Well... I couldn't quite remember about COBOL (the last time I even thought about it was on the day of the exam for Systems Analysis about 12 years ago), so I didn't include it. Much as I hated programming in it (and I'd have to say it's probably caused more RSI than any other two programming languages), I have to admit it's actually very good for what it was designed for, and therefore qualifies as a real programming language.
There are a number of other "real" programming languages (aside from FORTRAN) which use IF.. THEN constructs. Ada leaps to mind (also PL/SQL, a proprietary offshoot of Ada), also Pascal (it might be a quiche-eater's language, but it's still real). I'm sure given time and energy I could come up with other counter-examples, some of them still in use.
The last two mass waves of migration (South-East asians in the late 1970s and southern Europeans immediately after WWII) generally arrived speaking no English. They picked it up pretty quickly, though. They, and their descendants, are now as Australian as those of us whose ancestors arrived 50-100 years earlier.
As someone pointed out recently (on an SBS current affairs show I think) in line with Sam Kekovich's "Patriotic Australians eat lamb" advertisements, the best lamb recipes in the world come from the Middle East (Terror Central). So, anyone coming from that part of the world is, by definition, just about as Aussie as is possible (even if they can't yet speak English).
The point you (and many others) are missing is that, to access government-supplied benefits in Australia you _already_ have to jump through hoops proving that you are both yourself, and entitled to the benefit in question. This smart card won't make much difference to this.
The two things that bother me most about it is that, firstly it provides a single point of failure for identity theft, and secondly the proposed card has about 64MB of space (WAY more than required for your name, address, DOB and dependants for Medicare purposes).
The Australian Government would have us all believe that welfare fraud is rampant, and costs the Australian taxpayer billions of dollars a year. I doubt that, and I'd like to see the evidence, as this government has a long history of mendacity.
I imagine there'd be a lot of people who'd rather not have one of theses things observing them interfere with themselves while looking at www.dirtyschoolgirls.com...
I think your problem is more to do with idiotic system administrators than idiotic IT policy. This is essentially what happens at my workplace, and the only time people get locked out of their accounts is if they get the password wrong on 3 consecutive attempts.
The only problem caused by using multiple PCs is that your desktop/preferences/etc don't follow you around, unless you specifically request a roaming desktop.
It may be mainstream in the US. Just about everyone else in the world regards young-earth Creationists as crackpots.
The established, non-snake-handling, churches (ie, Roman Catholics, Anglicans/Episcopalians, etc) accept evolution, and merely posit some god as mostly first cause, perhaps nudging things in a particular direction at strategic moments (if I understand them correctly). If you're going to believe in a god at all, this is a fairly respectable philosophical and theological position (unlike Creationism).
> If trains were dramatically more efficient and cost effective then items would be shipped that way.
Not true. The main reason (in Australia at least) that trains aren't used more is because of trans-shipment. That is, you put your stuff on a truck, drive it to the nearest railhead, it gets put on a train and taken to a railhead nearer to its destination, it gets loaded onto another truck and delivered. In Australia, which is about the same size as the US but with less than 10% of the population, most of whom live in Sydney anyway, this is (almost) a reasonable excuse. (Look at a map of Australia showing the railway lines to see what I mean.) In the US or Europe, with much larger, more densely packed populations, it isn't. However, just because something is indefensible doen't mean people won't keep doing it if it saves a bit of time and money. Don't forget that, in the US at least, there is (effectively) a massive subsidy on petrol.
I don't understand why you think it is evil to assert there are far too many people in the world. Unlike human acts and intentions, facts don't really have a moral dimension.
I was working at Mitsubishi Australia a couple of years ago, and they still had some token ring. It was quite weird to see half the office unable to work and the other half saying, "What's your problem?" when either the token ring or the ethernet failed for some reason.
It seems to me that the two(ish) sides of this argument boil down to:
(a) I want to keep up my destructive lifestyle, including but not limited to driving a petrol-guzzling oversized car, so I'm going to believe this bloke who's a "world-famous expert", even though he's almost certainly sold his soul to the oil companies; and
(b) I'm really concerned that the world we're creating will be uninhabitable for my descendants and many other living things, so I think we should all try to do something about it, and even if there isn't really a problem surely it's better to take some sensible precautions.
While I'll concede my take on this isn't particularly nuanced, I think it encapsulates the core of the disagreement. I've worked out that it's actually pointless to try and have a sensible discussion with those who go with option (a), so I usually don't bother any more.
Although it's easy to play a guitar, it's extremely hard to play it well. (I speak as someone who's been playing for about 40 years - I still don't play all that well.)
