The issue here, is that governments are often pressured to take away from people that have honestly labored for what they have, to give to people who are of less merit, and undeserving of those resources. (Be they skill-less and rich, or skill-less and poor. The trend does not discriminate in and of itself.)
This is because really skilled and/or capable people (people who consistently succeed on their own merits, regardless of source for that merit) are a minority, whereas the less skilled (comparably) and the totally skill-less far outnumber them.
Such is typical of any anomalous demographic.
In an ideal situation, the really skilled would be lauded. Their rarity would be naturally self limiting toward their influence in the society, and the normally skillfull would power the society, creating a trend toward being skillfull.
But the reality is of course different. What would happen instead is that the less skilled (Be it by fate, fortune, or choice, does not matter) would demand the boons and perks of the skilled, without gaining any skills themselves other than how to bilk the system.
As such, people who REALLY DO work hard to get what they have, often have it yanked out from under them by either greedy rich bastards, or by well meaning but politicially enabled robber barrons who think they are helping the poor.
Note: By this I mean things like the following scenario-- Hard working and brilliant inventor creates a new invention that could revolutionize the world--- Huge patent troll sues him into oblivion, gobbles down the invention he worked hard to create, gets richer at his expense, and he gets nothing. Possibly jail time, and a lifetime of debt.
Brilliant chemisty is on the verge of creating a new plastic derived exclusively from waste cellulose and plant oil that biodegrades safely. Goes to jail for owning chemical glassware for suspicion of creating drugs.
And or-- Hard working person manages to beat the odds, and get a useful start in the business world. As the business succeeds, laws intended to keep the ultra-wealthy from being too powerful come to bear against him, and push him back into the poor house. Whatever he used to get ahead is siezed by government of larger enterprise.
This is because of the EXTREME divide between rich and poor-- Any measure of success would cross that line. (How do you discriminate against the 1% population that owns >90% of wealth, without discriminating against the small demographic of upwardly mobile citizens that alone would be able to erode that state?)
EG-- both sides of the knife keep the creme from rising, which is exactly what it was meant to do. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and both actively engineer the situation, knowingly or unknowingly.
A true meritocracy would be radically different from what we have today, and would certainly be even MORE exclusive than the plutocracy we have right now... [Which would be bad!] You can always get money (Illegally, or legally, does not matter really once you have enough of it, which is why lazy and unscrupulous rich fuckers thrive in it. It is also why there is a tiny glimmer of chance that poor people can become upwardly mobile.) but you cannot magically become truly elite without real talent, or the means to hone it. Practice all you want, you wont become Beethoven or Bach unless you have talen; Paint all you want, you wont become a Rembrant without innate talent, which is naturally rare.
As such, a meritocracy would be riddled with REAL ivory tower mentalities, and as your oponent above points out, this is how the fuedal system started. All royal dynasties come from a skilled warrior, or from a wise administrator who unites a divided population.
What would come out of a meritocracy would be the decendents of really smart and capable people riding the coat-tails of those people's legacies, rather than forging their own--- because they are statistically unlikely to be able to do so-- coupled with the sense of en
It's just the nature of the update cycle... all the cool features end up being glitchy and buggy. Mainly memory leaks - those seem to be the last to be found and fixed. In the meantime, just restarting it daily is about all I can do. No different than Windows - one version is unstable and poorly interfaced with drivers (ME, Vista) and the subsequent version will have most of those kinks worked out and end up being a mainstay for a good long time (XP, 7 - I hope). With any luck they'll have the memory leaking fixed mostly in one of the next updates (.0.1 didn't seem to help much, though...).
Of course, the variable definition for i would obviously have to go in the opening statement of the for-loop (along with the definition of the loop counter n) in order to demonstrate the variable going out of scope without being used after the i ++ statement..
I'm trying to switch to Chromium from FF because the memory hogging and CPU spiking in FF 4 is just nuts
Personally I'm just reluctantly putting up with it and hoping they fix the horrible memory leaks soon. FF was eating ~720m of VM this morning when I killed the process and restarted it; it's now back up to 420m. This on a PC that only has 1g of RAM... pre-4.0 didn't have anywhere near these problems. I figure they'll get fixed eventually.
