Either of these can be readily supported by various logical arguments. Unfortunately, they cannot both be true, as (2) gives the USA licence to disregard the supposed rights of other individuals, corporations, and nations where they clash with its own. However, many Americans tend to transpose deftly from one to the other in the same context - sometimes even within the same sentence. It would be nice to know which is the official position.
You missed it. We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. Ideally, all humans are the same and have the same rights and blah, blah, in practise US, UK, EU citizens have more rights and benefits than Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners.
Apply that logic to all things. Sure we'll let any company play game here, but US businesses have an advantage over nonUS businesses in the US. The US government will always work to bring more rights and benefits to US companies and not to non US companies. This is perfectly inline with number one. If your country morphes itself into a clone of the US than your businesses/citizens are treated more like our own. The thing is there is such a stark difference in the casual freedoms that we allow foreigners and what they are generally allowed, that even our restricted freedom that we grant them is far more than they usually encounter. That's always been our moral trump card.
The USA has been trying to assert it's laws over other countries for a very, very long time. Take any number of attempts by the USA to tell Canadian companies that they can't have business dealings with Cuba, just because they happen to be owned by American companies. Other examples would be the (attempted) enforcement of American policies regarding exportation of goods to certain countries, etc.
That's a bad example. Most people would support the US government trying to force US owned foreign companies to conform with US laws. Why? Because there could be a country out there that has slavery, serfdom, or some other similiar policies and it's perfectly "legal" there. If a US company goes over to that country and does business, they are expected to obey US laws and any businesses that they buy and own should be run as much as possible under US law.
You are bitching and moaning because the US is trying to get its foreign owned, but based in "first world" countries like Canada, UK, EU, or Au to follow US law. Hey, for the most part I don't blame you because their existing laws should be very similiar to US law any way. Why the US does this is for places like the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (think China) so that they'd confirm to US law and not have their individuals in serfdom/ near slavery. Well, we can't treat countries too differently so we treat everyone that way.
They're calling this the wave of the future... if they want to turn IT into something equated as fast food. That's the dream they're going for.
Damn, I go to McDonald's for lunch most days. I order a number 9, large Dr. Pepper, and large fries. McDonalds can't give me the same amount of fries, right drink, or the same burger that I ordered every day. Usually they get it right, but atleast once a week, I get medium fries rather than large. About once a month, I'll get a coke rather than a Dr. Pepper. About once a week, I'll get something slightly different than the number 9 of yesterday and the number 9 of tomorrow.
If McDonald's can't get me consistent food, I doubt IBM could get you consistent fast cheap software. (I'm assuming that it's vastly easier to cook a burger add the fixings, put some fries in a box, and fill a large drink container with the right drink than it is to design and build software. There hasn't been some vast improvements in compilers when I haven't been looking has there?)
China hasn't been socialist since their 1978 reforms. Disney hasn't been capitalist (in the sense of participating in a free market economy) since they bought the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, and probably weren't before then.
If you're on the side of capitalism, support China. If you agree with Disney's destruction of the public domain, support them
You mean, if we didn't have these copyrights that anyone could build a theme park of their favorite older characters? Hmm, this could be a great idea about limiting copyrights to increase capitalism and the free market.
Australia has thousands of stupid laws that the majority don't agree with, we have an effective way of dealing with these, ignore them.
Hey, we generally do that in the US. I'm pretty sure the UK and Canada does it as well. The thing isn't that you are ignoring some immoral law. The thing is "they" could pick you up and nail your ass at any time for not following any of a dozens of said immoral laws. The problem is that although the UK was outraged about the entire Big Brother concept from the book, the UK government thinks its a grand idea and is trying to get it rolled out in London as as politically possible. (It may take a generation or two but they are getting there.) I think the other "free" governments are taking a wait and see outlook on the London experiment before going out and copying them.
It's pretty hard to ignore immoral laws when ever square foot of land is recorded and monitored by living people.
The NSW Teachers Federation, which is a fairly powerful union here, has been vigorously fighting any attempts to rate the teachers performance and that of their students. Report cards for students are virtually meaningless nowdays and they have fought tooth and nail to prevent the return of the old system. I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites, but as someone who went through the NSW system, I think having a rating site is a great idea. Many of the teachers are less than competent to be teaching our children.
I'd never encountered this concept until I hit university. At the end of the semester, the department sec would hand out a teacher eval form for the students to fill out. She'd type them up and remove the names. The department head, dean of that college, and that professor generally where the only ones that saw the responses. I was pretty much a mandatory and expected thing at the end of the class. I would have loved for a similiar system in high school and also the ability to read the entire history of a professor's eval.
