Rather than looking at a single disease statistic I think it is more instructive to look at overall average life expectancy. I let the numbers do the talking.
If the government needs to apply lethal force to stay in power but the army won't play it is game over. That what toppled all the Eastern communist countries after Gorbachev made it clear the Russian military will not intervene.
And yes in all cases as you put it you somehow get the vast majority of citizens to join the protest. News bulletin: If just a minority is disenfranchised and protests violently this is usually referred to as terrorism and the majority of people will gladly have police force and army take care of them.
So it is not like there isn't plenty of cases where non violent protest got the job done (starting with Ghandi). In recent history the suppression of such protest has been the exception rather than the rule (Tienanmen, Burma). It will be interesting how Iran shakes out. At any rate I fail to see how the fire power in civilian hands will ever be a match to the resources that a cohesive army can command.
Please hurry over to Wikipedia to edit the article on totalitarian rule. It doesn't yet quite reflect your definition and uses so many unnecessary words in comparison to your brief definition that - dare I say it - exudes an intoxicatingly elegant simplicity.
If you don't have an unpalatable last resort then what's stopping those in power from abusing that power in the extreme?
A police force and army free of sociopaths that wouldn't follow an order to shoot at their own citizens if the latter were to mass protest non violently.
It ain't that simple. EU law can only overrides local law in the areas that belong to the primary EU pillar. Even then the guiding principle has been adopted that local administration should always be the preferred approach.
The EU is not yet and may never be a state. Of course it is easy to see that Americans may be confused by this given the lack of legal and administrative integration within the United States.
I wish you were right about this. After all evidence is building that the US torture policies have lead to many well documented deaths and have been authorized at the highest level. Yet, that doesn't mean that Bush wasn't elected president (although technically the first time around he may not have been).
Will be interesting to see if there are enough hardcore dead-enders still around on/. to get this modded as flamebait.
Very insightful. It goes to the core of why the Western countries divide power into separate branches. Our governments are not about efficiency but rather designed to preserve the citizens freedoms by compartmentalizing governmental power. It is very disconcerting when a populace forgets about this essential concept.
Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature...
So where do we mine Plutonium again?
Somebody please take the Informative moderation away from this comment. The highly radioactive fission products of a nuclear reactor have half times too short to occur naturally in any significant amount. Even an element like plutonium with the longest lasting isotope having a half time of 24,100 years decays way to quickly in comparison to the earth's age to have any meaningful deposits left. You can only found trace amounts close to uranium deposits because it can result form Uranium decay. Uranium is the only radioactive element that occurs naturally in significantly large quantity because it longest lasting isotope has a half time of 4.47 billion years. Most other naturally radioactive materials are - just like plutonium - decay products of uranium and only present in trace amounts in the earth's crust. As with most other things deadly it is the concentration that kills. The contents of nuclear fuel rods if spread so that they are ingested can kill many thousands - and we are talking slow agonizing radioactive poisoning and cancer deaths.
There is no natural equivalent of the density and intensity of radioactive matter that can be found in spend nuclear fuel. Last time this happened naturally was 2 billion years ago in Africa a truly catastrophic event.
BTW I am totally in favor of responsible use of nuclear fission technology. But spreading ignorance like this does nothing to further this cause.
GTA being the Greater Toronto Area. Don't know where you live but the medical service that I get here is not that different from the one that I had in the Research Triangle Area of North Carolina. My wife gave birth to our first kid in the US. Our youngest was born here in Canada. We actually had a much worse experience in the states and despite a top notch health plan from my employer I still had to pay more than a thousand dollars out of pocket for the medical costs of the birth. Here in Canada I never saw a bill.
Part of the reason that I moved up here is because I regard basic medical service as a human right. One that also makes a lot of practical sense because controlling infectious diseases is much easier if everybody has access to medical service.
I toy with the idea to start my own business. I find the idea much less daunting here because I know that neither I nor my family will lose our health insurance when I make the jump.
The fact that the brick walls store heat comes in very handy because it evens out temperature differentials between night and day. German houses pretty much nerve have air conditioning. I always wondered why this was a standard feature in the US even in temperate climate zones. After living in the US for while this became pretty obvious quickly. Walls of stick build houses especially if there is no brick veneer offer zero thermal buffering.
This advise was meant for those who don't have their oversize tin foil hats available. Alternatively feel free to wrap yourself in aluminum foil. As has been pointed out by the other poster the size of medical devices already makes for minuscule induction current and I like to add that they also usually feature a metal casing. As such my recommendation is intended for the overly paranoid.
Professor Gerhard Baudy of the University of Konstanz in Germany has spent 15 years studying ancient apocalyptic prophecies. He has learned that in the poor districts of Rome, Christians were circulating vengeful texts predicting that a raging inferno would reduce the city to ashes. "In all of these oracles, the destruction of Rome by fire is prophesied," Baudy explains. "That is the constant theme: Rome must burn. This was the long-desired objective of all the people who felt subjugated by Rome." (Source: PBS
Christians may not have burnt down Rome but they sure set themselves up as the perfect fall guys.
