The President traditionally submits a budget to set the agenda. Of course, the congress is free to totally ignore it, but in practice the President generally provides a roadmap of what he wants to see.
That's why I blame Reagan for the runaway budget during his years, even though conservatives tend to blame the Democrat congress. Reagan didn't even *try* to submit smaller government budgets, and he certainly didn't do any veto threats.
Money is nice and I can appreciate that a broke college student would want to maximize that, but that's short-term thinking. I would focus on:
1) What sort of industry relationships can I foster. If there is one lesson I've learned, it's that the most critical factor in success is who you know. Both in finding future employment and mentoring relationships.
2) What skills can I learn *that will look on a resume*. New grads always complain about, "They want experience, but how can I get experience when they won't hire me???" Well, this is how. You want as much experience doing real work as possible.
Honestly, working for free is worth it if you can get really great situation that fulfills #1 and #2. Be patient. The paychecks will come. Take advantage of your opportunities first.
Whatever Obama does to the country, it won't be worse than what the Republicans have done the last 8 years, and what I'm pretty confident would have continued for 4 more.
Why use Classmates.com when you have Myspace.com or Facebook.com [...] Seems to be the best way (For me at least) to stay in touch with old High School pals.
If you've graduated in the last five years or so, then this is probably reasonable. But very few people over the age of 30 (if not 25) use Myspace or Facebook. Those sites are oriented toward young single people with enough idle time to do that sort of thing.
I've connected with a couple of people through classmates.com. They're obnoxious, but they do provide a useful service on occasion.
I don't remember which movie it was, but I recall the opening sequence of an old B&W movie where they showed the a map to let the audience know where the action was taking place. The caption under the map in large, dramatic letters was... "ASIA".
The sarcastic comment was, "Well, that narrows it down."
Satire is now illegal. The lawyers are calling it a "collection of derivative works" and that it "damages the brand identity".
The lawyers called back. Satire is not totally illegal, but according to the new "Fairness Doctrine", all satire has to be balanced with equal time to opposing viewpoints.
Speaking of collaborative tools, anyone know of a good, free shared white board? I was searching for such an animal recently, and the results were disappointing, to say the least. There were only a couple of players, and the functionality was pretty bad.
Yikes -- That's a lot of spending on that site. He claims he's going to pay for everything with corresponding cuts and revenue increases (i.e., taxes), but I'd sure like to see as much detail put into where money was going to be saved as there is how money is going to be spent.
D goes to the end of line, dL goes to the end of the page. It's useful when you want to delete a bunch of stuff, so it's any easy way to delete a lot of lines at a time, but you never delete anything out of view. Repeating it allows you to suck up a lot of text quickly.
xp - reverse next two characters
dL - Delete to end of page, in other words, everything visible.
C - Often overlooked: chop off end of line and go into insert mode.
Some dude showing up and doing something that violates the laws of physics would be pretty convincing. Say, by making a large amount of mass stop instantaneously in zero time, or making light go twice as fast as 'e', something on that order.
Or beam me to heaven and watch Him manipulate the world on his Universe-Controller would be pretty cool.
Being 44 years old now, I have noticed that I'm not able to think as clearly as I did in my early thirties. In my self analysis, however, I find the biggest culprit is "brain noise." When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration. Which makes me wonder if it's simply a natural consequence of life: more and more detail is stored away in my head. A younger person with a relatively "empty" head isn't as distracted by all the useless dreck and is able to form thoughts more cleanly.
Even as I type this post, my lifetime of experience keep popping in with tangentially relevant information, not to mention songs triggered by phrases, movie quotes and other useless crapola.:D
I've actually wondered if there are mental exercises such as meditation that might help to quiet all the noise.
There can be no such thing as a bad guy: value-judgements are almost always out of place in conventional language, and this kind of (unconscious) hate-mongering seriously contributes to war and other cultual conflict.
