The other problem with DNA (and fingerprints too) is that they don't come with a time stamp. All they can say is that you were there at one point in time.
That's flat out incorrect. The difference between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "likely" is the difference between a criminal trial and a civil trial: In a criminal trial, guilt must be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt"; in a civil trial, the winning party is based on a "preponderance of the evidence" (ie "likely"). One can have a reasonable doubt about one side's evidence in a civil trial and still conclude that particular side's argument is more "likely" than the other side - the "likelihood scale" simply needs to shift to 51% vs 49%. In a criminal trial, the jury cannot have any doubt whatsoever, except for "unreasonable" doubt (ie "the laws of physics do not apply and a person can, in fact, be two places at once" would by most definitions be considered "unreasonable" doubt). Would you be willing to risk a death sentence on the basis you "likely" committed the crime for which you are on trial?
The existence and acceptance of secret laws and regulations should be one hell of a big tip off that one no longer lives in a functioning democracy/constitutional republic.
I honestly don't understand why you have to provide any information to board a plane for a domestic flight. You don't have to do so to board a bus or a train or a subway - all, I would image, tempting targets. In fact, I seem to recall someone from the EFF challenging this - he attempted to board a domestic flight from somewhere in CA to DC without any papers, and was refused entry to the plan, despite being screened for security threats. If I recall, he argued that it was unconstitutional to prevent people from flying to see their representatives in Washington. I also seem to recall he lost.
>"Oh also - population reduction does not require war or killing. Education would do quite nicely. Negative population growth only requires a "one child per couple" mindset. Plus those kids get much more attention and resources from their parents than if they had siblings."
It's self-correcting - you needn't worry about population growth continuing exponentially indefinitely in the absence of "education": as societies reduce their birth rate as a function of increased wealth (which they reach by consuming those resources you're worried about) it will become self-limiting. There's a pretty good analysis here: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html.
While I can appreciate that your circle of friends believes greater diversity = better, and place some arbitrarily value on "highly biodiverse rainforest ecosystems", is there any particular reason you and your friends have concluded the current amount of biodiversity is optimal and should remain static?
Peak Oil: the very quotation you include sums up why it will never be a problem: if oil becomes scarce, price will rise; as price rises, alternatives become economical, and the substitution effect occurs. The same thing essentially happened to the whale oil industry. I will acknowledge that oil reserves among OPEC countries are almost certainly vastly overstated: when production quotas became tied to "proven reserves" in 1985, Kuwait boosted their declared reserves from 63.90 to 90.00 billion barrels of oil (a 40.85% increase). In 1988 alone, Iran claimed to find an additional 44.05 billion barrels in declaring 92.85 billion barrels against 1984s 48.80 billion barrels (+90.27%), Iraq jumped from 47.10 to a nice, round 100.00 billion barrels (+112.31%, where it stayed, consistently (and regardless of production), for another four years, before increasing to 115), while Venezuela suddenly got lucky and declared 56.30 vs. 1984s 25 billion barrels (+125.20%). In 1990, Saudi Arabia suddenly declared an increase of 51.79% in oil reserves (from 169.97 to an even 258 billion barrels), while in 1988, Abu Dhabi went from 31.00 to 92.21 billion barrels (+194%). Even little old Dubai got into the act, in 1988 nearly tripling their reserves to 4 billion barrels from 1.35 previously. 1988 was one hell of a busy year in the world of oil discoveries: the five countries which increased their declared reserves went from a combined 153.25 billion barrels to a whopping 345.36 billion barrels!
Overfishing: I'll admit I can't speak intelligently on this issue, except to point out the role government subsidies play. For example, in Canada, fishermen (fisherpeople?) are paid by the government for six or more months of the year because they cannot earn a suitable income on their fishing income alone. Absent these subsidies I suggest a whole lot fewer people would be out there fishing. Of course, like trees, fishes are not a finite resource: you can always make more of them.
Extinction: I know this is an unpopular view, but I say: who cares? I honestly don't mean that flippantly. I just mean that species have gone extinct throughout the history of the earth, while other ones pop up for a while. According to some guy on Quora (I'm too tired to look up more sources - sorry!), somewhere between 6,000 and 19,000 new multicellular species are discovered each year http://www.quora.com/How-many-new-species-are-discovered-every-year. Is it "bad" that some (or perhaps even many) species disappear simply because of humans? If you accept that humans are part of nature, then you should conclude that there is no real difference between species becoming extinct because of a meteorite or because of humans or because of anything else. The view that humans are somehow "outside of nature" is very odd to me: birds build nests, beavers build dams and humans build skyscrapers and nuclear plants. The nests and dams and skyscrapers and nuclear plants are all simply animals reorganizing their environment to their benefit, and are all "natural" in my world view. I don't see humans as an affront to nature. YMMV.
