Perhaps this was a place where the local government really doesn't do much? (This is no bad thing if things are going reasonably smoothly.) When I lived in Tucson I didn't much care about local politics -- the local government pretty much left well enough alone.
Now that I'm in Washington, I do care about local politics, because the local government is intrusive as hell.
I know it does for photo processing. I have a laptop with a dual core i5 (something like 2.9GHz), and when I come home with a card full of RAW images it takes an hour at least to render them to jpeg in lightroom. RawTherapee is also somewhat slow. Faster storage would help somewhat (I really need to find the right size Torx screwdriver so I can put my SSD in this laptop), but it is still rather CPU-bound.
Those signs are a different matter. We have them in Arizona, too.
There was a state law, passed by the gun rights crowd, that said that you have a right to carry a gun anywhere, with a few exceptions. But private property owners still have the right to control over their property -- the owner of a shop can say that people with weapons aren't welcome in her shop. The gun rights crowd is also generally big on private property rights, so they're fine with this. This isn't the government telling you you can't bring a gun into the bar; it's the bar owner.
I think a lot of the excitement around these things is sort of similar to the excitement when Linux was first announced: not "this thing is a big deal", but "this thing will lead to a big deal".
Apparently setting off extremely high-powered flashguns near the side of the road aimed at drivers -- blinding some people for significant periods of time -- is fine, since it's done for "safety". So are sending police around to make traffic stops with dazzlingly bright LED light bars.
Your judgment of whether or not to speed is nearly always better than the people who impose speed limits, though. Their claim, by establishing a speed limit, is "it is sufficiently unsafe to drive above speed X that it is worth using coercion backed up by violence against you to prevent you from doing so".
That changes based on traffic, road conditions, lighting conditions, and the type of vehicle. Speed limits, in attempting to say "well, you usually shouldn't go above 50mph", are overbroad: they ban certain things (like driving a well-maintained maneuverable car at 60mph on that road in good weather and no traffic) that are safe.
I know Montana has either had no speed limits or a tacit agreement not to enforce the speed limits on their interstates for a while, and I'm not aware of any epidemic of traffic fatalities there. Same with the Autobahn, for that matter. You'd think that a country that prides itself on individual freedom would take after the German motto "free speed for free people", but we don't.
Well, it's a different kind of experiment: not "can some libertarians take over a state", but "if the libertarians got their way, what would their society look like?"
By all accounts, NH is a pretty nice place to live. So even though lots of folks calling themselves libertarians are batshit crazy, and many of their ideas seem crazy, apparently (empirically) things at least work out reasonably well under certain circumstances.
They're not trying to do a scientific experiment. They're trying to build a place to live that works the way they want it to -- and, well, why not start with the closest thing they can find?
I'd be interested to see, built into the Constitution, a nuclear option:
Every time there is a federal election (i.e. every two years), there is a little tick box for "vote of no confidence". If over 50% of people (or a majority of people in over 50% of states, or however you want to define "majority" -- or perhaps a supermajority) tick it, then there is another election after a three month campaign, for all Senate seats, House seats, and the Presidency. All current members of Congress, the President, the Vice President, and senior Cabinet members are ineligible to run. Until they're sworn in, any act of the lame-duck Congress requires a supermajority (so they can't break things out of spite on the way out), and can be vetoed by a majority of state governors. (The point is to impose paralysis for all but urgent matters until the new government gets there.)
Perhaps. But people using bitcoin as a medium of exchange now can know how many early miners' coins are floating around, and will likely revalue their coins as appropriate -- just like the presence of Fort Knox affects people's judgments about the worth of gold.
This sort of thing probably doesn't bother the libertarian types most likely to use Bitcoin -- they probably perceive the founders' profit as fair compensation for developing the system.
That is exactly the biggest weakness of these things. The goal of an electronic currency isn't to "make money mining"; it's to create a medium of exchange.
Well, sure. I know they're pretty fast (although I would really prefer not to have to spin up my GPU and eat power to render a dog licking itself, thanks). But the whole process of finding where I put my damn files is so much harder on Windows than it should be. I want to search for a thing, why do I have to click ten times?
I always thought it was the MSIE "navigation" noise -- turns out the search window refreshes itself once in a while. I've heard that fucking noise too.
It sort of was for me. Before my default paradigm on my home machine was "use windows by default and KDE to get work done"; now it's "KDE by default and windows to play games".
That means I have to figure out how to interact with the Win8 app store.
OS-integrated install functions that are more complicated than "sudo apt-get install foobar" make me sad, because we have evidence that it really can be that simple.
I was at a computational physics conference once and a Slashdot story about a windows supercomputer came out. Some of us looked at each other and were completely perplexed -- how do you control it? Go around to each node and click on lattice_gauge_generation.exe?
Simple stupid answer: because my new laptop came with it, because I know the drivers and sorting through the UEFI baggage to install win7 on it will be a pain, and because I've not gotten around to it yet. It's a piece of shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this was a place where the local government really doesn't do much? (This is no bad thing if things are going reasonably smoothly.) When I lived in Tucson I didn't much care about local politics -- the local government pretty much left well enough alone.
Now that I'm in Washington, I do care about local politics, because the local government is intrusive as hell.
I know it does for photo processing. I have a laptop with a dual core i5 (something like 2.9GHz), and when I come home with a card full of RAW images it takes an hour at least to render them to jpeg in lightroom. RawTherapee is also somewhat slow. Faster storage would help somewhat (I really need to find the right size Torx screwdriver so I can put my SSD in this laptop), but it is still rather CPU-bound.
