, and then plugged it again (on the opposite side of the desk this time). Worked fairly well, with an occasional (weekly or so) flicker that was enough to make me think the power was on the way out.
So a month goes by and what happens? Another leak, on the other side of the desk, where the monitor now resided. So, clean it up, dry it out, get the roof re-roofed, and move the monitor back to the original side of the desk. Powered up and works ok.
I would tend to agree - when I used to work on laptops with touch pads I always found them poorly positioned in the middle of the area beneath the keyboard. This makes very little sense as you would have to bend your wrist a lot to reach them.
On a side issue, does anyone else despise the MS Natural keyboards that put the arrow keys at about a 45 degree angle from the control key? Seemed like it was very difficult to have to bend my wrist to the right to use a arrow key when combined with using the control key in some first person shooter.
There is one major problem with this plan that always upsets me when I hear something like this:
America is not, and was not intended to be a democracy. America was intended to be a Republic. Remember Ben Franklin's response to Mrs. Powell's question on the form of goverment: "A republic if you can keep it". the Founding Fathers knew better than to allow a direct democracy and knew better than to allow a monarchy. For 200+ years their wisdom moved America into the world powerhouse, and I would rather keep it that way.
Direct democracy is a form of goverment that emphasizes general consensus and mediocrity. Take the example of Rome - as a Republic it ruled the world through Senators that had to look out for the country's interests or not be elected, as a Democracy, whoever could bribe the most citizens had their views made into law.
We have enough mediocrity in Congress as it is, time to elect a few statesmen to bring commonsense back to Capitol Hill.
Yes but the possibilities for what could have happened in that scene make me shudder to think. Only someone with a deathwish would interrupt and tap on the shoulder a person who is heavily concentrating on discharging a loaded weapon.
And the odds of a normal human actually gaining a class 3 license and 2 UZI's? If you can pull that off you're definitely uberhacker/industrial spy material.
Oh, I would think that any safety rules for television production would limit them to using blanks at best.
As far as the rest of the show, my biggest problems are that it is the perfect show to appeal to geeks but done so poorly it will turn most of them off after this episode.
Problems I saw included:
The goverment not being able to track them back to their location after figuring out that they were on DSL , their region, and probably having a good idea what they're IP address was (they do log these things in military computer systems I hope)
The whole embedded modem in the CPU idea (and the lack of originality in stealing the idea from Intel)
The hacking into the winch controls when the computer that was controlling it SHOULD have been only on a wired connection straight to the winch (no internet needed for that)
The 2 Buyer's boarding a plane to check for explosives - wouldn't it have been smarter to check cargo perhaps?
And oh yes, travelling to the Lee Harvey Oswald girl, convincing her to use the stolen CPU in they're cause, returning, breaking the code, and saving the plane - all in 22 minutes? Give me a break I will suspend MOST disbelief for television but dont insult me.
Nice try, but they can do better. Remember, script writers who aren't technologically challenged are out there!
And I certain that books regarding those conflicts would sell well to them. But to those of use reading Slashdot, this book documents what interests us. If you want to argue that we should not concentrate on technology but on social conflict, fine. But Slashdot is not about social conflict (unless in some regard it coincides with technological advances) and should not be an advertising forum for books on such topics.
I remember reading Fire in the Valley before I went to college for my CS degree. I thought that it gave an excellent foundation for understanding what people were thinking when computers were developed. Lots of names and history that no one recognizes anymore but that doesn't mean they didn't play an equal role compared to the current dotcom set.
A flat tax will take a larger amount from the wealthy and with the modified flat taxes that have been proposed the "poor" (by US standards) wouldn't have to pay anything.
If that is not progressive what is?
Good question.
A budget surplus means that we are being taxed above what is needed to run the government. And we have no complaints that we don't get our money back? Come on. In any other industry money made above costs is considered profit but why should the federal government profit at my expense?
And who moderated this as "Flamebait" ?
Someone who has no use for their money I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you don't remember that far back, but the DC Sniper story was front page news for weeks. Inability of police to catch the criminals, fear among the general public of that region, and worry about when they would strike next. Not a good thing at all, but I only list it as an example of what havoc an armed person can create. Your original posted intoned that armed people couldn't stand up to our government. I am just thinking of the reaction to 30 million armed people standing up to our government instead of just 2 nutjobs.