As for "widespread destruction of forests", as I mention above regarding fishies, we can always make more trees. In fact, there are more trees now in the US than there were 100 years ago: according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the number of trees in the US increased by 4,441,000 hectares between 1900 and 2005 http://www.fao.org/forestry/country/32185/en/usa/.
In any case, I'm glad to learn you are indeed optimistic, as I'm optimistic too, and for the same reasons you are, except for the "human population reduction" you mention, which has been tried in various ways with poor results (see Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and others). Humans are humans' best and most precious resource, and more of them is a good thing.
Fine: cut it in half and take your 2.5 acres. That's still plenty. And the calcs were based on land mass: no bodies of water were included. Hell, even if you only get one acre, that's still an awful lot of land for every single man, woman and child (a lot of people somehow manage to live in 500 ft^2 apartments).
Another thing to keep in mind is that growth in the efficiency of things like agriculture has outpaced the growth of the population considerably. For example, agricultural productivity increased about 89% in Florida, 108% in California and 127% in Ohio (the three largest producing states) between 1960 and 2004 - overall in the US agricultural production grew 112% - while population grew in the US between 1960 and 2000 by just 55.6%. Resource scarcity isn't a problem; distribution, on the other hand, often is.
Obviously that's not the point. The habitable world is considerably larger than the state of Texas, in case you're unaware. In fact, Texas constitutes 0.467% of all land on earth. So currently, there is 231,338 ft^2 for every single person on earth. So yes: there's plenty of room, even for people like you (you get an additional 20,000 ft^2 so as not to irritate the other humans).
The idea that the earth has some sort of "population problem" is nonsense: the entire population of the earth could fit into the state of Texas with plenty of elbow room (Texas: 696,241 km^2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas); 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2 X 696,241 = 696,241,000,000 m^2; population of earth: ~6,930,000,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population); 696,241,000,000 / 6,930,000,000 = 100.47 m^2 per person (or about 1,081 ft^2)). There are more than enough resources, too (including food) to go around.
There are several significant problems with minimum wage: imagine there's a guy who owns a pizza parlor and the windows of his shop are dirty. Outside he sees a homeless man. He goes outside and offers the homeless man $4/hr to clean his windows. The homeless man, eager to earn some money, agrees. The deal they've struck, two adults of free will, is illegal. As a consequence, the pizza parlor retains its filthy windows and the homeless man retains a pocket devoid of currency. Who, exactly, wins in this scenario?
Or imagine a restaurant owner who has 8 servers on staff earning a wage of $8/hr. The government declares a new minimum wage of $10/hr. The owner's existing payroll for eight hours of operation is $512 (ie $8/hr X 8 servers X 8 hours = $512/day). Under the government's new minimum wage law, the owner's daily payroll increases to $640 (ie $10/hr X 8 servers X 8 hours = $640). That's a 25% increase in costs for the owner. That extra money for wages does not magically appear: the owner must increase his prices or lay off staff or do some combination of each. If competitive market pressures mean he cannot raise prices to compensate for the extra 25% without a resulting decrease in revenue, he must lay off staff. In that scenerio you end up with 6 servers making $10/hr but doing the work of 8 servers, and 2 formerly employed servers now among the unemployed. Again, who exactly benefits from this?
Imagine further that the minimum wage is $10/hr. Obviously companies hiring at the minimum will seek out the most skilled workers for their payroll dollar. But among those who apply for the $10/hr minimum wage jobs, some have a skillset worth perhaps $5/hr in a free labor market. Some have skillsets worth $7/hr. Other have skillsets worth $9/hr, and still others have skillsets worth $10/hr. Those people with skillsets worth less than $10/hr will have considerable difficulty finding any kind of job in an economy where they are legally obligated to sell their labor at an artificially determined fixed price. As a consequence, they become infantalized dependents upon the state welfare schemes. Why shouldn't these people be treated like adults and permitted to sell their labor for an amount of their choosing? Are they not entitled to the same freedoms of non-minimum wage workers?