Oh, please. Do the "bad guys" think they're bad? Probably not. But who cares? Leaders of countries who practice genocide are "bad guys". Leaders of countries who invade other countries for expansionist goals are "bad guys". Roving gangs of men in Africa who steal children are "bad guys". Terrorists who ram airplanes into skyscrapers are "bad guys".
Bottom line, nothing personal, but your attitude is what I'm talking about. You have no perspective that there really are maniacs in the world with no interest in stable civilization. They want personal glory at any cost. Tell the twins that Dr. Mengele was sewing together or one of the people whose eyes he injected dye into to try and turn them blue that there are no bad guys in the world. After all, who are we to judge his cultural differences? Maybe in his culture it's okay to do these sort of medical experiments./sarcasm
Generalizations are bad. Specific criticism of individuals or cultures is not.
Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?
To take the military: Forget, for a second, contemporary specifics of what you may or may not support. But in general, what is your freedom worth? Do you really think that you would still have it if the American military decided to completely disband? How long do you think it would take for a World War to spring up?
Do you know why we haven't had another world war since 1945? You can thank the American military for that. There is absolutely no question Europe would have had another world war if we hadn't stationed troops through the region. And Europe might be slightly more civilized today (France, for example, is probably not going to get another Napoleon, but then, you never know with the insane French who think they are still relevant and powerful), but there are still expansionist countries and old hatreds still abound.
Of course, if the American military disbanded, I would give it 10 years before some country do a full-blown invasion of the USA.
Unfortunately, Americans are so spoiled and our memories are so short, that we think there are no bad guys in the world.
If you change the climate enough, there will be massive ecological collapse.
And if the Queen had balls, she'd be the King. What's your point? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that it's conceivable that the climate will changed "enough" that "ecological collapse" is possible. And you also seem to be under the mistaken impression that the Earth has never been significantly warmer than it is now.
The Earth is not static. It is constantly changing, sometimes radically so. Life is very, very flexible. Much more flexible than many people believe.
The concern is that we won't cut back CO2 enough (and looking at the current state of things, this is quite likely), and we need a backup plan.
Backup plan for what? If Global Warming is true and we are unable to stop things, the worst that will happen is that humans will be displaced to higher ground and we might have more hurricanes (and both of those might not even be true). And it's even possible that life will be *better* with a warmer Earth.
What won't happen is massive extinction of all life.
Well, I'd say the main issue with that argument is that we just plain don't have the tools to detect intelligent life outside our solar system.
Radio signals are not the only way to detect intelligent life. I think the biggest ramification of the Fermi Paradox is that we're here at all. When you do the math, even at sublight speed, it takes about 10 million years to fill a galaxy (give or take an order of magnitude) using geometric progression. That's *nothing* in the billions of years of the life of the galaxy. Yes, maybe a lot of civilizations wouldn't have expansionist goals, but it only takes one. Only one civilization has to have the desire to expand in a sublight sleep ship and the whole galaxy is filled before we even arrive on the scene.
Or, at the very least, someone would have sent out Von Neumann self-reproducing intelligent probes. We should see those everywhere, if life were common.
People hate facing up to the fact that we're alone. But it just seems to be the fact of the matter.
The "famous Drake equation" is NOT meant to calculate anything, it's meant to start a conversation on what the parameters of intelligent life probability are.
On the other hand, the famous Fermi Paradox tells us that we're alone in the galaxy. And considering that's a direct piece of data, I tend to believe this view. People like to wave their hands and say, but, but, WE'RE here! That means that there "just have" to be more! Why are we so unique? This is the Sagan argument, and it's answered by the Anthropic Principle.
And yes, in this case, absence of evidence *IS* evidence of absence.
If you can point out any reason why Flash is superior to other video technologies, I'd very much like to hear it.
You can spew any techno details you want, but Flash rules for one and only one reason: It works, every time. The fact that it starts up nearly instantaneously is another big bonus. Flash is the only video technology you can say that about, in my (and I daresay most people's) experience.