At the college level, you generally get to pick your professor except in some gen. ed. classes where the teacher is currently unassigned and tweleve people generally teach the class. In high school, you generaly have zero or little control over your teachers. I was in advanced and honors classes. I knew ahead of time which teachers would be teaching those honor/advanced subjects because my highschool generally only had one teacher in each subject area teach said honors classes. When you go the general ed route or take a PE, you get teacher lotto on the results.
My highschool had a good education atleast they had the one thing my college couldn't master down. Teachers that were fluent in english teaching all the subjects. CS and math majors should know what I'm talking about. I'd never had to deal with English a third or fourth language spoken with Chinese, Indian, or French accents before college.
The U.S. Navy doesn't send submarines out for 3-year deployments, although 1-year deployments have been done.
Sounds like it would be cheaper/safer if we did some test runs with various subs at 3 to 6 year deployments. (I'm assuming 3 years to Mars and 3 years back.) It would be much cheaper and safer than rushing forward trying to build a spaceship and do the same thing without some long term study on the effects to your average person. There is a part of me that thinks that every single person that wants to take a trip to Mars needs to spend 3 years on a sub with their team in a test run.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads. If the power gathered is then invested into a public transport system, then you'll end up having drivers subsidise public transport. The fuel savings with public transport may well offset the extra fuel burnt through the turbine induced drag.
I'd hope that the New Jersey drivers would sue the any government that tried this.
Um, what does the Navy do with subs? That's the basic policy of what they should try copying from because its the closest Earth based thing that we have to this.
I've loved reading slashdots ideas though. My favorite has to be the celibate space monks. I also like the send swingers up there idea, but I don't think that'd work. The concept behind "swinging" that I understand is not to have the same casual sex parnter for years at a time. Emotionaly attachments would develop for most people if you kept on having sex with the same people over and over for 3 years or so. I like the idea of making sure that they are all sterilized before hand or single sex crews rather than remotely risking space pregancy at the moment.
Of course if you were going to play Big Brother in Space, you might want to plan for a space pregnacy and all the associated hassles just for pontential PR benefits and boosting the public's interest in space.
The what to do about a dead bodies question is more interesting to me. The most politically pro PR wise is to bag 'em and bring the body back. I think that they should have options though. Some might want to be ejected into space, some might want to be burned and the ashes returned or scattered either on Earth, in space, or on Mars. Heck, if I died on my way to Mars there is a part of me that'd want to be buried or placed on Mars. Talk about being a future scientist's prize. If the idea of people the the future finding and studying your dead body freaks you out, I'd go with the burning option.
The idea of adding the dead body to food system isn't go as of yet. If we were colonizing space, or hand a small town floating around up there, yes that'd be what we'd want to do. On a mission of sending most likely under a dozen people? I think the idea or thought that you are eating food made from the remains of some one that you personally knew would freak people out. Scifish it is the best recycle the materials bet. We generally don't grow our food supply on top of our cementries though so why should we want them to suffer that?
The writer says that the Member of Parliament who broke the news (that International Olympic Committee chose VISA for IT security) doesn't see why the British Government should pay one billion pounds for security. Presumably because they didn't select the contractor. I don't see where you get the idea that Visa is paying for security - they are profiting from their investment in sponsoring the games by being paid to handle IT security.
I've been trying to re-read the article, but now its a register to read. From what I recall on my first read through though, the UK government wasn't paying any, but the security was going to cost billion. It did sound like Visa was paying that and the writer was wanting the UK to pay it. If it did say that the UK government was paying, then it wasn't very clear on that.
Sorry, but it said that Visa the sponser was providing security. That generally would mean that Visa were paying for said security. How I read it, was that the MP was complaining because the UK wasn't paying the billion for security and wasn't in charge of said security and was seriously pissed at that. I just kinda of blinked that the UK MP wanted to take on the cost and burden myself.
Come on that actually makes some sort of sense. Let the folks that are already paying for the Olympics be incharge of the security. Visa sounds like a good choice. After actually reading the article, I was surprised. They article writer wants the UK government to pay a billion or so for the Olympic security. Hmm, which would you rather have, your tax payer money going for the Olympics security, (which you may or may not actually care about), or a known sponser for the Olympics paying the bill?
Come on this guy lists two possible techs and then mentions that it's an existing Olympic rule that sponsers only need apply, which sounds like if they want their products in then they need to sponser the Olympics.
I'm sorry, but Visa is one of the few companies that I'd actually be willing to trust on security. Would you want Nokia or the London Public Transient Authority responsible for your security?
Which is why you don't work at MERL. In large, complex buildings, having only the signs that lead you out of the building in the quickest possible way would definitely be a benefit. Especially if, for example, one particular exit route was blocked for any reason.
Um, the building is on fire, or in an earth quake, flood, hurricane or what ever, it isn't working properly and is about to fall down. Are you going to trust that these signs will works as said? I doubt they'd work quite that well.