Among those with little understanding of economics, the thinking seems to be that the difference will be taken out of a business' margins. However margins are finite (and often very thin), and the additional money does not, in fact, magically appear.
By far, the vast majority of workers do not work for minimum wage, and they are provided benefits such as health care, dental coverage, extra vacation periods and higher wages not because employers are forced by government to do so, but because employers are forced by competitive pressures in the market place to compete aggressively for staff.
Minimum wage laws produce inflation and unemployment, with no discernible upside, except for the smugness in knowing they've "done the right thing" on the part of middle class and above people upon whom such laws have no real discernible impact.
The fix I use for this is to change the max_version number in each add-on's install.pdf file to 9.* - you can find these in/home/.mozilla/firefox/[profile]/extensions. This will stop the add-ons from being disabled automatically by a newer version of FF (at least until FF10). A particular add-on may still not work with a newer version of FF, but they usually do - I've done this with NoScript, Tab-mix Plus, Extended Status Bar, Web Developer, HTTPS Everywhere and Better Privacy and they all work perfectly on FF5. YMMV.
That can work both ways: great phone + crappy games = mediocrity (see blackberry).
As an aside, I have a 3DS and I think the 3D is fantastic, and more than a novelty, but quickly grew bored of the games (Pilotwings and the horrible Pirates of the Caribbean 3D). Crappy game + cool 3D = mediocrity too.
The federal flood insurance pools ensure that people continue to build in extremely high-risk flood zones. No private insurer would provide insurance against flood in these areas (rightfully so, as the odds of writing the business profitably are incredibly small and subject to massive volatility), and therefore lenders would not provide financing, as the lenders would be unable to be protected from default in the event of a flood (ie once a person's home is destroyed by an uninsured flood, that person retains no motivation to continue paying the mortgage on a destroyed house).
The National Flood Insurance Program is another example of well intentioned government subsidies putting people directly in harm's way.
I honestly don't understand the belief system which posits humans are not only not animals, but are somehow worse than animals, and that animals are all wholesome and pure, with winning personalities to boot. Humans are part of nature in the same way your ill-fated mealworms are. By the same token, skyscrapers and highways are perfectly natural in just the same way as birds' nests and beaver dams are: in all cases it's simply an animal, or a group of animals, reordering their environment to suit their purposes.
So give yourself a break from the self-imposed anguish of struggling with the mealworm destiny issue - feed 'em to the birds, don't feed 'em to the birds, light them on fire, flush them down the toilet, throw them in the next pie you bake or let them loose in your back yard and consider them "free range". In the end, whatever you do is simply nature playing itself out.
Actually, they often do, when the insurance rates for a particular specialty become prohibitively high. And fewer people go into that particular specialty too. As an example, there was a significant shortage of ob/gyns until various states passed tort reform (which limits damages and in the process reduces insurance premiums): https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Obstetrics_and_gynaecology#Recent_shortage_in_US
Fair point. And actually, now that you mention it, I started updating ff manually years ago because I got sick of waiting for the repos to update - I'd forgotten that, having become so used to manually downloading ff.
On linux, at least, you can try to make your extensions work with higher versions:
- in your home folder, find.mozilla --> firefox --> [profile] (it's usually a goofy name like "elexz4g.default").
- go into the "extensions" folder. There you'll find (not surprisingly) your extensions, also usually with goofy names like "{97f3d2a0-50ac-11df-9879-0800200c9a66}".
- go into each extension's folder and find the "install.rdf" file. Open it with your favorite text editor (ie gedit, vim, etc).
- look for a line like this:
"[em:maxVersion]4.0[/em:maxVersion]"
- change that to:
"[em:maxVersion]5.*[/em:maxVersion]"
- (the brackets are substitutes for greater than and less than)
- save and restart firefox.
A lot of the extensions will work just fine - I have web developer, tab-mix plus, better-privacy, https everywhere, no-script and extended status bar working without issue on ff5. YMMV.
No, I haven't measured it - that's a good idea, and I'll do that. It feels an awful lot faster. Have you compared? Maybe you'd be even faster on Swype. You're right tho: it could just seem that way because there's far less effort involved (ie you're just moving one finger as opposed to pressing down on each key).
What I can say is that the typical non-Swype soft keyboard is horribly slow - as I mentioned, it's a deal-breaker for me, because I send a lot of emails, often involving detailed explanations.