The only difference is that you've got a higher speed connection today than you did the last time you used RealPlayer, or Quicktime, or Windows Media Player.
Well, I've had some form of broadband for about 10 years now (I paid relatively big $$$ for dual-line ISDN back in the day), and maybe you always had a beautiful experience, but for me, it *always* sucked before Flash came along. Flash gave us two things: 1) A standardized plugin that everybody had and was under tight control, and 2) the server side was well designed and gave instant start-up.
And I would go so far as to say that RealPlayer, QuickTime and WMP STILL all suck when it comes to streaming reliability (well, to be fair, I haven't installed RP in about five years, and never will).
Do you think it's a coincidence that YouTube became popular *exactly* at the same time that Flash released their video capability? No, it's not a coincidence. It was the first video platform that actually *worked* reliably. And it's not a coincidence that Flash video has utterly dominated the scene.
Considering Flash is what made video on the web actually viable and reliable, I would like to hear of these "much better" solutions. You apparently don't remember the Bad Old Days before Flash video when streaming video worked about 10% of the time, and when it did work, it took about 60 seconds to start up.
Say what you want about Flash, but it works pretty damn well.
Anyone who has a grasp of history is hoping for a president who can stand up to the next Cold War and prevent WWIII.
Ha! You sound exactly like my brother. He says he's a single issue voter, and that's his single issue. It's not so much the military experience that attracts him to McCain, it's the perception that McCain is a crazy SOB who isn't afraid to pull the trigger if necessary. No rogue country is going to challenge him -- they already know what he'll do. Obama, on the other hand, will probably be tested, and Obama's proclivity toward talking rather than saber rattling might encourage the rogue countries to act.
I'm not sure I buy into that point of view, but it's a valid concern.
Slashdot Mirror
The President traditionally submits a budget to set the agenda. Of course, the congress is free to totally ignore it, but in practice the President generally provides a roadmap of what he wants to see.
That's why I blame Reagan for the runaway budget during his years, even though conservatives tend to blame the Democrat congress. Reagan didn't even *try* to submit smaller government budgets, and he certainly didn't do any veto threats.
Money is nice and I can appreciate that a broke college student would want to maximize that, but that's short-term thinking. I would focus on:
1) What sort of industry relationships can I foster. If there is one lesson I've learned, it's that the most critical factor in success is who you know. Both in finding future employment and mentoring relationships.
2) What skills can I learn *that will look on a resume*. New grads always complain about, "They want experience, but how can I get experience when they won't hire me???" Well, this is how. You want as much experience doing real work as possible.
Honestly, working for free is worth it if you can get really great situation that fulfills #1 and #2. Be patient. The paychecks will come. Take advantage of your opportunities first.
Whatever Obama does to the country, it won't be worse than what the Republicans have done the last 8 years, and what I'm pretty confident would have continued for 4 more.
Wow, you have contact information on every person you've ever met in your life?
I congratulate you, sir, on your extensive record keeping.
Why use Classmates.com when you have Myspace.com or Facebook.com [...] Seems to be the best way (For me at least) to stay in touch with old High School pals.
If you've graduated in the last five years or so, then this is probably reasonable. But very few people over the age of 30 (if not 25) use Myspace or Facebook. Those sites are oriented toward young single people with enough idle time to do that sort of thing.
I've connected with a couple of people through classmates.com. They're obnoxious, but they do provide a useful service on occasion.
I had ONE spam message last night. I average probably 20 a night.
I don't remember which movie it was, but I recall the opening sequence of an old B&W movie where they showed the a map to let the audience know where the action was taking place. The caption under the map in large, dramatic letters was... "ASIA".
The sarcastic comment was, "Well, that narrows it down."
Satire is now illegal. The lawyers are calling it a "collection of derivative works" and that it "damages the brand identity".
The lawyers called back. Satire is not totally illegal, but according to the new "Fairness Doctrine", all satire has to be balanced with equal time to opposing viewpoints.