You can easily spot the difference with any unit when comparing to a Garmin. If it tells you frequently to "keep left" or "stay on the road" then it is using pretty raw data.
I've had a Garmin insist that I was on the outer road for several miles after I missed my exit, so I'd take that with a grain of salt. More likely they're just making it less picky about whether you're actually on the road it thinks you're on.
Gak the Caveman has updated his stone axe. The bindings are now made from hemp rather than mammoth tendon.
What a stupid idea - no doubt the tendon would be tougher and wear better. Not to mention the hemp could be put to... better... use. I'd ask what they were smoking when they came up with it, but it's pretty obvious what they weren't smoking in any case...
The company claims they assumed that the data would be used to improve traffic safety and road engineering, and were shocked, shocked to discover that instead the police used it to figure out the best places to put speed traps.
Well duh. Those two phrases mean exactly the same thing in the newspeak.
Firefox does have it built-in. You go to about:config and add a "general.useragent.override" string. Plugins just make changing it an easier and friendlier process.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'd still have to find it first, unless it got that Peeping Tom firmware update.
It'd be kind of hard to leave a voice mail if you didn't want the receiving party to record it. Implied consent much?
What, did hell freeze over?
Yes, it's the Twitter update in the screenshot that reads "Go away helicopter - before I take out my giant swatter :-/"...
My services can do 20000 transactions per second, per server, per core. - by Anonymous Coward
That's nothing - I can ignore all ten billion people in the world simultaneously in no time at all.
Go ahead, test me - there's a "Reply to This" button beneath my post.
Good news - after you go through all the painstaking, tedious work of deleting them ten at a time, they're really gone forever!
*snort* yeah, I couldn't keep a straight face while typing that. Hopefully you couldn't keep one while reading it, either.
You'll be pleased to learn that we're currently on pace to set the record for Slashdot as well. Thanks for your help.
Who got made president and decided that the "order" of magnitude has to always be 10? It's like a freaking cult...
The issue here, is that governments are often pressured to take away from people that have honestly labored for what they have, to give to people who are of less merit, and undeserving of those resources. (Be they skill-less and rich, or skill-less and poor. The trend does not discriminate in and of itself.)
This is because really skilled and/or capable people (people who consistently succeed on their own merits, regardless of source for that merit) are a minority, whereas the less skilled (comparably) and the totally skill-less far outnumber them.
Such is typical of any anomalous demographic.
In an ideal situation, the really skilled would be lauded. Their rarity would be naturally self limiting toward their influence in the society, and the normally skillfull would power the society, creating a trend toward being skillfull.
But the reality is of course different. What would happen instead is that the less skilled (Be it by fate, fortune, or choice, does not matter) would demand the boons and perks of the skilled, without gaining any skills themselves other than how to bilk the system.
As such, people who REALLY DO work hard to get what they have, often have it yanked out from under them by either greedy rich bastards, or by well meaning but politicially enabled robber barrons who think they are helping the poor.
Note: By this I mean things like the following scenario-- Hard working and brilliant inventor creates a new invention that could revolutionize the world--- Huge patent troll sues him into oblivion, gobbles down the invention he worked hard to create, gets richer at his expense, and he gets nothing. Possibly jail time, and a lifetime of debt.
Brilliant chemisty is on the verge of creating a new plastic derived exclusively from waste cellulose and plant oil that biodegrades safely. Goes to jail for owning chemical glassware for suspicion of creating drugs.
And or-- Hard working person manages to beat the odds, and get a useful start in the business world. As the business succeeds, laws intended to keep the ultra-wealthy from being too powerful come to bear against him, and push him back into the poor house. Whatever he used to get ahead is siezed by government of larger enterprise.
This is because of the EXTREME divide between rich and poor-- Any measure of success would cross that line. (How do you discriminate against the 1% population that owns >90% of wealth, without discriminating against the small demographic of upwardly mobile citizens that alone would be able to erode that state?)
EG-- both sides of the knife keep the creme from rising, which is exactly what it was meant to do. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and both actively engineer the situation, knowingly or unknowingly.
