The faith in their institutions isn't the cause of less corruption though (did you mean that?).
I've always contended that it is the size of US wealth that makes it a target for corruption. If Finland had a military 10x the size of the next 10 countries combined, had a GDP greater than any single country, had the majority of the worlds largest corporations headquartered there, etc... the bribes and corruption would increase overnight.
I'm not sure how to fix it, except through election reform. Trying to get more honest politicians in office, that are not beholden to campaign finance.
For a large company the server's alone could cost 200-300 thousand for a cluster of boxes and dedicated storage plus backup solution, assume a 5 year life cycle, and that is 1.5 million per 5 years.
Licensing some enterprise software can be really expensive also. If it requires an oracle database on the back-end, then you are looking at 50K per processor per year. Say you want highly available stuff. Then double that Oracle cost, and add Data Guard for another 10K per processor. Then license the voice software itself, backup software and agents, etc.. it adds up fast when you are building big systems. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf
Sounds like you are more annoyed with the software used to listen to voice mail, not the voice mail itself. Our voice system is fully voip, and it has a software client. So I can 'click to listen' just like with email I can 'click to read'.
It reminds me of the earlier days of online gaming. New people logging into the Everquest, that were not part of the beta group that learned faster ways to communicate (sometimes based on language changes that happened over earlier communication channels like IRC), were really confused.
afk = away from keyboard brb = be right back etc....
Sometimes I still use those gaming abbreviations in the work place. It depends on who the person is, and what I know about their background. If I don't know anything about them, regardless of age, I always use proper English (minus typos:)).
The US mortgage industry single-handedly is keeping facsimile alive and well. Anyone who's bought a house lately can attest that they have no clue about PII in unencrypted e-mails, and think nothing of asking you to print out, sign and initial a 60 page document, then fax it back to them. And then they have the gall to complain when you reduce their 8.5 x 14 legal size documents to 8.5 x 11 because your $99 inkjet printer/scanner can't handle legal size.
With throwback companies like that, you'd never know that the mortgage industry is the major backer behind DocuSign. Another reason why banks should issue you a digital certificate when you open an account. If the US Government can implement PKI for their own use, surely the more nimble private marketplace can do the same.../s
That is 100% accurate. It is the first time in my life I used a "kinko's" type photo/fax/copy shop. The volumes of scanning, printing, signing, and faxing were so absurd that I needed enterprise fast office equipment to make it bearable.
Yes, but it was my understanding that there is a lot of 'wink wink' going on at gun shows. The laws are present, but not enforced. My only evidence of this is a undercover 60 minutes-like documentary. Has that not been your experience?
The issue they had was *delivery* to a wedding reception. Surely you see the difference here?....Delivery is seen as tacit approval
I've never thought my pizza delivery guy was tacitly approving on my lifestyle, color of my skin, or religion when he showed up....
Refusing a service to someone based on an attribute protected by law is the same, regardless of the attribute. The most strongly protected attributes right now are race, religion, gender, etc.. sexual orientation is already a protected attribute in a lot of places, it just isn't universally protected in the US, yet.
Pretending that there is some difference between sexual orientation and other protected attributes is on the losing side of history. Sorry if you fail to see that.
If this is accurate, http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/ , there are now 6 processor better for performance/price currently. Just in case anyone is curious, because I was:)
I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools.
I am an atheist, and I DO want religion taught in schools..
There is a big difference between preaching (or teaching with the goal to convert) and teaching with the goal to describe the history, context, and impact of a religion in the world. Ideally, the class would be titled something like "history of the major religions", with academic research and data used to create the lesson plans, not just "what pastor bob says".
But even if the class ended up "history of christianity", it could be taught as any other history course.
Even if some small conservative school uses the "history of christianity" course to try and preach/convert students, at least it is contained in that course and out of the science class room.
The ID people agree that species can be bred to enhance new traits or develop new ones. They disagree that you can breed a new species. The whole notion is to make sure that humans are special and didn't evolve from "monkeys" as the ID people say.
I think the ID people agree that a species can develop new traits over time. It is really hard to argue against high school fruit fly experiments:) What they don't believe is that new species can evolve from existing species.