Speaking of collaborative tools, anyone know of a good, free shared white board? I was searching for such an animal recently, and the results were disappointing, to say the least. There were only a couple of players, and the functionality was pretty bad.
Yikes -- That's a lot of spending on that site. He claims he's going to pay for everything with corresponding cuts and revenue increases (i.e., taxes), but I'd sure like to see as much detail put into where money was going to be saved as there is how money is going to be spent.
D goes to the end of line, dL goes to the end of the page. It's useful when you want to delete a bunch of stuff, so it's any easy way to delete a lot of lines at a time, but you never delete anything out of view. Repeating it allows you to suck up a lot of text quickly.
Also, you can do use "ma" to mark the beginning line, "mb" to mark the ending line, and then:
:'a,'bs/FROM/TO/g
Not horribly exciting ones, but useful:
xp - reverse next two characters
dL - Delete to end of page, in other words, everything visible.
C - Often overlooked: chop off end of line and go into insert mode.
Some dude showing up and doing something that violates the laws of physics would be pretty convincing. Say, by making a large amount of mass stop instantaneously in zero time, or making light go twice as fast as 'e', something on that order. Or beam me to heaven and watch Him manipulate the world on his Universe-Controller would be pretty cool.
Being 44 years old now, I have noticed that I'm not able to think as clearly as I did in my early thirties. In my self analysis, however, I find the biggest culprit is "brain noise." When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration. Which makes me wonder if it's simply a natural consequence of life: more and more detail is stored away in my head. A younger person with a relatively "empty" head isn't as distracted by all the useless dreck and is able to form thoughts more cleanly.
Even as I type this post, my lifetime of experience keep popping in with tangentially relevant information, not to mention songs triggered by phrases, movie quotes and other useless crapola. :D
I've actually wondered if there are mental exercises such as meditation that might help to quiet all the noise.
There can be no such thing as a bad guy: value-judgements are almost always out of place in conventional language, and this kind of (unconscious) hate-mongering seriously contributes to war and other cultual conflict.
Oh, please. Do the "bad guys" think they're bad? Probably not. But who cares? Leaders of countries who practice genocide are "bad guys". Leaders of countries who invade other countries for expansionist goals are "bad guys". Roving gangs of men in Africa who steal children are "bad guys". Terrorists who ram airplanes into skyscrapers are "bad guys".
Bottom line, nothing personal, but your attitude is what I'm talking about. You have no perspective that there really are maniacs in the world with no interest in stable civilization. They want personal glory at any cost. Tell the twins that Dr. Mengele was sewing together or one of the people whose eyes he injected dye into to try and turn them blue that there are no bad guys in the world. After all, who are we to judge his cultural differences? Maybe in his culture it's okay to do these sort of medical experiments. /sarcasm
Generalizations are bad. Specific criticism of individuals or cultures is not.
Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?
To take the military: Forget, for a second, contemporary specifics of what you may or may not support. But in general, what is your freedom worth? Do you really think that you would still have it if the American military decided to completely disband? How long do you think it would take for a World War to spring up?
Do you know why we haven't had another world war since 1945? You can thank the American military for that. There is absolutely no question Europe would have had another world war if we hadn't stationed troops through the region. And Europe might be slightly more civilized today (France, for example, is probably not going to get another Napoleon, but then, you never know with the insane French who think they are still relevant and powerful), but there are still expansionist countries and old hatreds still abound.
Of course, if the American military disbanded, I would give it 10 years before some country do a full-blown invasion of the USA.
Unfortunately, Americans are so spoiled and our memories are so short, that we think there are no bad guys in the world.
If you change the climate enough, there will be massive ecological collapse.
And if the Queen had balls, she'd be the King. What's your point? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that it's conceivable that the climate will changed "enough" that "ecological collapse" is possible. And you also seem to be under the mistaken impression that the Earth has never been significantly warmer than it is now.