I used BBs exclusively for nearly a decade, until two weeks ago, when I finally got a personal phone (my company agreed I would be permitted to use my BB for personal and business use from the onset, so I never had a personal phone or a, gasp, land line). I never thought I would switch to a touchscreen phone - the lack of a hard keyboard was always a deal-breaker for me. Until I tried Swype.
Now I have a Nexus S and I'm absolutely delighted by it and wish I'd bought it sooner. Using Swype, I can 'type' faster than I ever could on the BB keyboard, and I'm pretty damn fast on a BB. Adding in all the other features Android includes made me quickly realize I'll never go back to BB, and I was a long-time BB evangelist. When I occasionally use a friend's BB, the OS now feels so outdated. Most of my BB-using friends are on google talk now, so we can still IM (altho I have to admit I miss the little "d" and "r" status indicator for delivered and read BBMs).
"the US government makes up less than.5% of the population."
It's not particularly meaningful to compare it to the general population, because somewhat less than half the population is employed (plus you're counting children). More meaningful is comparing government employees to all employees.
There are around 2 million people directly employed by the federal government, not including postal workers or military personnel. There are roughly 600,000 postal workers and about 1.4 million uniformed military personnel. There are about 146 million people in the workforce of the US. So that makes for 1.37% of all workers are directly employed by the federal government. That rises to 2.74% if you include postal workers and the military (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs041.htm).
Employment by government at all levels is about 14% in the US (comparison: Russia: 0.59%; France: 3.5%), but varies substantially by state (top states are Alaska and Wyoming at over 20% of all workers). So about 1 in 7 workers in the US works for government (and have their salaries paid by the other 6 in 7). As of 2002, more people work for the government than manufacturing and construction combined (https://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/milestone/).
Slashdot Mirror
The other problem with DNA (and fingerprints too) is that they don't come with a time stamp. All they can say is that you were there at one point in time.
That's flat out incorrect. The difference between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "likely" is the difference between a criminal trial and a civil trial: In a criminal trial, guilt must be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt"; in a civil trial, the winning party is based on a "preponderance of the evidence" (ie "likely"). One can have a reasonable doubt about one side's evidence in a civil trial and still conclude that particular side's argument is more "likely" than the other side - the "likelihood scale" simply needs to shift to 51% vs 49%. In a criminal trial, the jury cannot have any doubt whatsoever, except for "unreasonable" doubt (ie "the laws of physics do not apply and a person can, in fact, be two places at once" would by most definitions be considered "unreasonable" doubt). Would you be willing to risk a death sentence on the basis you "likely" committed the crime for which you are on trial?
The existence and acceptance of secret laws and regulations should be one hell of a big tip off that one no longer lives in a functioning democracy/constitutional republic.
I honestly don't understand why you have to provide any information to board a plane for a domestic flight. You don't have to do so to board a bus or a train or a subway - all, I would image, tempting targets. In fact, I seem to recall someone from the EFF challenging this - he attempted to board a domestic flight from somewhere in CA to DC without any papers, and was refused entry to the plan, despite being screened for security threats. If I recall, he argued that it was unconstitutional to prevent people from flying to see their representatives in Washington. I also seem to recall he lost.
Actually, here's a link http://www.ktvu.com/news/6473925/detail.html. The rules requiring identification, it turns out, are actually themselves secret!
Dr Bob - is that you?!?
>"Oh also - population reduction does not require war or killing. Education would do quite nicely. Negative population growth only requires a "one child per couple" mindset. Plus those kids get much more attention and resources from their parents than if they had siblings."
It's self-correcting - you needn't worry about population growth continuing exponentially indefinitely in the absence of "education": as societies reduce their birth rate as a function of increased wealth (which they reach by consuming those resources you're worried about) it will become self-limiting. There's a pretty good analysis here: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html.
While I can appreciate that your circle of friends believes greater diversity = better, and place some arbitrarily value on "highly biodiverse rainforest ecosystems", is there any particular reason you and your friends have concluded the current amount of biodiversity is optimal and should remain static?
Appreciate the citations.