Except isn't even string theory based on what came out of interesting work in math? It may not be testable, but it was built up from some mathematical foundations, correct? I assume X,Y,Z about the universe, and then work out some math, and the math leads me to a state of matter that behaves like strings, etc..
Religious faith in "B" has no logical underpinnings. There isn't a series of logical arguments, that, assuming "Y", leads you to believing in "B". You just believe or don't believe. That seems rather different than string theory...
They "proclaim truths" (without actually going to the trouble of step-by-step proving every single one),
Your high school sucked or mine was excellent then, because we went through the proof behind "truths" all the time. Fruit fly experiments showing natural selection and evolution right before our eyes, deriving equations in physics just like the original discoverers derived them (from things like physical measurements, etc..).
I have no idea if my school is the exception or the rule though.
Not allowing a black person into your diner doesn't prevent the black person from getting dinner somewhere else, right?
Race, gender, etc.. are specially protected classes under the law. Sexual orientation is not as widely or uniformly protected in all States like race/gender. But that is changing over time. People seeking to discriminate against other people based on their sexual orientation are on the losing side of history.
Disagreeing, ridiculing, or otherwise speaking out against a viewpoint you find dangerous or distasteful is not an issue of free speech. You have no right to express 'x' without another person expressing the opposite.
If someone claims the Earth is 6,000 years old, I'm sorry, but they deserve to be 'shut down'. Where 'shut down' is the voices of others disagreeing, the political or legal actions of others to prevent that message from being taught in science class, etc.. And of course, the people making the 6,000 year claim are free to 'fight back' with legal, political, social media, etc.. That is how the exchange, and more importantly, the evaluation of ideas in the public takes place.
Yeah, US taxes wouldn't have to be raised much higher to get free college, free healthcare, free payed maternity/paternity leaves, etc..
We would, however, have to re-structure our budget. Small things like spending more on our Military than the next 7 countries combined spend, sorta eats up one's money that could be used to help society.....
In theory, it's possible that educating everyone increases the wealth of everyone involved by an amount greater than the taxes paid out to cover education over the course of their working lifetime.
That has already been proven time and time again. Educating a populace pays for itself in terms of a lifetime of higher tax revenues. It doesn't really matter that it is fiscally sound, because it doesn't fit in with the conservative viewpoint that giving people stuff for free is somehow always bad.
I love Germany, but I don't know of any German beers that are all that good. They certainly have the reputation but the reality has always been disappointing.
The unusual quality that might irritate people used to Bud Light is called "taste", and is usually considered a good thing in beers.
Most stores don't carry a lot of German beers. At most, you'll be lucky to see Becks or St. Pauli Girl which are not good imo. Especially if you are used to real American craft beer, the big bold IPA flavors.
Making all higher education free would result in a college being watered down even more than it is now, and would waste tremendous amounts of resources on people who are either not capable or unwilling to do the work.
So this is true of most of Europe, where college is free, even for foreigners in some places? Not.
And if I were to implement it in reality, it would be a mix of private/public. All state schools would be free. Harvard and similar can (and should) remain private.
Regardless, there is still testing involved in Europe to get into schools. If I recall correctly, Germany has different tiers of free college. If you don't score high enough to get into a University, you might score high enough to get into a free vocational college.
So its not like any random person would be allowed to attend harvard...
Because, for a minute there, you sounded like just another political idiot taking any opportunity to bash whoever you don't like. But surely that's not the case, right?
At this point in time, I assume that half the posts on the internet that are political in nature are coming from paid shills working for one side or another.
PETA can be pretty over the top sometimes, and that has earned it a bad reputation, especially here on Slashdot. That said, PETA (ethical treatment of animals) likely considers euthanizing an animal less cruel than it starving to death (due to lack of resources in the shelter).
If you have only X dollars to support Y animals and only Z people come to adopt, I can see euthanasia as the logical outcome for some percent of Y.
Name a form of tax that isn't wealth redistribution.
Take the military for example. If we didn't have a military, people would be required to hire private security to keep their country/property safe. Rich people could handle this easily, poor people not so much. By taxing everyone, including the rich at higher rates / higher total tax amount, we provide this blanket protection (military) to everyone, regardless whether they could have afforded it.