What we really need is inside of a federal holiday, a federal disaster drill day or week. We seperate the US into regions and drill the entire community into what to do if the most likely natural disasters happen there. Usually, hospitals, fire departments, police departments and the Office of Emergency Management have these sorts of drills every now and then, but only first responders are really drilled into what to do.
Do you remember in public school having fire and torando drills? Something like that on a city level. I don't have a clue how you'd drill a city like NY for everyone to just know the best way out of any given building, but that's really what we should do.
A recent report on the radio here said that out of about $840M donated by foreign countries to help the victims of Katrina...only about $40M of it was sent to the gulf south region. The rest...was funneled to other govt. programs or lost I guess.
So does that mean the US is now offically a third world country where foreign aid is channeled from aid to poor people/refugees to those with government connections to their overpriced pet projects?
Digg is pathetic. The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer. Whatever slashdot's shortcomings in other areas, at least they have paid editors who work at it like a real job. Reading the typical comments on digg, they all seem to be by high school students who think they know the secret to tabletop nuclear fusion, and they're all voting each other's posts up and down like crazy, based on nothing but their own biases. At least with slashdot moderation, posts are likely to be moderated by randomly chosen people who didn't get handed a license to go around voting their friends up and their enemies down.
This is the funnies thing that I've ever read. Just trade in slashdot for where you have digg and the same applies except we are more of a randomly chosen jury duty around here rather than anything like democracy. Actually, both forums could be discribed as angry mobs if you try to voice opinions against the majority. On slashdot, just come out in favor of closed source, Microsoft, DRM, copyrights, censorship, ID, or the police or the government (doesn't matter which police or which government) to get modded down. Group think is alive and well in both forums.
I don't even know what a "ribbon" is, but I'm sure that I'll hate that too.
Hey, the ribbon will be your new best friend. Unlike clippy and all that help crap, the ribbon is just there and has everything in only three rows. I've used it on 15" lcds and think that it takes up too much room on that sized monitor. On a 18-19" LCD though it is great.
What will you hate about the ribbon? That your boss or your top 5 user friends will now be finding crap that was artfully hidden behind 4-5 menus in previous verions. MS has moved stuff. This is annoying and will be for every former Office user. The ribbon is one of the few things that actually does what it is meant to. It isn't personlized and doesn't rearrange itself automagically ever time you start. It has all these neat features right there. That's why you'll love/hate this new ribbon thingy. Heck, you ought to love the ribbon thingy just because that don't have all those annoying task panes to the sides.
The only problems my wife really ran into is that there isn't an obvious either it was print or print preview on the toolbar I don't remember at the moment. Oh, it took my wife and I awhile to figure out that MS Office icon in the upper left hand corner could be clicked to open the file menu. If it took computer savvy people awhile to figure that one out, how long would it take for people that don't like computers to figure that one out?
Thus putting you somewhere near the 99th percentile of the general pool of home PC purchasers. For everyone else, they won't even notice the difference. That's one reason why HP has been kicking Dell's ass in the home pc market recently.
Couldn't it be more along the lines of the Hp/Compaq at Walmart/Best Buy/Office Depot that is doing it? My mom bought an HP at walmart on sale for $450. I recently assisted someone buying a Compaq desktop for $700 out there. I didn't notice any Dell brand desktops or laptops in stores. Some people make impluse computer purchases and want the computer that second after picking it out. Dell doesn't have an option in the stores, so isn't even considered in this market. I'd bet Toshiba is leading against Dell in this market simply because I see Toshiba laptops in all these stores as well. If you see, Compaq/Toshiba every day in your shopping, but only hear about or see Dell on TV ads, which would you think that your average shopper would just pickout to buy?
I think that we need more of those sorts of classes...Honors (usually you could get AP credit and weighted), advanced (weighted normally), regular, and remedial.
Thus you would create a system which would become a game. Legislators and bureaucrats would create policies to favor rich/politically targeted kids to forward an agenda. Those who actually worked for the grades would be displaced by those who gamed the system better.
Nah, it's more like those that don't care about school or just aren't good at a subject get into regular classes. This leaves those with the determination and skills in the advanced and honors classes. The important thing is making sure that local rich VIP can't pull strings to get their remedial kid into the honors classes. If the kid has any talent or their parents actually push them, most teachers will try to get those students boosted into the advanced/honors classes ASAP. Life is unfair and school can be treated as a game. It is better to game it to the max than be used by it. One of the reason's that the universities and highschools really don't care about this issue is taht local rich VIP kid that could barely keep up in remedial classes has to take 2-3 remedial college classes until they pass with an acceptable grade. The local rich VIP's kid has to be a very rich statewide VIP's kid to get special treatment at the university level, but it still happens.