You are right, it is not very likely to happen. We have seen our rights slowly trampled on for quite a few years now and nobody really takes offense at it anymore. I doubt Bush was the first President to spy on us, just the most open and obvious about doing it. And it would take something insane to get armed citizens to stand up to the government. I hope nothing like that ever occurs, but if it did, it most likely would only occur after most of the guns had been removed from individual ownership.
On Iraq, you kind went astray from the whole issue there - I merely pointed out that the same AK-47 you characterized as ineffective, is the small arm of choice of the insurgents in Iraq. If such a small country with a limited number of insurgents and weapons causes the problems for our army that it does, wouldn't a country of our size be able to resist an army at least as well?
If 2 individuals with a single semiautomatic weapon can with paralyze most of the Beltway area of DC/Maryland, then maybe we need to rethink this argument. Two people, one semiautomatic weapon (and not even a real sniper rifle at that!), and three weeks of fear back in October of 2002.
If you multiply that times a 30 million armed US citizens, then, yes, the government would have something to fear.
The AK-47 you mention seems to be the exact weapon giving our troops in Iraq such a problem. (There are other weapons in use there as well, but the prolific small arm seems to be the AK.)
One armed individual as you stated wouldn't make a difference. An armed nation like the founders intended would give the government pause before grossly violating our rights.
The cheaper aspect is debatable, but the real question should be "Is it better?"
I have heard many stories of the Canadian healthcare system since I live in a border area that the only decent hospital within 100 miles of the border.
In our local hospital, a serious heart condition can get you same day tests and hospital admittance and frequently surgery scheduled for a day or two away. Across the border in Canada, a similar heart condition can get you scheduled for testing a few weeks in the future. I guess if you die before you are diagnosed and approved for surgery, it is much cheaper for the overall system there.
Our local hospital opened a cardiac surgery unit a few years back. One of the reasons it is successful is that those who have the money to pay for it can come across the border and pay cash to get their heart surgery done in a timely manner.
Don't get me wrong, I have also heard that for minor problems, preventive care, and prescriptions, Canadian health care is great. It's just when you actually need it for something serious that it has a tendency to fail.
To me, quality of care is nearly as important as cost. Healthcare costs do need a reality check, but if you aren't alive to pay the bills, you won't have a chance to complain about them.
This should be the #1 truth!!
I can't recall the number of times "the problem is solved!" by rebooting only to happen again a week later.
And always at a worse time.
Part of your problem may be that you need to get the Expo right.
If we are talking about the same expo that I attended, then you probably attended Expo 86 in Vancouver. I think this was the latest one held in Canada. If you get the Expo right, the clerks might be less inclined to argue on the currency with you.
Maybe a little rare, but not unheard of.
As one such left handed person, I use the mouse with my left hand and right hand. At the same time.
Yes, you read right. At the same time. Well, almost at the same time anyway. I find it very convenient to have 2 mice plugged into the computer with one on each side of the keyboard. I am ambidextrous enough with mousing (though not much else) to be able to use either fairly well. Generally, I have not found many problems with recent MS OS's accepting two or more mice at the same time (haven't tried it on linux, but I will have to now that I think about it). Generally, I use a PS2 and a USB mouse in combo but you can add multiple USB mice as well.
Many good reasons to use two mice - spreading the mousing load between two hands helps at least reduce the fatigue and other effects mentioned in the article, some mouse/key combos are easier with particular hands, and if one of the righties wants to borrow my computer there is no need to move the mouse to accomodate them.
Give it a try sometime, I am convinced that many of the RSI injuries are a result of years of continuous mousing with only one hand and being able to give your hand/wrister/shoulder a break while you use your other side certainly could only help.
Now that is a problem I am seeing more and more -
It just isn't worth the time to put much effort into fixing problems. I CAN spend hours tracking down a hardware/OS problem, possibly requiring a reformat in the end anyway, but by the time I have reached that point, there is half the price for a new low-end Dell/HP/whatever computer.