The Earth is not static. It is constantly changing, sometimes radically so. Life is very, very flexible. Much more flexible than many people believe.
The concern is that we won't cut back CO2 enough (and looking at the current state of things, this is quite likely), and we need a backup plan.
Backup plan for what? If Global Warming is true and we are unable to stop things, the worst that will happen is that humans will be displaced to higher ground and we might have more hurricanes (and both of those might not even be true). And it's even possible that life will be *better* with a warmer Earth.
What won't happen is massive extinction of all life.
Well, I'd say the main issue with that argument is that we just plain don't have the tools to detect intelligent life outside our solar system.
Radio signals are not the only way to detect intelligent life. I think the biggest ramification of the Fermi Paradox is that we're here at all. When you do the math, even at sublight speed, it takes about 10 million years to fill a galaxy (give or take an order of magnitude) using geometric progression. That's *nothing* in the billions of years of the life of the galaxy. Yes, maybe a lot of civilizations wouldn't have expansionist goals, but it only takes one. Only one civilization has to have the desire to expand in a sublight sleep ship and the whole galaxy is filled before we even arrive on the scene.
Or, at the very least, someone would have sent out Von Neumann self-reproducing intelligent probes. We should see those everywhere, if life were common.
People hate facing up to the fact that we're alone. But it just seems to be the fact of the matter.
The "famous Drake equation" is NOT meant to calculate anything, it's meant to start a conversation on what the parameters of intelligent life probability are.
On the other hand, the famous Fermi Paradox tells us that we're alone in the galaxy. And considering that's a direct piece of data, I tend to believe this view. People like to wave their hands and say, but, but, WE'RE here! That means that there "just have" to be more! Why are we so unique? This is the Sagan argument, and it's answered by the Anthropic Principle.
And yes, in this case, absence of evidence *IS* evidence of absence.
If you can point out any reason why Flash is superior to other video technologies, I'd very much like to hear it.
You can spew any techno details you want, but Flash rules for one and only one reason: It works, every time. The fact that it starts up nearly instantaneously is another big bonus. Flash is the only video technology you can say that about, in my (and I daresay most people's) experience.
The only difference is that you've got a higher speed connection today than you did the last time you used RealPlayer, or Quicktime, or Windows Media Player.
Well, I've had some form of broadband for about 10 years now (I paid relatively big $$$ for dual-line ISDN back in the day), and maybe you always had a beautiful experience, but for me, it *always* sucked before Flash came along. Flash gave us two things: 1) A standardized plugin that everybody had and was under tight control, and 2) the server side was well designed and gave instant start-up.
And I would go so far as to say that RealPlayer, QuickTime and WMP STILL all suck when it comes to streaming reliability (well, to be fair, I haven't installed RP in about five years, and never will).
Do you think it's a coincidence that YouTube became popular *exactly* at the same time that Flash released their video capability? No, it's not a coincidence. It was the first video platform that actually *worked* reliably. And it's not a coincidence that Flash video has utterly dominated the scene.
and there are much better solutions for video.
Considering Flash is what made video on the web actually viable and reliable, I would like to hear of these "much better" solutions. You apparently don't remember the Bad Old Days before Flash video when streaming video worked about 10% of the time, and when it did work, it took about 60 seconds to start up.
Say what you want about Flash, but it works pretty damn well.
Anyone who has a grasp of history is hoping for a president who can stand up to the next Cold War and prevent WWIII.
Ha! You sound exactly like my brother. He says he's a single issue voter, and that's his single issue. It's not so much the military experience that attracts him to McCain, it's the perception that McCain is a crazy SOB who isn't afraid to pull the trigger if necessary. No rogue country is going to challenge him -- they already know what he'll do. Obama, on the other hand, will probably be tested, and Obama's proclivity toward talking rather than saber rattling might encourage the rogue countries to act.
I'm not sure I buy into that point of view, but it's a valid concern.