How many people outside of fields like engineering and other math-specialty careers even need to be able to do much beyond the basic four functions anyway? Sure, it'd be nice to have a general populace well-versed in all subjects, but at this point in time I think that's little more than wishful thinking.
I just wish that we could drop those lit and comp requirements. It's not like we need to know who to read classical lit or write. We need to learn who and how to properly bitch to in order for our environment to be updated to our specs. I remember my lit professor saying that he wouldn't accept BS on his essays questions when 98% of what came out of his mouth was BS. His class was a BS general ed requirement and I just did what had to be done in order to pass it. I read scifiction which stretchs my mind more than anything he had us read.
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses....
The 4.0 student who took shop as his electives is still in my hometown working on cars possibly missing a finger. I'm working half way across the country on computer systems for probably better pay. Ironically, in the end the only thing that matters is if you're happy.
The more that I find out about how other areas work, the more pleased that I am with my highschool education. Honors classes were weighted so if you made straight Bs in the honors classes those counted as As. Some one that didn't take Honors English, World History, and Math didn't stand a chance of making it in the top 50 at my HS. I think that we need more of those sorts of classes. Basically we had Honors (usually you could get AP credit and weighted), advanced (weighted normally), regular, and remidal. Everyone that was going to college was either in Honors or advanced classes and there weren't too many people holding the entire class up. Actually, the first week of classes were devoted to ensuring those folks got filtered into the regular classes.
Ok. It's a CD size, why is their title wiki on DVD? Actually, I was looking for something like this just a few months ago. At that time, if you wanted an offline copy of wikipedia, you had to download something like 80GB and figure out how to install/run the wikipedia backend.
I think the folks behind this project just don't get what wikipedia is best used for. It sounds like they are trying to release the best fact checked copy that they can within those subjects. Um, that's not what I use wikipedia for. I use it to quickly figure out who this guy is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen or immediate trivia that in 5 minutes I could care less about, but I just would like a vague idea of who the guy is and such. Wikipedia is great for fast trivia. I bet you most of the articles that I look up won't be on this CD because those that are making this want wikipedia to be like a book reference and all the junk that I want researched would be filtered out. Oh well, maybe it would be useful for the kids to look through.
I belive that one reason is that scientists are still trying to defeat, with evidence and reason, the religious fundamentalists who believe we are the only "intelligent" life in the Universe, and on the only planet that supports life. On this argument, which I personally doubt, conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
I don't put much stock into either ID or evolution or climate change, but it's this sort of mindset that sets folks into disbeliefing any thing that scientists say that is just theory. It's this sort of mindset that makes it easily believable that the entire field of global climate change is politically backed just to make wide spread social changes. Science needs to be objective and not just research into areas to piss off the majority of global religions and those that belief in them. I think that's the main reason that they like bringing up evolution and the big bang just to piss off our existing religions. That's not how science should work.
Drop the Roman Numbers already! I actually would like "sequels" and such for FF. What would I really like? No more end of the word/got to save the entire world quests. This is something that the FF series sucks at. Each of them starts with a small group that should just be happy to survive on their own adventures. And theses small groups level up and take down empires. And all tech cultures are evil because they pollute and trees and mana are automatically good.
Just once, I'd like a FF game where you were from the techy culture and they were the good guys, fighting against the evil Gaia/Zerg Living Planet Monsters. I really like playing around in the FF worlds that last on FFXII was really fun, but I could do without their overwhelming plot. Why can't they have a world with more city states and wars and such. There are tons of things that could make an interesting world besides saving the world from the evil menace. How about us getting to be the evil menace for a change? I wasn't as thrilled with FFXII after just playing Radatia story and Dragon Quest 8. Those worlds were just more fun to be in and watch than FFXII. FFXII was like most of the background characters were just copied and pasted and there were tons of them with a one or two dialog sentences. Why was this disappointing? Because although Radiata Stories sucked on some of the graphics, the level of detail in the characters and where you could follow them on their day and night cycles rocked. (And you could follow the characters around and get different responses instead of the same phrase over and over again.) I was expecting FFXII to out do that. It's like they only tried outdoing the previous FF games and not borrowing what was fun from other RPGs.
I have a friend who immigrated from Peru to the US. She is a staunchly anti-Bush person and considers him an overreaching warmongerer who wishes he was a dictator and is taking steps in that direction. She's a major civil liberties and human rights advocate. Yet, in Peru, she was a supporter of hardline dictator Alberto Fujimori. Knowing just these two facts.
Um, sounds like your friend wants to live in a police state. I advise you to lobby her to return to Peru rather than trying to reform the US into Peru.