Peak Oil: the very quotation you include sums up why it will never be a problem: if oil becomes scarce, price will rise; as price rises, alternatives become economical, and the substitution effect occurs. The same thing essentially happened to the whale oil industry. I will acknowledge that oil reserves among OPEC countries are almost certainly vastly overstated: when production quotas became tied to "proven reserves" in 1985, Kuwait boosted their declared reserves from 63.90 to 90.00 billion barrels of oil (a 40.85% increase). In 1988 alone, Iran claimed to find an additional 44.05 billion barrels in declaring 92.85 billion barrels against 1984s 48.80 billion barrels (+90.27%), Iraq jumped from 47.10 to a nice, round 100.00 billion barrels (+112.31%, where it stayed, consistently (and regardless of production), for another four years, before increasing to 115), while Venezuela suddenly got lucky and declared 56.30 vs. 1984s 25 billion barrels (+125.20%). In 1990, Saudi Arabia suddenly declared an increase of 51.79% in oil reserves (from 169.97 to an even 258 billion barrels), while in 1988, Abu Dhabi went from 31.00 to 92.21 billion barrels (+194%). Even little old Dubai got into the act, in 1988 nearly tripling their reserves to 4 billion barrels from 1.35 previously. 1988 was one hell of a busy year in the world of oil discoveries: the five countries which increased their declared reserves went from a combined 153.25 billion barrels to a whopping 345.36 billion barrels!
Overfishing: I'll admit I can't speak intelligently on this issue, except to point out the role government subsidies play. For example, in Canada, fishermen (fisherpeople?) are paid by the government for six or more months of the year because they cannot earn a suitable income on their fishing income alone. Absent these subsidies I suggest a whole lot fewer people would be out there fishing. Of course, like trees, fishes are not a finite resource: you can always make more of them.
Extinction: I know this is an unpopular view, but I say: who cares? I honestly don't mean that flippantly. I just mean that species have gone extinct throughout the history of the earth, while other ones pop up for a while. According to some guy on Quora (I'm too tired to look up more sources - sorry!), somewhere between 6,000 and 19,000 new multicellular species are discovered each year http://www.quora.com/How-many-new-species-are-discovered-every-year. Is it "bad" that some (or perhaps even many) species disappear simply because of humans? If you accept that humans are part of nature, then you should conclude that there is no real difference between species becoming extinct because of a meteorite or because of humans or because of anything else. The view that humans are somehow "outside of nature" is very odd to me: birds build nests, beavers build dams and humans build skyscrapers and nuclear plants. The nests and dams and skyscrapers and nuclear plants are all simply animals reorganizing their environment to their benefit, and are all "natural" in my world view. I don't see humans as an affront to nature. YMMV.
As for "widespread destruction of forests", as I mention above regarding fishies, we can always make more trees. In fact, there are more trees now in the US than there were 100 years ago: according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the number of trees in the US increased by 4,441,000 hectares between 1900 and 2005 http://www.fao.org/forestry/country/32185/en/usa/.
In any case, I'm glad to learn you are indeed optimistic, as I'm optimistic too, and for the same reasons you are, except for the "human population reduction" you mention, which has been tried in various ways with poor results (see Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and others). Humans are humans' best and most precious resource, and more of them is a good thing.
Fine: cut it in half and take your 2.5 acres. That's still plenty. And the calcs were based on land mass: no bodies of water were included. Hell, even if you only get one acre, that's still an awful lot of land for every single man, woman and child (a lot of people somehow manage to live in 500 ft^2 apartments).
Another thing to keep in mind is that growth in the efficiency of things like agriculture has outpaced the growth of the population considerably. For example, agricultural productivity increased about 89% in Florida, 108% in California and 127% in Ohio (the three largest producing states) between 1960 and 2004 - overall in the US agricultural production grew 112% - while population grew in the US between 1960 and 2000 by just 55.6%. Resource scarcity isn't a problem; distribution, on the other hand, often is.
Citations needed: "...those remaining are in radical decline..."; "...every oil expert agrees..."; "...accelerating extinctions..."; "...proven beyond doubt...".
(And those are some ironic comments, given your user name...)
Obviously that's not the point. The habitable world is considerably larger than the state of Texas, in case you're unaware. In fact, Texas constitutes 0.467% of all land on earth. So currently, there is 231,338 ft^2 for every single person on earth. So yes: there's plenty of room, even for people like you (you get an additional 20,000 ft^2 so as not to irritate the other humans).
The idea that the earth has some sort of "population problem" is nonsense: the entire population of the earth could fit into the state of Texas with plenty of elbow room (Texas: 696,241 km^2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas); 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2 X 696,241 = 696,241,000,000 m^2; population of earth: ~6,930,000,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population); 696,241,000,000 / 6,930,000,000 = 100.47 m^2 per person (or about 1,081 ft^2)). There are more than enough resources, too (including food) to go around.