Likewise, for removing virus/spyware from a computer, updating Windows, installing Firefox, installing an anti-virus product and walking a customer through everything we are talking about several hours of billable time. Formatting and reinstalling is brutal if the customer hasn't had every little document backed up, but the time savings can be worth it.
Reminds me of cars today - what used to be an expensive fender-bender now totals a car because the labor and parts to get a car back to like new condition is more than the value of the car.
Step 1: Change your /. handle!
Step 2: Follow someone else's instructions on getting a clearance
Step 3: Profit? (Or at least Get By)
One I used to use (before I actually checked that a domain existed for it) was test@test.com - at 8,410 results it should rank pretty highly in this list.
And unless you pay the $2200 don't even think about getting Redhat to provide support for it (a big consideration in the corporate environments it was designed for.)
Not quite. Living in a border town with a decent hospital, I do hear quite a bit about the health care in Canada (B.C. to be specific).
Yes, many things are better/cheaper in Canada - dental care is much cheaper, laser eye surgery is cheaper, and many drugs are much cheaper. Frequently we head to Canada for these things.
However, procedures are frequently MUCH slower to be performed - seeing a doctor, getting tests done/results back, actually having the surgery done all can take a lot longer than here in the States. Especially if you need an MRI.
And hope that you never get injured while in the States - it's patch you up until your stable and then wait until you can have a surgery back in Canada (even if you could have the surgery immediately in the same hospital that you are staying in while you wait for transportation back to Canada.)
I know one person that waited nearly a month for a treadmill test for diagnosing a heart condition - in the US, that test would have been done probably the day the heart pain was reported and surgery/pacemaker implantation would have occurred within a couple of days. This is only of many stories I have heard of this, but medical testing and examination and surgery can frequently be much slower than in the States.
And just who was the last person that you heard of that chose to go to Canada for any serious medical procedure? I understand our hospital appreciates greatly all the revenue from Canadians that come this way to get procedures performed quickly.
The frequent saying I hear is that "Canadian health care is great unless you really need it" - meaning that for anything minor Canadian health care is at least as good as the US system and appears cheaper to the consumer, but if you need serious medical attention, you had better think about having it done in the States.
I would have to disagree somewhat with your statement that they had not yet gained full faculty to make their own judgement.
As I recall, 13 is the age a Jewish boy is considered an adult (feel free to correct me if I am wrong there). So these children would have to be younger than 13, but it there were 42 of them, and they came out of the city to mock Elisha, then they must not have been too much younger (assuming that parents wouldn't allow infants to wander outside the city).
If a boy is considered to have his full faculty to make judgement at 13 then these children must be considered to have enough mental faculties to know better than to mock a prophet of God.
Maybe not the full experience and judgement of someone with more age, but certainly enough know what they were doing was wrong.
At what age did you or I know not to mock a pastor or rabbi to his face? I doubt it took us until adulthood to learn basic respect.
Total agreement with that here - I have found that NU or SW are great products if you are advanced enough to know what they are doing and when you should/shouldn't use them. Of course, if you are at that level do you really need these specific tools?
The problem comes from the slightly more knowledgeable users who say - "I have a problem. These tools are supposed to be good, so let's give them a try." And end up causing no end of trouble. Most of the time, the people who these tools are marketed to are the very ones who shouldn't be using them.
With the changes to the crew/cast and to the Cylons, it really doesn't resemble the original enough to warrant being given the same name.
I think I would welcome it if they just gave it a new name and didn't try to manufacture a few similarities between it and the original. In its own right it isn't too terrible, but just make it a spin-off of the original rather than a remake.
If he is using a touchscreen for input it may make the cheating a bit more difficult - I doubt there would be much typing involved with the touchscreen, more likely just a multiple choice selection, so the immediate problem would be finding a method for getting input into the system. Not impossible of course, just more difficult.
Although the encryption on the Wi-Fi would have to be fairly strong otherwise the next class period's students would have a good time trying to intercept all the exam questions and answers.
Similar experience here. I had my 19 inch monitor at work get rained for a whole weekend due to a leak in the roof. Dried it out, let it sit for week or so, and then plugged it again (on the opposite side of the desk this time). Worked fairly well, with an occasional (weekly or so) flicker that was enough to make me think the power was on the way out.