Slashdot Mirror
Either of these can be readily supported by various logical arguments. Unfortunately, they cannot both be true, as (2) gives the USA licence to disregard the supposed rights of other individuals, corporations, and nations where they clash with its own. However, many Americans tend to transpose deftly from one to the other in the same context - sometimes even within the same sentence. It would be nice to know which is the official position.
You missed it. We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. Ideally, all humans are the same and have the same rights and blah, blah, in practise US, UK, EU citizens have more rights and benefits than Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners.
Apply that logic to all things. Sure we'll let any company play game here, but US businesses have an advantage over nonUS businesses in the US. The US government will always work to bring more rights and benefits to US companies and not to non US companies. This is perfectly inline with number one. If your country morphes itself into a clone of the US than your businesses/citizens are treated more like our own. The thing is there is such a stark difference in the casual freedoms that we allow foreigners and what they are generally allowed, that even our restricted freedom that we grant them is far more than they usually encounter. That's always been our moral trump card.
The USA has been trying to assert it's laws over other countries for a very, very long time. Take any number of attempts by the USA to tell Canadian companies that they can't have business dealings with Cuba, just because they happen to be owned by American companies. Other examples would be the (attempted) enforcement of American policies regarding exportation of goods to certain countries, etc.
That's a bad example. Most people would support the US government trying to force US owned foreign companies to conform with US laws. Why? Because there could be a country out there that has slavery, serfdom, or some other similiar policies and it's perfectly "legal" there. If a US company goes over to that country and does business, they are expected to obey US laws and any businesses that they buy and own should be run as much as possible under US law.
You are bitching and moaning because the US is trying to get its foreign owned, but based in "first world" countries like Canada, UK, EU, or Au to follow US law. Hey, for the most part I don't blame you because their existing laws should be very similiar to US law any way. Why the US does this is for places like the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (think China) so that they'd confirm to US law and not have their individuals in serfdom/ near slavery. Well, we can't treat countries too differently so we treat everyone that way.
They're calling this the wave of the future... if they want to turn IT into something equated as fast food. That's the dream they're going for.
Damn, I go to McDonald's for lunch most days. I order a number 9, large Dr. Pepper, and large fries. McDonalds can't give me the same amount of fries, right drink, or the same burger that I ordered every day. Usually they get it right, but atleast once a week, I get medium fries rather than large. About once a month, I'll get a coke rather than a Dr. Pepper. About once a week, I'll get something slightly different than the number 9 of yesterday and the number 9 of tomorrow.
If McDonald's can't get me consistent food, I doubt IBM could get you consistent fast cheap software. (I'm assuming that it's vastly easier to cook a burger add the fixings, put some fries in a box, and fill a large drink container with the right drink than it is to design and build software. There hasn't been some vast improvements in compilers when I haven't been looking has there?)
China hasn't been socialist since their 1978 reforms. Disney hasn't been capitalist (in the sense of participating in a free market economy) since they bought the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, and probably weren't before then.
If you're on the side of capitalism, support China. If you agree with Disney's destruction of the public domain, support them
You mean, if we didn't have these copyrights that anyone could build a theme park of their favorite older characters? Hmm, this could be a great idea about limiting copyrights to increase capitalism and the free market.
Australia has thousands of stupid laws that the majority don't agree with, we have an effective way of dealing with these, ignore them.
Hey, we generally do that in the US. I'm pretty sure the UK and Canada does it as well. The thing isn't that you are ignoring some immoral law. The thing is "they" could pick you up and nail your ass at any time for not following any of a dozens of said immoral laws. The problem is that although the UK was outraged about the entire Big Brother concept from the book, the UK government thinks its a grand idea and is trying to get it rolled out in London as as politically possible. (It may take a generation or two but they are getting there.) I think the other "free" governments are taking a wait and see outlook on the London experiment before going out and copying them.
It's pretty hard to ignore immoral laws when ever square foot of land is recorded and monitored by living people.
The NSW Teachers Federation, which is a fairly powerful union here, has been vigorously fighting any attempts to rate the teachers performance and that of their students. Report cards for students are virtually meaningless nowdays and they have fought tooth and nail to prevent the return of the old system. I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites, but as someone who went through the NSW system, I think having a rating site is a great idea. Many of the teachers are less than competent to be teaching our children.
I'd never encountered this concept until I hit university. At the end of the semester, the department sec would hand out a teacher eval form for the students to fill out. She'd type them up and remove the names. The department head, dean of that college, and that professor generally where the only ones that saw the responses. I was pretty much a mandatory and expected thing at the end of the class. I would have loved for a similiar system in high school and also the ability to read the entire history of a professor's eval.
At the college level, you generally get to pick your professor except in some gen. ed. classes where the teacher is currently unassigned and tweleve people generally teach the class. In high school, you generaly have zero or little control over your teachers. I was in advanced and honors classes. I knew ahead of time which teachers would be teaching those honor/advanced subjects because my highschool generally only had one teacher in each subject area teach said honors classes. When you go the general ed route or take a PE, you get teacher lotto on the results.