There are several significant problems with minimum wage: imagine there's a guy who owns a pizza parlor and the windows of his shop are dirty. Outside he sees a homeless man. He goes outside and offers the homeless man $4/hr to clean his windows. The homeless man, eager to earn some money, agrees. The deal they've struck, two adults of free will, is illegal. As a consequence, the pizza parlor retains its filthy windows and the homeless man retains a pocket devoid of currency. Who, exactly, wins in this scenario?
Or imagine a restaurant owner who has 8 servers on staff earning a wage of $8/hr. The government declares a new minimum wage of $10/hr. The owner's existing payroll for eight hours of operation is $512 (ie $8/hr X 8 servers X 8 hours = $512/day). Under the government's new minimum wage law, the owner's daily payroll increases to $640 (ie $10/hr X 8 servers X 8 hours = $640). That's a 25% increase in costs for the owner. That extra money for wages does not magically appear: the owner must increase his prices or lay off staff or do some combination of each. If competitive market pressures mean he cannot raise prices to compensate for the extra 25% without a resulting decrease in revenue, he must lay off staff. In that scenerio you end up with 6 servers making $10/hr but doing the work of 8 servers, and 2 formerly employed servers now among the unemployed. Again, who exactly benefits from this?
Imagine further that the minimum wage is $10/hr. Obviously companies hiring at the minimum will seek out the most skilled workers for their payroll dollar. But among those who apply for the $10/hr minimum wage jobs, some have a skillset worth perhaps $5/hr in a free labor market. Some have skillsets worth $7/hr. Other have skillsets worth $9/hr, and still others have skillsets worth $10/hr. Those people with skillsets worth less than $10/hr will have considerable difficulty finding any kind of job in an economy where they are legally obligated to sell their labor at an artificially determined fixed price. As a consequence, they become infantalized dependents upon the state welfare schemes. Why shouldn't these people be treated like adults and permitted to sell their labor for an amount of their choosing? Are they not entitled to the same freedoms of non-minimum wage workers?
Among those with little understanding of economics, the thinking seems to be that the difference will be taken out of a business' margins. However margins are finite (and often very thin), and the additional money does not, in fact, magically appear.
By far, the vast majority of workers do not work for minimum wage, and they are provided benefits such as health care, dental coverage, extra vacation periods and higher wages not because employers are forced by government to do so, but because employers are forced by competitive pressures in the market place to compete aggressively for staff.
Minimum wage laws produce inflation and unemployment, with no discernible upside, except for the smugness in knowing they've "done the right thing" on the part of middle class and above people upon whom such laws have no real discernible impact.
+1. Minimum wage laws are simply the legalized restraint of the free trade of labor, and hurt the poor most of all, all the while infantalizing them.
An adult ought to be free to sell his or her labor at any amount they choose and at which there is a willing buyer.
The fix I use for this is to change the max_version number in each add-on's install.pdf file to 9.* - you can find these in /home/.mozilla/firefox/[profile]/extensions. This will stop the add-ons from being disabled automatically by a newer version of FF (at least until FF10). A particular add-on may still not work with a newer version of FF, but they usually do - I've done this with NoScript, Tab-mix Plus, Extended Status Bar, Web Developer, HTTPS Everywhere and Better Privacy and they all work perfectly on FF5. YMMV.
That can work both ways: great phone + crappy games = mediocrity (see blackberry).
As an aside, I have a 3DS and I think the 3D is fantastic, and more than a novelty, but quickly grew bored of the games (Pilotwings and the horrible Pirates of the Caribbean 3D). Crappy game + cool 3D = mediocrity too.
MIT Open Courseware offers (for free) CS, including video lectures, assignments, exams etc. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/video-lectures/
The federal flood insurance pools ensure that people continue to build in extremely high-risk flood zones. No private insurer would provide insurance against flood in these areas (rightfully so, as the odds of writing the business profitably are incredibly small and subject to massive volatility), and therefore lenders would not provide financing, as the lenders would be unable to be protected from default in the event of a flood (ie once a person's home is destroyed by an uninsured flood, that person retains no motivation to continue paying the mortgage on a destroyed house).
The National Flood Insurance Program is another example of well intentioned government subsidies putting people directly in harm's way.