Seems to me this reveals more of a problem about how programming is taught rather than the reality in the industry. For any given core application you will usually decide upfront to go primarily with one language e.g. Java for an enterprise web app, C for an embedded app with tight hardware resources. Typically you pick whatever is best suited for the job although the familiarity of a language for your developer resource pool will certainly factor in. But I really don't think anybody with some seniority in the IT business would take the position serious that one language will always fit the bill.
At any rate if you haven't done so I'd very much recommend you pick up one of the C influenced languages. C++ wouldn't be a bad choice since it contains C as a subset but something more esoteric like Objective C makes also for a good choice especially if you are into OS X as well. If you know any of the OO off-spring of C fairly well then gaining competence in C, Java and JScript is a small step.
I am an IT consultant for a large software vendor. In the last 5 years I worked and developed in Python, JScript, Perl, XSLT, SAS code, SQL, Java and Shell scripts. While it is true that big software packages are usually developed with primarily one implementation language it still holds that to glue things together in an enterprise setting a plethora of languages can still be deployed. I often find that I have the freedom to pick the best tool for the job.
Language free protocols are abundant, object communication often facilitated via XML or JSON. Even on Windows the Scripting host has been around since NT - JScript and VB are natively supported and pretty much any other interpreted language under the sun can sit on top of it. And then there is.Net which has even escaped the confines of Windows.
Just as with human languages the more you mastering the merrier and I find that small is still beautifull.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than looking at a single disease statistic I think it is more instructive to look at overall average life expectancy. I let the numbers do the talking.
Why would the government pay any attention?
If the government needs to apply lethal force to stay in power but the army won't play it is game over. That what toppled all the Eastern communist countries after Gorbachev made it clear the Russian military will not intervene.
'68 this would have already worked in Czechoslovakia but back then the Soviets intervened.
And yes in all cases as you put it you somehow get the vast majority of citizens to join the protest. News bulletin: If just a minority is disenfranchised and protests violently this is usually referred to as terrorism and the majority of people will gladly have police force and army take care of them.
So it is not like there isn't plenty of cases where non violent protest got the job done (starting with Ghandi). In recent history the suppression of such protest has been the exception rather than the rule (Tienanmen, Burma). It will be interesting how Iran shakes out. At any rate I fail to see how the fire power in civilian hands will ever be a match to the resources that a cohesive army can command.
Please hurry over to Wikipedia to edit the article on totalitarian rule. It doesn't yet quite reflect your definition and uses so many unnecessary words in comparison to your brief definition that - dare I say it - exudes an intoxicatingly elegant simplicity.
To answer your question:
If you don't have an unpalatable last resort then what's stopping those in power from abusing that power in the extreme?
A police force and army free of sociopaths that wouldn't follow an order to shoot at their own citizens if the latter were to mass protest non violently.
It ain't that simple. EU law can only overrides local law in the areas that belong to the primary EU pillar. Even then the guiding principle has been adopted that local administration should always be the preferred approach.
The German Wikipedia entry explains this in some detail. When I try to follow your link I get a bad URL so I am not sure if and why an English Wikipedia entry wouldn't convey the same level of detail information.
The EU is not yet and may never be a state. Of course it is easy to see that Americans may be confused by this given the lack of legal and administrative integration within the United States.
I wish you were right about this. After all evidence is building that the US torture policies have lead to many well documented deaths and have been authorized at the highest level. Yet, that doesn't mean that Bush wasn't elected president (although technically the first time around he may not have been).
Will be interesting to see if there are enough hardcore dead-enders still around on /. to get this modded as flamebait.
Very insightful. It goes to the core of why the Western countries divide power into separate branches. Our governments are not about efficiency but rather designed to preserve the citizens freedoms by compartmentalizing governmental power. It is very disconcerting when a populace forgets about this essential concept.
Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature ...
So where do we mine Plutonium again?
Somebody please take the Informative moderation away from this comment. The highly radioactive fission products of a nuclear reactor have half times too short to occur naturally in any significant amount. Even an element like plutonium with the longest lasting isotope having a half time of 24,100 years decays way to quickly in comparison to the earth's age to have any meaningful deposits left. You can only found trace amounts close to uranium deposits because it can result form Uranium decay. Uranium is the only radioactive element that occurs naturally in significantly large quantity because it longest lasting isotope has a half time of 4.47 billion years. Most other naturally radioactive materials are - just like plutonium - decay products of uranium and only present in trace amounts in the earth's crust. As with most other things deadly it is the concentration that kills. The contents of nuclear fuel rods if spread so that they are ingested can kill many thousands - and we are talking slow agonizing radioactive poisoning and cancer deaths.
There is no natural equivalent of the density and intensity of radioactive matter that can be found in spend nuclear fuel. Last time this happened naturally was 2 billion years ago in Africa a truly catastrophic event.