My highschool had a good education atleast they had the one thing my college couldn't master down. Teachers that were fluent in english teaching all the subjects. CS and math majors should know what I'm talking about. I'd never had to deal with English a third or fourth language spoken with Chinese, Indian, or French accents before college.
The U.S. Navy doesn't send submarines out for 3-year deployments, although 1-year deployments have been done.
Sounds like it would be cheaper/safer if we did some test runs with various subs at 3 to 6 year deployments. (I'm assuming 3 years to Mars and 3 years back.) It would be much cheaper and safer than rushing forward trying to build a spaceship and do the same thing without some long term study on the effects to your average person. There is a part of me that thinks that every single person that wants to take a trip to Mars needs to spend 3 years on a sub with their team in a test run.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads. If the power gathered is then invested into a public transport system, then you'll end up having drivers subsidise public transport. The fuel savings with public transport may well offset the extra fuel burnt through the turbine induced drag.
I'd hope that the New Jersey drivers would sue the any government that tried this.
Um, what does the Navy do with subs? That's the basic policy of what they should try copying from because its the closest Earth based thing that we have to this.
I've loved reading slashdots ideas though. My favorite has to be the celibate space monks. I also like the send swingers up there idea, but I don't think that'd work. The concept behind "swinging" that I understand is not to have the same casual sex parnter for years at a time. Emotionaly attachments would develop for most people if you kept on having sex with the same people over and over for 3 years or so. I like the idea of making sure that they are all sterilized before hand or single sex crews rather than remotely risking space pregancy at the moment.
Of course if you were going to play Big Brother in Space, you might want to plan for a space pregnacy and all the associated hassles just for pontential PR benefits and boosting the public's interest in space.
The what to do about a dead bodies question is more interesting to me. The most politically pro PR wise is to bag 'em and bring the body back. I think that they should have options though. Some might want to be ejected into space, some might want to be burned and the ashes returned or scattered either on Earth, in space, or on Mars. Heck, if I died on my way to Mars there is a part of me that'd want to be buried or placed on Mars. Talk about being a future scientist's prize. If the idea of people the the future finding and studying your dead body freaks you out, I'd go with the burning option.
The idea of adding the dead body to food system isn't go as of yet. If we were colonizing space, or hand a small town floating around up there, yes that'd be what we'd want to do. On a mission of sending most likely under a dozen people? I think the idea or thought that you are eating food made from the remains of some one that you personally knew would freak people out. Scifish it is the best recycle the materials bet. We generally don't grow our food supply on top of our cementries though so why should we want them to suffer that?
The writer says that the Member of Parliament who broke the news (that International Olympic Committee chose VISA for IT security) doesn't see why the British Government should pay one billion pounds for security. Presumably because they didn't select the contractor. I don't see where you get the idea that Visa is paying for security - they are profiting from their investment in sponsoring the games by being paid to handle IT security.
I've been trying to re-read the article, but now its a register to read. From what I recall on my first read through though, the UK government wasn't paying any, but the security was going to cost billion. It did sound like Visa was paying that and the writer was wanting the UK to pay it. If it did say that the UK government was paying, then it wasn't very clear on that.
Sorry, but it said that Visa the sponser was providing security. That generally would mean that Visa were paying for said security. How I read it, was that the MP was complaining because the UK wasn't paying the billion for security and wasn't in charge of said security and was seriously pissed at that. I just kinda of blinked that the UK MP wanted to take on the cost and burden myself.
Come on that actually makes some sort of sense. Let the folks that are already paying for the Olympics be incharge of the security. Visa sounds like a good choice. After actually reading the article, I was surprised. They article writer wants the UK government to pay a billion or so for the Olympic security. Hmm, which would you rather have, your tax payer money going for the Olympics security, (which you may or may not actually care about), or a known sponser for the Olympics paying the bill?
Come on this guy lists two possible techs and then mentions that it's an existing Olympic rule that sponsers only need apply, which sounds like if they want their products in then they need to sponser the Olympics.
I'm sorry, but Visa is one of the few companies that I'd actually be willing to trust on security. Would you want Nokia or the London Public Transient Authority responsible for your security?
Which is why you don't work at MERL. In large, complex buildings, having only the signs that lead you out of the building in the quickest possible way would definitely be a benefit. Especially if, for example, one particular exit route was blocked for any reason.
Um, the building is on fire, or in an earth quake, flood, hurricane or what ever, it isn't working properly and is about to fall down. Are you going to trust that these signs will works as said? I doubt they'd work quite that well.