After all, look at all the research sponsored by... someone... that proved that not only did smoking tobacco not cause cancer, it actually had a positive effect on the smoker's health, and also it wasn't even a little bit addictive. Now THAT'S what I'd call real science, just like all the climate-change-denying real science that isn't getting funded. Well, it isn't getting MUCH funding...
Environmentalism is not a religion. That has got to be close to THE MOST STUPID FUCKING THING that conservatives say (despite an awful lot of competition). I'm not going to bother justifying my claim. As I've said on many occasions, it's impossible to have a rational discussion with you people, and I'm tired of trying.
I have read Chrichton's particularly ill-informed ramblings on climate change, together with the debunking of them by proper climate scientists. That's why I suggested you look at Real Climate. If you're too fucking lazy to do that, that's your problem not mine. You can't expect people to hold your hand all your life.
I've also tried reading a couple of his books. He really is a very bad writer.
If you consider Chrichton (an extremely bad writer who isn't even a scientist) to be a credible source on climate change (or anything else, for that matter), there is no hope of having a rational discussion with you.
There's an excellent debunking of his pronouncements on the Real Cliamte website (I can't be fucked looking for it right now) which I suggest you read.
Try living in Australia. It's roughly the same size as the US, but with less than 10% of the population (mostly concentrated on the east coast). We need artificially cheap fuel even more than you do, by your reasoning. Fortunately a wise government put that out of the picture about 30 years ago. However, we've still got a huge number of selfish arseholes driving 4WDs around.
We are already paying $A5 per gallon. While the $A is worth about $US0.7 according to the currency gamblers, you can actually buy about the same amount of stuff with $A1 here as you would with $US1 in America, which means they're actually worth about the same amount.
We're already paying this much in Australia - and petrol here is still cheaper than in Europe, I believe. It doesn't discourage arseholes from driving 4WDs in the city, unfortunately. Even heavily-taxed fuel can't beat a cunningly devised marketing plan.
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Well ... I couldn't quite remember about COBOL (the last time I even thought about it was on the day of the exam for Systems Analysis about 12 years ago), so I didn't include it. Much as I hated programming in it (and I'd have to say it's probably caused more RSI than any other two programming languages), I have to admit it's actually very good for what it was designed for, and therefore qualifies as a real programming language.
There are a number of other "real" programming languages (aside from FORTRAN) which use IF .. THEN constructs. Ada leaps to mind (also PL/SQL, a proprietary offshoot of Ada), also Pascal (it might be a quiche-eater's language, but it's still real). I'm sure given time and energy I could come up with other counter-examples, some of them still in use.
The last two mass waves of migration (South-East asians in the late 1970s and southern Europeans immediately after WWII) generally arrived speaking no English. They picked it up pretty quickly, though. They, and their descendants, are now as Australian as those of us whose ancestors arrived 50-100 years earlier.
What's your point?
As someone pointed out recently (on an SBS current affairs show I think) in line with Sam Kekovich's "Patriotic Australians eat lamb" advertisements, the best lamb recipes in the world come from the Middle East (Terror Central). So, anyone coming from that part of the world is, by definition, just about as Aussie as is possible (even if they can't yet speak English).
> ... if the United States were taken over by totalitarians ...
I've got news for you, and it's all bad.
The point you (and many others) are missing is that, to access government-supplied benefits in Australia you _already_ have to jump through hoops proving that you are both yourself, and entitled to the benefit in question. This smart card won't make much difference to this.
The two things that bother me most about it is that, firstly it provides a single point of failure for identity theft, and secondly the proposed card has about 64MB of space (WAY more than required for your name, address, DOB and dependants for Medicare purposes).
The Australian Government would have us all believe that welfare fraud is rampant, and costs the Australian taxpayer billions of dollars a year. I doubt that, and I'd like to see the evidence, as this government has a long history of mendacity.
I imagine there'd be a lot of people who'd rather not have one of theses things observing them interfere with themselves while looking at www.dirtyschoolgirls.com ...
That is outstanding! You, sir, are a comic genius.
I think your problem is more to do with idiotic system administrators than idiotic IT policy. This is essentially what happens at my workplace, and the only time people get locked out of their accounts is if they get the password wrong on 3 consecutive attempts.
The only problem caused by using multiple PCs is that your desktop/preferences/etc don't follow you around, unless you specifically request a roaming desktop.
It may be mainstream in the US. Just about everyone else in the world regards young-earth Creationists as crackpots.