So a month goes by and what happens? Another leak, on the other side of the desk, where the monitor now resided. So, clean it up, dry it out, get the roof re-roofed, and move the monitor back to the original side of the desk. Powered up and works ok.
Still in use to this day.
It is about time that a judge was willing to use some common sense!
I would tend to agree - when I used to work on laptops with touch pads I always found them poorly positioned in the middle of the area beneath the keyboard. This makes very little sense as you would have to bend your wrist a lot to reach them.
On a side issue, does anyone else despise the MS Natural keyboards that put the arrow keys at about a 45 degree angle from the control key? Seemed like it was very difficult to have to bend my wrist to the right to use a arrow key when combined with using the control key in some first person shooter.
There is one major problem with this plan that always upsets me when I hear something like this: America is not, and was not intended to be a democracy. America was intended to be a Republic. Remember Ben Franklin's response to Mrs. Powell's question on the form of goverment: "A republic if you can keep it". the Founding Fathers knew better than to allow a direct democracy and knew better than to allow a monarchy. For 200+ years their wisdom moved America into the world powerhouse, and I would rather keep it that way.
Direct democracy is a form of goverment that emphasizes general consensus and mediocrity. Take the example of Rome - as a Republic it ruled the world through Senators that had to look out for the country's interests or not be elected, as a Democracy, whoever could bribe the most citizens had their views made into law.
We have enough mediocrity in Congress as it is, time to elect a few statesmen to bring commonsense back to Capitol Hill.
If they were going to be cute they could at least have use something like 127.0.0.1 so we techies could have laughed at an obvious an inside joke.
Yes but the possibilities for what could have happened in that scene make me shudder to think. Only someone with a deathwish would interrupt and tap on the shoulder a person who is heavily concentrating on discharging a loaded weapon. And the odds of a normal human actually gaining a class 3 license and 2 UZI's? If you can pull that off you're definitely uberhacker/industrial spy material. Oh, I would think that any safety rules for television production would limit them to using blanks at best. As far as the rest of the show, my biggest problems are that it is the perfect show to appeal to geeks but done so poorly it will turn most of them off after this episode. Problems I saw included: The goverment not being able to track them back to their location after figuring out that they were on DSL , their region, and probably having a good idea what they're IP address was (they do log these things in military computer systems I hope) The whole embedded modem in the CPU idea (and the lack of originality in stealing the idea from Intel) The hacking into the winch controls when the computer that was controlling it SHOULD have been only on a wired connection straight to the winch (no internet needed for that) The 2 Buyer's boarding a plane to check for explosives - wouldn't it have been smarter to check cargo perhaps? And oh yes, travelling to the Lee Harvey Oswald girl, convincing her to use the stolen CPU in they're cause, returning, breaking the code, and saving the plane - all in 22 minutes? Give me a break I will suspend MOST disbelief for television but dont insult me. Nice try, but they can do better. Remember, script writers who aren't technologically challenged are out there!
And I certain that books regarding those conflicts would sell well to them. But to those of use reading Slashdot, this book documents what interests us. If you want to argue that we should not concentrate on technology but on social conflict, fine. But Slashdot is not about social conflict (unless in some regard it coincides with technological advances) and should not be an advertising forum for books on such topics.
I remember reading Fire in the Valley before I went to college for my CS degree. I thought that it gave an excellent foundation for understanding what people were thinking when computers were developed. Lots of names and history that no one recognizes anymore but that doesn't mean they didn't play an equal role compared to the current dotcom set.
Isn't a flat tax, to an extent, progressive?
A flat tax will take a larger amount from the wealthy and with the modified flat taxes that have been proposed the "poor" (by US standards) wouldn't have to pay anything.
If that is not progressive what is?
Good question.
A budget surplus means that we are being taxed above what is needed to run the government. And we have no complaints that we don't get our money back? Come on. In any other industry money made above costs is considered profit but why should the federal government profit at my expense?
And who moderated this as "Flamebait" ? Someone who has no use for their money I guess.