What we really need is inside of a federal holiday, a federal disaster drill day or week. We seperate the US into regions and drill the entire community into what to do if the most likely natural disasters happen there. Usually, hospitals, fire departments, police departments and the Office of Emergency Management have these sorts of drills every now and then, but only first responders are really drilled into what to do.
Do you remember in public school having fire and torando drills? Something like that on a city level. I don't have a clue how you'd drill a city like NY for everyone to just know the best way out of any given building, but that's really what we should do.
A recent report on the radio here said that out of about $840M donated by foreign countries to help the victims of Katrina...only about $40M of it was sent to the gulf south region. The rest...was funneled to other govt. programs or lost I guess.
So does that mean the US is now offically a third world country where foreign aid is channeled from aid to poor people/refugees to those with government connections to their overpriced pet projects?
Digg is pathetic. The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer. Whatever slashdot's shortcomings in other areas, at least they have paid editors who work at it like a real job. Reading the typical comments on digg, they all seem to be by high school students who think they know the secret to tabletop nuclear fusion, and they're all voting each other's posts up and down like crazy, based on nothing but their own biases. At least with slashdot moderation, posts are likely to be moderated by randomly chosen people who didn't get handed a license to go around voting their friends up and their enemies down.
This is the funnies thing that I've ever read. Just trade in slashdot for where you have digg and the same applies except we are more of a randomly chosen jury duty around here rather than anything like democracy. Actually, both forums could be discribed as angry mobs if you try to voice opinions against the majority. On slashdot, just come out in favor of closed source, Microsoft, DRM, copyrights, censorship, ID, or the police or the government (doesn't matter which police or which government) to get modded down. Group think is alive and well in both forums.
I don't even know what a "ribbon" is, but I'm sure that I'll hate that too.
Hey, the ribbon will be your new best friend. Unlike clippy and all that help crap, the ribbon is just there and has everything in only three rows. I've used it on 15" lcds and think that it takes up too much room on that sized monitor. On a 18-19" LCD though it is great.
What will you hate about the ribbon? That your boss or your top 5 user friends will now be finding crap that was artfully hidden behind 4-5 menus in previous verions. MS has moved stuff. This is annoying and will be for every former Office user. The ribbon is one of the few things that actually does what it is meant to. It isn't personlized and doesn't rearrange itself automagically ever time you start. It has all these neat features right there. That's why you'll love/hate this new ribbon thingy. Heck, you ought to love the ribbon thingy just because that don't have all those annoying task panes to the sides.
The only problems my wife really ran into is that there isn't an obvious either it was print or print preview on the toolbar I don't remember at the moment. Oh, it took my wife and I awhile to figure out that MS Office icon in the upper left hand corner could be clicked to open the file menu. If it took computer savvy people awhile to figure that one out, how long would it take for people that don't like computers to figure that one out?
Thus putting you somewhere near the 99th percentile of the general pool of home PC purchasers. For everyone else, they won't even notice the difference. That's one reason why HP has been kicking Dell's ass in the home pc market recently.
Couldn't it be more along the lines of the Hp/Compaq at Walmart/Best Buy/Office Depot that is doing it? My mom bought an HP at walmart on sale for $450. I recently assisted someone buying a Compaq desktop for $700 out there. I didn't notice any Dell brand desktops or laptops in stores. Some people make impluse computer purchases and want the computer that second after picking it out. Dell doesn't have an option in the stores, so isn't even considered in this market. I'd bet Toshiba is leading against Dell in this market simply because I see Toshiba laptops in all these stores as well. If you see, Compaq/Toshiba every day in your shopping, but only hear about or see Dell on TV ads, which would you think that your average shopper would just pickout to buy?
I think that we need more of those sorts of classes...Honors (usually you could get AP credit and weighted), advanced (weighted normally), regular, and remedial.
Thus you would create a system which would become a game. Legislators and bureaucrats would create policies to favor rich/politically targeted kids to forward an agenda. Those who actually worked for the grades would be displaced by those who gamed the system better.
Nah, it's more like those that don't care about school or just aren't good at a subject get into regular classes. This leaves those with the determination and skills in the advanced and honors classes. The important thing is making sure that local rich VIP can't pull strings to get their remedial kid into the honors classes. If the kid has any talent or their parents actually push them, most teachers will try to get those students boosted into the advanced/honors classes ASAP. Life is unfair and school can be treated as a game. It is better to game it to the max than be used by it. One of the reason's that the universities and highschools really don't care about this issue is taht local rich VIP kid that could barely keep up in remedial classes has to take 2-3 remedial college classes until they pass with an acceptable grade. The local rich VIP's kid has to be a very rich statewide VIP's kid to get special treatment at the university level, but it still happens.