The mega-rich could afford to basically create the entire infrastructure and services (miltary, roads, power lines, etc..) required to have a modern functioning society. The middle class and poor, not so much. So, we tax and re-distribute to create a functioning society for everyone.
Nope. Its being streamed in the USA. Once it hits my VPN its on my private network.
I know that technically you are correct. However, arguments similar in nature to that have been used in the past, and failed when it reached a court. Like the, "I'm not housing any copyrighted material, I'm just providing links to them..." argument.
It seems like judges are more likely to make rulings that conform to the spirit of a law, the intent of the law, rather than a technical loophole. For example, https://www.aereo.com/ , as far as I could tell, was not breaking any laws. Unless I'm mixing my companies up, Aereo was the online TV streaming service, who literally had a physical TV antennae for each customer. What they provided was a service that would use "your" TV antennae (housed in their data center) to record over the air broadcasts, and then let you stream those broadcasts at a time of your choosing.
It sounded very legal to most of us. Say I payed my neighbor to rent a spot on his roof. I moved my antennae off of my house, and put it on his roof. In addition to this rent, I told my neighbor that I would pay him X dollars per month to record all the TV signals that are flowing down my antennae, and put them in my dropbox account. DVR's, VCR's, etc... have been legal for a long time. Why should it matter if I do it myself in my own house, or pay someone to manage it for me?
The courts disagreed:
While we had significant victories in the federal district courts in New York and Boston and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the reversal of the Second Circuit decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court has proven difficult to overcome. The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws that had governed Aereo’s technology, creating regulatory and legal uncertainty. And while our team has focused its energies on exploring every path forward available to us, without that clarity, the challenges have proven too difficult to overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
The faith in their institutions isn't the cause of less corruption though (did you mean that?).
I've always contended that it is the size of US wealth that makes it a target for corruption. If Finland had a military 10x the size of the next 10 countries combined, had a GDP greater than any single country, had the majority of the worlds largest corporations headquartered there, etc... the bribes and corruption would increase overnight.
I'm not sure how to fix it, except through election reform. Trying to get more honest politicians in office, that are not beholden to campaign finance.
Or pay nothing for the panels http://www.solarcity.com/residential and have a lower electricity cost right now.
For a large company the server's alone could cost 200-300 thousand for a cluster of boxes and dedicated storage plus backup solution, assume a 5 year life cycle, and that is 1.5 million per 5 years.
Licensing some enterprise software can be really expensive also. If it requires an oracle database on the back-end, then you are looking at 50K per processor per year. Say you want highly available stuff. Then double that Oracle cost, and add Data Guard for another 10K per processor. Then license the voice software itself, backup software and agents, etc.. it adds up fast when you are building big systems. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf
Our work has a voice mail client, so I 'click to listen' to voice mails just like I 'click to read' email. The interface does make a big difference.
However, things I miss, that are easy to do with written text:
1. Rewind
2. Pause
3. Jump forward/backward to specific locations
That is easy to do when reading, but not easy to do with our voice mail client.
Sounds like you are more annoyed with the software used to listen to voice mail, not the voice mail itself. Our voice system is fully voip, and it has a software client. So I can 'click to listen' just like with email I can 'click to read'.
It reminds me of the earlier days of online gaming. New people logging into the Everquest, that were not part of the beta group that learned faster ways to communicate (sometimes based on language changes that happened over earlier communication channels like IRC), were really confused.
afk = away from keyboard
brb = be right back
etc....
Sometimes I still use those gaming abbreviations in the work place. It depends on who the person is, and what I know about their background. If I don't know anything about them, regardless of age, I always use proper English (minus typos:)).
The US mortgage industry single-handedly is keeping facsimile alive and well. Anyone who's bought a house lately can attest that they have no clue about PII in unencrypted e-mails, and think nothing of asking you to print out, sign and initial a 60 page document, then fax it back to them. And then they have the gall to complain when you reduce their 8.5 x 14 legal size documents to 8.5 x 11 because your $99 inkjet printer/scanner can't handle legal size.