BTW I am totally in favor of responsible use of nuclear fission technology. But spreading ignorance like this does nothing to further this cause.
GTA being the Greater Toronto Area. Don't know where you live but the medical service that I get here is not that different from the one that I had in the Research Triangle Area of North Carolina. My wife gave birth to our first kid in the US. Our youngest was born here in Canada. We actually had a much worse experience in the states and despite a top notch health plan from my employer I still had to pay more than a thousand dollars out of pocket for the medical costs of the birth. Here in Canada I never saw a bill.
Part of the reason that I moved up here is because I regard basic medical service as a human right. One that also makes a lot of practical sense because controlling infectious diseases is much easier if everybody has access to medical service.
I toy with the idea to start my own business. I find the idea much less daunting here because I know that neither I nor my family will lose our health insurance when I make the jump.
You are raising some good points and BTW - love your sig.
If I can not make sweeping generalizing statements on /. of all places where else on the intertubes can i get away with it :)
The fact that the brick walls store heat comes in very handy because it evens out temperature differentials between night and day. German houses pretty much nerve have air conditioning. I always wondered why this was a standard feature in the US even in temperate climate zones. After living in the US for while this became pretty obvious quickly. Walls of stick build houses especially if there is no brick veneer offer zero thermal buffering.
You are kidding right? Almost all houses in the US are stick build wood frame based. Almost all houses in Germany are solid brick build.
Surprised it doesn't seem to have been recommended yet. This OS is developed with security as a guiding design principle and offers binary emulation compatibility with Linux.
This advise was meant for those who don't have their oversize tin foil hats available. Alternatively feel free to wrap yourself in aluminum foil. As has been pointed out by the other poster the size of medical devices already makes for minuscule induction current and I like to add that they also usually feature a metal casing. As such my recommendation is intended for the overly paranoid.
If you receive an advance warning of such an electrical storm your car will offer perfect shelter. The metal enclosure will act as a Faraday cage.
Thanks for the link. Not being American I'll use it to feed my prejudice and file it under yet another stupid anglo-saxon idea.
This construct of yours an entity that has to act like parents is moronic.
There is only one such entity and that is parents
If the school thinks strip searching is the answer they need to ground the student under supervision and call the parents .
As has been pointed out by others the Romans were not atheists. In fact throughout the Roman empires lifetime there was an abundance of religions to chose from. Atheism is a fairly new phenomenon. The first individuals to self-identify as "atheist" appeared in the 18th century.
As to why the Romans prosecuted Christians in particular one of these German scholars may have an explanation:
Professor Gerhard Baudy of the University of Konstanz in Germany has spent 15 years studying ancient apocalyptic prophecies. He has learned that in the poor districts of Rome, Christians were circulating vengeful texts predicting that a raging inferno would reduce the city to ashes. "In all of these oracles, the destruction of Rome by fire is prophesied," Baudy explains. "That is the constant theme: Rome must burn. This was the long-desired objective of all the people who felt subjugated by Rome." (Source: PBS
Christians may not have burnt down Rome but they sure set themselves up as the perfect fall guys.
Seems to me this reveals more of a problem about how programming is taught rather than the reality in the industry. For any given core application you will usually decide upfront to go primarily with one language e.g. Java for an enterprise web app, C for an embedded app with tight hardware resources. Typically you pick whatever is best suited for the job although the familiarity of a language for your developer resource pool will certainly factor in. But I really don't think anybody with some seniority in the IT business would take the position serious that one language will always fit the bill.
At any rate if you haven't done so I'd very much recommend you pick up one of the C influenced languages. C++ wouldn't be a bad choice since it contains C as a subset but something more esoteric like Objective C makes also for a good choice especially if you are into OS X as well. If you know any of the OO off-spring of C fairly well then gaining competence in C, Java and JScript is a small step.
I am an IT consultant for a large software vendor. In the last 5 years I worked and developed in Python, JScript, Perl, XSLT, SAS code, SQL, Java and Shell scripts. While it is true that big software packages are usually developed with primarily one implementation language it still holds that to glue things together in an enterprise setting a plethora of languages can still be deployed. I often find that I have the freedom to pick the best tool for the job.
Language free protocols are abundant, object communication often facilitated via XML or JSON. Even on Windows the Scripting host has been around since NT - JScript and VB are natively supported and pretty much any other interpreted language under the sun can sit on top of it. And then there is .Net which has even escaped the confines of Windows.
Just as with human languages the more you mastering the merrier and I find that small is still beautifull.
Highly recommend this amusing article on mistranslations.
Slightly different account here.
Reminds me of this whole Ahmadinejad "Wiping Israel from the map" translation flap.
Once an incorrect translation takes hold it is pretty much impossible to correct.
but, but I look just like that guy!
The OLPC screen really rocks. Only device I can comfortably surf on sun bathing on the deck.