The established, non-snake-handling, churches (ie, Roman Catholics, Anglicans/Episcopalians, etc) accept evolution, and merely posit some god as mostly first cause, perhaps nudging things in a particular direction at strategic moments (if I understand them correctly). If you're going to believe in a god at all, this is a fairly respectable philosophical and theological position (unlike Creationism).
> If trains were dramatically more efficient and cost effective then items would be shipped that way.
Not true. The main reason (in Australia at least) that trains aren't used more is because of trans-shipment. That is, you put your stuff on a truck, drive it to the nearest railhead, it gets put on a train and taken to a railhead nearer to its destination, it gets loaded onto another truck and delivered. In Australia, which is about the same size as the US but with less than 10% of the population, most of whom live in Sydney anyway, this is (almost) a reasonable excuse. (Look at a map of Australia showing the railway lines to see what I mean.) In the US or Europe, with much larger, more densely packed populations, it isn't. However, just because something is indefensible doen't mean people won't keep doing it if it saves a bit of time and money. Don't forget that, in the US at least, there is (effectively) a massive subsidy on petrol.
If it makes you feel any better, Creationism is a crackpotted religious belief.
I don't understand why you think it is evil to assert there are far too many people in the world. Unlike human acts and intentions, facts don't really have a moral dimension.
I was working at Mitsubishi Australia a couple of years ago, and they still had some token ring. It was quite weird to see half the office unable to work and the other half saying, "What's your problem?" when either the token ring or the ethernet failed for some reason.
...
It's redundancy, of a kind
Did I say I believe in absolutes? I'm not sure I understand you.
It seems to me that the two(ish) sides of this argument boil down to:
(a) I want to keep up my destructive lifestyle, including but not limited to driving a petrol-guzzling oversized car, so I'm going to believe this bloke who's a "world-famous expert", even though he's almost certainly sold his soul to the oil companies; and
(b) I'm really concerned that the world we're creating will be uninhabitable for my descendants and many other living things, so I think we should all try to do something about it, and even if there isn't really a problem surely it's better to take some sensible precautions.
While I'll concede my take on this isn't particularly nuanced, I think it encapsulates the core of the disagreement. I've worked out that it's actually pointless to try and have a sensible discussion with those who go with option (a), so I usually don't bother any more.
Although it's easy to play a guitar, it's extremely hard to play it well. (I speak as someone who's been playing for about 40 years - I still don't play all that well.)
After all, look at all the research sponsored by ... someone ... that proved that not only did smoking tobacco not cause cancer, it actually had a positive effect on the smoker's health, and also it wasn't even a little bit addictive. Now THAT'S what I'd call real science, just like all the climate-change-denying real science that isn't getting funded. Well, it isn't getting MUCH funding ...
Environmentalism is not a religion. That has got to be close to THE MOST STUPID FUCKING THING that conservatives say (despite an awful lot of competition). I'm not going to bother justifying my claim. As I've said on many occasions, it's impossible to have a rational discussion with you people, and I'm tired of trying.
I have read Chrichton's particularly ill-informed ramblings on climate change, together with the debunking of them by proper climate scientists. That's why I suggested you look at Real Climate. If you're too fucking lazy to do that, that's your problem not mine. You can't expect people to hold your hand all your life.
I've also tried reading a couple of his books. He really is a very bad writer.
If you consider Chrichton (an extremely bad writer who isn't even a scientist) to be a credible source on climate change (or anything else, for that matter), there is no hope of having a rational discussion with you.
There's an excellent debunking of his pronouncements on the Real Cliamte website (I can't be fucked looking for it right now) which I suggest you read.
Try living in Australia. It's roughly the same size as the US, but with less than 10% of the population (mostly concentrated on the east coast). We need artificially cheap fuel even more than you do, by your reasoning. Fortunately a wise government put that out of the picture about 30 years ago. However, we've still got a huge number of selfish arseholes driving 4WDs around.
We are already paying $A5 per gallon. While the $A is worth about $US0.7 according to the currency gamblers, you can actually buy about the same amount of stuff with $A1 here as you would with $US1 in America, which means they're actually worth about the same amount.
I reckon people who own 4WDs should be hit with a stupidity tax - say, double the annual registration fee everyone else pays.
We're already paying this much in Australia - and petrol here is still cheaper than in Europe, I believe. It doesn't discourage arseholes from driving 4WDs in the city, unfortunately. Even heavily-taxed fuel can't beat a cunningly devised marketing plan.
Additionally, Ferraris spend _considerably_ more time being fixed than they do on the road. From what I've heard, they aren't very reliable.