With throwback companies like that, you'd never know that the mortgage industry is the major backer behind DocuSign. Another reason why banks should issue you a digital certificate when you open an account. If the US Government can implement PKI for their own use, surely the more nimble private marketplace can do the same... /s
That is 100% accurate. It is the first time in my life I used a "kinko's" type photo/fax/copy shop. The volumes of scanning, printing, signing, and faxing were so absurd that I needed enterprise fast office equipment to make it bearable.
Yes, but it was my understanding that there is a lot of 'wink wink' going on at gun shows. The laws are present, but not enforced. My only evidence of this is a undercover 60 minutes-like documentary. Has that not been your experience?
The issue they had was *delivery* to a wedding reception. Surely you see the difference here?....Delivery is seen as tacit approval
I've never thought my pizza delivery guy was tacitly approving on my lifestyle, color of my skin, or religion when he showed up....
Refusing a service to someone based on an attribute protected by law is the same, regardless of the attribute. The most strongly protected attributes right now are race, religion, gender, etc.. sexual orientation is already a protected attribute in a lot of places, it just isn't universally protected in the US, yet.
Pretending that there is some difference between sexual orientation and other protected attributes is on the losing side of history. Sorry if you fail to see that.
If this is accurate, http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/ , there are now 6 processor better for performance/price currently. Just in case anyone is curious, because I was:)
I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools.
I am an atheist, and I DO want religion taught in schools. .
There is a big difference between preaching (or teaching with the goal to convert) and teaching with the goal to describe the history, context, and impact of a religion in the world. Ideally, the class would be titled something like "history of the major religions", with academic research and data used to create the lesson plans, not just "what pastor bob says".
But even if the class ended up "history of christianity", it could be taught as any other history course.
Even if some small conservative school uses the "history of christianity" course to try and preach/convert students, at least it is contained in that course and out of the science class room.
The ID people agree that species can be bred to enhance new traits or develop new ones. They disagree that you can breed a new species. The whole notion is to make sure that humans are special and didn't evolve from "monkeys" as the ID people say.
I think the ID people agree that a species can develop new traits over time. It is really hard to argue against high school fruit fly experiments:) What they don't believe is that new species can evolve from existing species.
Except isn't even string theory based on what came out of interesting work in math? It may not be testable, but it was built up from some mathematical foundations, correct? I assume X,Y,Z about the universe, and then work out some math, and the math leads me to a state of matter that behaves like strings, etc..
Religious faith in "B" has no logical underpinnings. There isn't a series of logical arguments, that, assuming "Y", leads you to believing in "B". You just believe or don't believe. That seems rather different than string theory...
They "proclaim truths" (without actually going to the trouble of step-by-step proving every single one),
Your high school sucked or mine was excellent then, because we went through the proof behind "truths" all the time. Fruit fly experiments showing natural selection and evolution right before our eyes, deriving equations in physics just like the original discoverers derived them (from things like physical measurements, etc..).
I have no idea if my school is the exception or the rule though.
Not allowing a black person into your diner doesn't prevent the black person from getting dinner somewhere else, right?
Race, gender, etc.. are specially protected classes under the law. Sexual orientation is not as widely or uniformly protected in all States like race/gender. But that is changing over time. People seeking to discriminate against other people based on their sexual orientation are on the losing side of history.
shut down free speech and the free expression
Disagreeing, ridiculing, or otherwise speaking out against a viewpoint you find dangerous or distasteful is not an issue of free speech. You have no right to express 'x' without another person expressing the opposite.
If someone claims the Earth is 6,000 years old, I'm sorry, but they deserve to be 'shut down'. Where 'shut down' is the voices of others disagreeing, the political or legal actions of others to prevent that message from being taught in science class, etc.. And of course, the people making the 6,000 year claim are free to 'fight back' with legal, political, social media, etc.. That is how the exchange, and more importantly, the evaluation of ideas in the public takes place.
Yeah, US taxes wouldn't have to be raised much higher to get free college, free healthcare, free payed maternity/paternity leaves, etc..