Those signs are a different matter. We have them in Arizona, too.
There was a state law, passed by the gun rights crowd, that said that you have a right to carry a gun anywhere, with a few exceptions. But private property owners still have the right to control over their property -- the owner of a shop can say that people with weapons aren't welcome in her shop. The gun rights crowd is also generally big on private property rights, so they're fine with this. This isn't the government telling you you can't bring a gun into the bar; it's the bar owner.
I think a lot of the excitement around these things is sort of similar to the excitement when Linux was first announced: not "this thing is a big deal", but "this thing will lead to a big deal".
I think "... with a 3D printer!" is going to become the new version of "... on the internet!" -- somehow it's Different (tm)!
Indeed.
I trust most people to make this distinction.
I don't trust cops to, especially when it's near the end of their quota period.
Apparently setting off extremely high-powered flashguns near the side of the road aimed at drivers -- blinding some people for significant periods of time -- is fine, since it's done for "safety". So are sending police around to make traffic stops with dazzlingly bright LED light bars.
Your judgment of whether or not to speed is nearly always better than the people who impose speed limits, though. Their claim, by establishing a speed limit, is "it is sufficiently unsafe to drive above speed X that it is worth using coercion backed up by violence against you to prevent you from doing so".
That changes based on traffic, road conditions, lighting conditions, and the type of vehicle. Speed limits, in attempting to say "well, you usually shouldn't go above 50mph", are overbroad: they ban certain things (like driving a well-maintained maneuverable car at 60mph on that road in good weather and no traffic) that are safe.
I know Montana has either had no speed limits or a tacit agreement not to enforce the speed limits on their interstates for a while, and I'm not aware of any epidemic of traffic fatalities there. Same with the Autobahn, for that matter. You'd think that a country that prides itself on individual freedom would take after the German motto "free speed for free people", but we don't.
... and these are the same people trying to ban the practical use of satnav devices while driving, leading to everyone reading maps in traffic.
I am sick of the automotive nanny state.
Well, it's a different kind of experiment: not "can some libertarians take over a state", but "if the libertarians got their way, what would their society look like?"
By all accounts, NH is a pretty nice place to live. So even though lots of folks calling themselves libertarians are batshit crazy, and many of their ideas seem crazy, apparently (empirically) things at least work out reasonably well under certain circumstances.
They're not trying to do a scientific experiment. They're trying to build a place to live that works the way they want it to -- and, well, why not start with the closest thing they can find?
The FSP'ers have said that they've picked NH because their views are already fairly well-aligned with what the FSP wants to do.
I'd be interested to see, built into the Constitution, a nuclear option:
Every time there is a federal election (i.e. every two years), there is a little tick box for "vote of no confidence". If over 50% of people (or a majority of people in over 50% of states, or however you want to define "majority" -- or perhaps a supermajority) tick it, then there is another election after a three month campaign, for all Senate seats, House seats, and the Presidency. All current members of Congress, the President, the Vice President, and senior Cabinet members are ineligible to run. Until they're sworn in, any act of the lame-duck Congress requires a supermajority (so they can't break things out of spite on the way out), and can be vetoed by a majority of state governors. (The point is to impose paralysis for all but urgent matters until the new government gets there.)
Why does everyone want devices to be even smaller and lighter? Have we gotten unable to lift the ones that we have?
If I could get a smartphone that weighed twice as much, with all that extra weight devoted solely to battery, I would.
How has Assange committed treachery, exactly?
He may not be on your side -- but he's not exactly betrayed the side he's on. That's treachery, and he's not committed it.
Perhaps. But people using bitcoin as a medium of exchange now can know how many early miners' coins are floating around, and will likely revalue their coins as appropriate -- just like the presence of Fort Knox affects people's judgments about the worth of gold.
This sort of thing probably doesn't bother the libertarian types most likely to use Bitcoin -- they probably perceive the founders' profit as fair compensation for developing the system.
That is exactly the biggest weakness of these things. The goal of an electronic currency isn't to "make money mining"; it's to create a medium of exchange.
Well, sure. I know they're pretty fast (although I would really prefer not to have to spin up my GPU and eat power to render a dog licking itself, thanks). But the whole process of finding where I put my damn files is so much harder on Windows than it should be. I want to search for a thing, why do I have to click ten times?
I always thought it was the MSIE "navigation" noise -- turns out the search window refreshes itself once in a while. I've heard that fucking noise too.
WHY does a file browser need sound effects? WHY?
Thank you; I'll try that when I get home. Gods. And people say Linux is complicated!
It sort of was for me. Before my default paradigm on my home machine was "use windows by default and KDE to get work done"; now it's "KDE by default and windows to play games".
That means I have to figure out how to interact with the Win8 app store.
OS-integrated install functions that are more complicated than "sudo apt-get install foobar" make me sad, because we have evidence that it really can be that simple.
I was at a computational physics conference once and a Slashdot story about a windows supercomputer came out. Some of us looked at each other and were completely perplexed -- how do you control it? Go around to each node and click on lattice_gauge_generation.exe?
This, right here, is the problem -- and that they've let the tablet-makers dictate mouse/keyboard UI's.
Simple stupid answer: because my new laptop came with it, because I know the drivers and sorting through the UEFI baggage to install win7 on it will be a pain, and because I've not gotten around to it yet. It's a piece of shit.