How many people outside of fields like engineering and other math-specialty careers even need to be able to do much beyond the basic four functions anyway? Sure, it'd be nice to have a general populace well-versed in all subjects, but at this point in time I think that's little more than wishful thinking.
I just wish that we could drop those lit and comp requirements. It's not like we need to know who to read classical lit or write. We need to learn who and how to properly bitch to in order for our environment to be updated to our specs. I remember my lit professor saying that he wouldn't accept BS on his essays questions when 98% of what came out of his mouth was BS. His class was a BS general ed requirement and I just did what had to be done in order to pass it. I read scifiction which stretchs my mind more than anything he had us read.
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses. ...
The 4.0 student who took shop as his electives is still in my hometown working on cars possibly missing a finger. I'm working half way across the country on computer systems for probably better pay. Ironically, in the end the only thing that matters is if you're happy.
The more that I find out about how other areas work, the more pleased that I am with my highschool education. Honors classes were weighted so if you made straight Bs in the honors classes those counted as As. Some one that didn't take Honors English, World History, and Math didn't stand a chance of making it in the top 50 at my HS. I think that we need more of those sorts of classes. Basically we had Honors (usually you could get AP credit and weighted), advanced (weighted normally), regular, and remidal. Everyone that was going to college was either in Honors or advanced classes and there weren't too many people holding the entire class up. Actually, the first week of classes were devoted to ensuring those folks got filtered into the regular classes.
Ok. It's a CD size, why is their title wiki on DVD? Actually, I was looking for something like this just a few months ago. At that time, if you wanted an offline copy of wikipedia, you had to download something like 80GB and figure out how to install/run the wikipedia backend.
I think the folks behind this project just don't get what wikipedia is best used for. It sounds like they are trying to release the best fact checked copy that they can within those subjects. Um, that's not what I use wikipedia for. I use it to quickly figure out who this guy is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen or immediate trivia that in 5 minutes I could care less about, but I just would like a vague idea of who the guy is and such. Wikipedia is great for fast trivia. I bet you most of the articles that I look up won't be on this CD because those that are making this want wikipedia to be like a book reference and all the junk that I want researched would be filtered out. Oh well, maybe it would be useful for the kids to look through.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan
I clicked your link, but it wasn't in english. For those, that only know english use wikipeida.
I belive that one reason is that scientists are still trying to defeat, with evidence and reason, the religious fundamentalists who believe we are the only "intelligent" life in the Universe, and on the only planet that supports life. On this argument, which I personally doubt, conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
I don't put much stock into either ID or evolution or climate change, but it's this sort of mindset that sets folks into disbeliefing any thing that scientists say that is just theory. It's this sort of mindset that makes it easily believable that the entire field of global climate change is politically backed just to make wide spread social changes. Science needs to be objective and not just research into areas to piss off the majority of global religions and those that belief in them. I think that's the main reason that they like bringing up evolution and the big bang just to piss off our existing religions. That's not how science should work.
Drop the Roman Numbers already! I actually would like "sequels" and such for FF. What would I really like? No more end of the word/got to save the entire world quests. This is something that the FF series sucks at. Each of them starts with a small group that should just be happy to survive on their own adventures. And theses small groups level up and take down empires. And all tech cultures are evil because they pollute and trees and mana are automatically good.
Just once, I'd like a FF game where you were from the techy culture and they were the good guys, fighting against the evil Gaia/Zerg Living Planet Monsters. I really like playing around in the FF worlds that last on FFXII was really fun, but I could do without their overwhelming plot. Why can't they have a world with more city states and wars and such. There are tons of things that could make an interesting world besides saving the world from the evil menace. How about us getting to be the evil menace for a change? I wasn't as thrilled with FFXII after just playing Radatia story and Dragon Quest 8. Those worlds were just more fun to be in and watch than FFXII. FFXII was like most of the background characters were just copied and pasted and there were tons of them with a one or two dialog sentences. Why was this disappointing? Because although Radiata Stories sucked on some of the graphics, the level of detail in the characters and where you could follow them on their day and night cycles rocked. (And you could follow the characters around and get different responses instead of the same phrase over and over again.) I was expecting FFXII to out do that. It's like they only tried outdoing the previous FF games and not borrowing what was fun from other RPGs.
Using the term "cultural deficit" doesn't seem quite right -- it implies that the USA has a cultural surplus.
What's funny is that Canada actually buys this so called cultural surplus!
I have a friend who immigrated from Peru to the US. She is a staunchly anti-Bush person and considers him an overreaching warmongerer who wishes he was a dictator and is taking steps in that direction. She's a major civil liberties and human rights advocate. Yet, in Peru, she was a supporter of hardline dictator Alberto Fujimori. Knowing just these two facts.
Um, sounds like your friend wants to live in a police state. I advise you to lobby her to return to Peru rather than trying to reform the US into Peru.