A true meritocracy would be radically different from what we have today, and would certainly be even MORE exclusive than the plutocracy we have right now... [Which would be bad!] You can always get money (Illegally, or legally, does not matter really once you have enough of it, which is why lazy and unscrupulous rich fuckers thrive in it. It is also why there is a tiny glimmer of chance that poor people can become upwardly mobile.) but you cannot magically become truly elite without real talent, or the means to hone it. Practice all you want, you wont become Beethoven or Bach unless you have talen; Paint all you want, you wont become a Rembrant without innate talent, which is naturally rare.
As such, a meritocracy would be riddled with REAL ivory tower mentalities, and as your oponent above points out, this is how the fuedal system started. All royal dynasties come from a skilled warrior, or from a wise administrator who unites a divided population.
What would come out of a meritocracy would be the decendents of really smart and capable people riding the coat-tails of those people's legacies, rather than forging their own--- because they are statistically unlikely to be able to do so-- coupled with the sense of en
Or your parents were half-siblings.
Actually, I'd simplify that to "if the word sounds German".
Didn't Galileo discover that?
It's just the nature of the update cycle... all the cool features end up being glitchy and buggy. Mainly memory leaks - those seem to be the last to be found and fixed. In the meantime, just restarting it daily is about all I can do. No different than Windows - one version is unstable and poorly interfaced with drivers (ME, Vista) and the subsequent version will have most of those kinks worked out and end up being a mainstay for a good long time (XP, 7 - I hope). With any luck they'll have the memory leaking fixed mostly in one of the next updates (.0.1 didn't seem to help much, though...).
That'd be one hell of a light-footed guy to be tap-dancing while he had an elephant in his mouth.
Of course, the variable definition for i would obviously have to go in the opening statement of the for-loop (along with the definition of the loop counter n) in order to demonstrate the variable going out of scope without being used after the i ++ statement..
For example, if you have i++ and you then don't use i before it goes out of scope, this is a dead expression and the compiler can remove it.
Fine, then you can tell me what the result of the following code should be, I assume?
for (var n = 0; n < 100; n ++) {
i ++;
}
Now what if I tell you that I had originally defined i like this:
var i = { valueOf: function() { var a = Math.floor(Math.random()*100); document.write(a); return a; } };
In my book any creative use of toString or valueOf counts for bonus points...
I'm trying to switch to Chromium from FF because the memory hogging and CPU spiking in FF 4 is just nuts
Personally I'm just reluctantly putting up with it and hoping they fix the horrible memory leaks soon. FF was eating ~720m of VM this morning when I killed the process and restarted it; it's now back up to 420m. This on a PC that only has 1g of RAM... pre-4.0 didn't have anywhere near these problems. I figure they'll get fixed eventually.
You clicked those links? I kinda just assumed they'd be more of this...
You can easily spot the difference with any unit when comparing to a Garmin. If it tells you frequently to "keep left" or "stay on the road" then it is using pretty raw data.
I've had a Garmin insist that I was on the outer road for several miles after I missed my exit, so I'd take that with a grain of salt. More likely they're just making it less picky about whether you're actually on the road it thinks you're on.
Actually, it depends on which state you're in, and the primary distinction from one state to another state is the different politicians.
E.g. "the Kansas Legislature on Friday agreed to raise the speed limit to 75 mph on more than 1,000 miles of separated, multi-lane highways." Yes, that's last Friday; you heard it here first...
Probably because the Mmagb community filed a patent on that process of creating fire.
Gak the Caveman has updated his stone axe. The bindings are now made from hemp rather than mammoth tendon.
What a stupid idea - no doubt the tendon would be tougher and wear better. Not to mention the hemp could be put to ... better ... use. I'd ask what they were smoking when they came up with it, but it's pretty obvious what they weren't smoking in any case...
The company claims they assumed that the data would be used to improve traffic safety and road engineering, and were shocked, shocked to discover that instead the police used it to figure out the best places to put speed traps.
Well duh. Those two phrases mean exactly the same thing in the newspeak.
Firefox does have it built-in. You go to about:config and add a "general.useragent.override" string. Plugins just make changing it an easier and friendlier process.