I honestly don't understand the belief system which posits humans are not only not animals, but are somehow worse than animals, and that animals are all wholesome and pure, with winning personalities to boot. Humans are part of nature in the same way your ill-fated mealworms are. By the same token, skyscrapers and highways are perfectly natural in just the same way as birds' nests and beaver dams are: in all cases it's simply an animal, or a group of animals, reordering their environment to suit their purposes.
So give yourself a break from the self-imposed anguish of struggling with the mealworm destiny issue - feed 'em to the birds, don't feed 'em to the birds, light them on fire, flush them down the toilet, throw them in the next pie you bake or let them loose in your back yard and consider them "free range". In the end, whatever you do is simply nature playing itself out.
In short: less drama, more mealworm death.
Actually, they often do, when the insurance rates for a particular specialty become prohibitively high. And fewer people go into that particular specialty too. As an example, there was a significant shortage of ob/gyns until various states passed tort reform (which limits damages and in the process reduces insurance premiums): https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Obstetrics_and_gynaecology#Recent_shortage_in_US
Fair point. And actually, now that you mention it, I started updating ff manually years ago because I got sick of waiting for the repos to update - I'd forgotten that, having become so used to manually downloading ff.
I don't get it: why does it suck? If you want ff5 for linux, just go here:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-5.0&os=linux&lang=en-US
If you want the 64 bit version, go here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/5.0b7/linux-x86_64/
If your extensions won't work with ff5, see this post to get them working: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2257134&cid=36519454
On linux, at least, you can try to make your extensions work with higher versions:
.mozilla --> firefox --> [profile] (it's usually a goofy name like "elexz4g.default").
- in your home folder, find
- go into the "extensions" folder. There you'll find (not surprisingly) your extensions, also usually with goofy names like "{97f3d2a0-50ac-11df-9879-0800200c9a66}".
- go into each extension's folder and find the "install.rdf" file. Open it with your favorite text editor (ie gedit, vim, etc).
- look for a line like this:
"[em:maxVersion]4.0[/em:maxVersion]"
- change that to:
"[em:maxVersion]5.*[/em:maxVersion]"
- (the brackets are substitutes for greater than and less than)
- save and restart firefox.
A lot of the extensions will work just fine - I have web developer, tab-mix plus, better-privacy, https everywhere, no-script and extended status bar working without issue on ff5. YMMV.
No, I haven't measured it - that's a good idea, and I'll do that. It feels an awful lot faster. Have you compared? Maybe you'd be even faster on Swype. You're right tho: it could just seem that way because there's far less effort involved (ie you're just moving one finger as opposed to pressing down on each key).
What I can say is that the typical non-Swype soft keyboard is horribly slow - as I mentioned, it's a deal-breaker for me, because I send a lot of emails, often involving detailed explanations.
I used BBs exclusively for nearly a decade, until two weeks ago, when I finally got a personal phone (my company agreed I would be permitted to use my BB for personal and business use from the onset, so I never had a personal phone or a, gasp, land line). I never thought I would switch to a touchscreen phone - the lack of a hard keyboard was always a deal-breaker for me. Until I tried Swype.
Now I have a Nexus S and I'm absolutely delighted by it and wish I'd bought it sooner. Using Swype, I can 'type' faster than I ever could on the BB keyboard, and I'm pretty damn fast on a BB. Adding in all the other features Android includes made me quickly realize I'll never go back to BB, and I was a long-time BB evangelist. When I occasionally use a friend's BB, the OS now feels so outdated. Most of my BB-using friends are on google talk now, so we can still IM (altho I have to admit I miss the little "d" and "r" status indicator for delivered and read BBMs).
"the US government makes up less than .5% of the population."
It's not particularly meaningful to compare it to the general population, because somewhat less than half the population is employed (plus you're counting children). More meaningful is comparing government employees to all employees.
There are around 2 million people directly employed by the federal government, not including postal workers or military personnel. There are roughly 600,000 postal workers and about 1.4 million uniformed military personnel. There are about 146 million people in the workforce of the US. So that makes for 1.37% of all workers are directly employed by the federal government. That rises to 2.74% if you include postal workers and the military (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs041.htm).
Employment by government at all levels is about 14% in the US (comparison: Russia: 0.59%; France: 3.5%), but varies substantially by state (top states are Alaska and Wyoming at over 20% of all workers). So about 1 in 7 workers in the US works for government (and have their salaries paid by the other 6 in 7). As of 2002, more people work for the government than manufacturing and construction combined (https://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/milestone/).