We would, however, have to re-structure our budget. Small things like spending more on our Military than the next 7 countries combined spend, sorta eats up one's money that could be used to help society.....
http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison
In theory, it's possible that educating everyone increases the wealth of everyone involved by an amount greater than the taxes paid out to cover education over the course of their working lifetime.
That has already been proven time and time again. Educating a populace pays for itself in terms of a lifetime of higher tax revenues. It doesn't really matter that it is fiscally sound, because it doesn't fit in with the conservative viewpoint that giving people stuff for free is somehow always bad.
I love Germany, but I don't know of any German beers that are all that good. They certainly have the reputation but the reality has always been disappointing.
The unusual quality that might irritate people used to Bud Light is called "taste", and is usually considered a good thing in beers.
http://german.answers.com/culture/popular-german-beer-brands-found-in-america
Most stores don't carry a lot of German beers. At most, you'll be lucky to see Becks or St. Pauli Girl which are not good imo. Especially if you are used to real American craft beer, the big bold IPA flavors.
Making all higher education free would result in a college being watered down even more than it is now, and would waste tremendous amounts of resources on people who are either not capable or unwilling to do the work.
So this is true of most of Europe, where college is free, even for foreigners in some places? Not.
And if I were to implement it in reality, it would be a mix of private/public. All state schools would be free. Harvard and similar can (and should) remain private.
Regardless, there is still testing involved in Europe to get into schools. If I recall correctly, Germany has different tiers of free college. If you don't score high enough to get into a University, you might score high enough to get into a free vocational college.
So its not like any random person would be allowed to attend harvard...
Because, for a minute there, you sounded like just another political idiot taking any opportunity to bash whoever you don't like. But surely that's not the case, right?
At this point in time, I assume that half the posts on the internet that are political in nature are coming from paid shills working for one side or another.
PETA can be pretty over the top sometimes, and that has earned it a bad reputation, especially here on Slashdot. That said, PETA (ethical treatment of animals) likely considers euthanizing an animal less cruel than it starving to death (due to lack of resources in the shelter).
If you have only X dollars to support Y animals and only Z people come to adopt, I can see euthanasia as the logical outcome for some percent of Y.
Name a form of tax that isn't wealth redistribution.
Take the military for example. If we didn't have a military, people would be required to hire private security to keep their country/property safe. Rich people could handle this easily, poor people not so much. By taxing everyone, including the rich at higher rates / higher total tax amount, we provide this blanket protection (military) to everyone, regardless whether they could have afforded it.
The mega-rich could afford to basically create the entire infrastructure and services (miltary, roads, power lines, etc..) required to have a modern functioning society. The middle class and poor, not so much. So, we tax and re-distribute to create a functioning society for everyone.
Nope. Its being streamed in the USA. Once it hits my VPN its on my private network.
I know that technically you are correct. However, arguments similar in nature to that have been used in the past, and failed when it reached a court. Like the, "I'm not housing any copyrighted material, I'm just providing links to them..." argument.
It seems like judges are more likely to make rulings that conform to the spirit of a law, the intent of the law, rather than a technical loophole. For example, https://www.aereo.com/ , as far as I could tell, was not breaking any laws. Unless I'm mixing my companies up, Aereo was the online TV streaming service, who literally had a physical TV antennae for each customer. What they provided was a service that would use "your" TV antennae (housed in their data center) to record over the air broadcasts, and then let you stream those broadcasts at a time of your choosing.
It sounded very legal to most of us. Say I payed my neighbor to rent a spot on his roof. I moved my antennae off of my house, and put it on his roof. In addition to this rent, I told my neighbor that I would pay him X dollars per month to record all the TV signals that are flowing down my antennae, and put them in my dropbox account. DVR's, VCR's, etc... have been legal for a long time. Why should it matter if I do it myself in my own house, or pay someone to manage it for me?
The courts disagreed:
While we had significant victories in the federal district courts in New York and Boston and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the reversal of the Second Circuit decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court has proven difficult to overcome. The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws that had governed Aereo’s technology, creating regulatory and legal uncertainty. And while our team has focused its energies on exploring every path forward available to us, without that clarity, the challenges have proven too difficult to overcome.