That's really not true. a good deal of money is funneled into Massachusetts through the Federal government for all sorts of wacky things, and it certainly isn't because this state lacks money to for things itself (we have the second highest per capita income along with a relatively high tax rate... which I love saying just because it frustrates right-wingers trying to justify how that makes sense without blowing their own theories completely out of the water) or we have such an enormous population. It's because they actually do what Senators are supposed to do, and represent the interests of their state.
Yeah, it really frustrates folks that you can manage to vote in and rig to have the rest of the nation to have higher tax rates to support your states toys. If you want to have toys in your state, have it funded at the state level. There are a few things that other states do what in your state though and will vote to build.
AR wouldn't ever build highways if it was up to it. There is just too much land and not enough population base to support those things all over properly. Now, it really helps the rest of the nation to be able to drive through Arkansas rather than around it. I actually wonder some times how much rail roads or boats would have been used if we just didn't have a national highway system. Well, the point is things that really indirect benefit US as well we will support. Things like Ports we do support because they increase trade for everyone.
I'm so glad that the US has basically an internal free trade zone that the feds or states can't really screw up too much anyway.
We should just limit bills to 10 pages. If it can't be said in 10 pages, it needs to be broken up into smaller chunks.
Are you kidding me? 10 sentences with word count limits. We should also have a max limit of number of bills that congress is allowed to run by. That number should be 1 publishable and readable sized book. Say 300-500 pages for every federal US bill that congress wants to operate by. If they don't all fit down into that size, then they need to start removing crap until it fits. Then you need to require the entire 300-500 page novel of bills to be read and signed that they understood it by anyone who wants to run for federal office. Think of it as the paper work reading torture test for running for office.
Obama says "figure out what is wrong, and solve that". If a government program sucks, kill it. If it is a good program but badly managed, fix the management. If it is a good program and well managed, reward it.
Regan's entire argument was wrong. The entire argument was an excuse and a rationalization for poorly managed government. "Make something smaller" is a solution to specific problems, not a solution to all problems. The goal is to make the government work for the people, not make it bigger or smaller. If the government works well, who cares what the size is!
You don't get it do you? I couldn't care less if Obama or Bush was the worst elected tyrant that beat Hilter, Stalin, and others for evil that they've passed, as long as the size of the government is that it's impossible for them to carry out any evil programs! What's the ideal size of the federal government? x number of judges, let's say 10 including staff in the white house, 2 senators per state, and 435 house reps. That's about 565 people only that the federal government needs to employ.
Let's get rid of NASA, DOD, Health and Human services, and the SSA. We've just stopped spending 20+600+600+600 billion dollars. Couldn't you think of better uses of tax money closer to home?
Actually it isn't. You don't judge a book by its size, do you? You don't judge how good a computer is based on its size, do you? No. You judge them based on how well they do their job, not based on their physical makeup.
Regan was wrong. Size doesn't matter. It is how well you do the job that matters.
Go read Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. Afterwords read any other fantasy trilogy and try to say that size doesn't matter that's its all about quality or doing the job. Just try to say it without choking.
Oh, we do judge computers on size and speed. My dad asked what would be good for a tower replacement for mom. I checked out office depot, staples, and best buy just to see what the current low end $400-600 was. I was stunned to find out for $500 that you can get 3GB RAM, 320 GB HD, DVD burner, and it was quad core. Size and speed does sell computers. I almost ran out and bought one.
Next you are going to say that we don't judge mates on how they look, but strictly on how well they do their jobs. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader to enlighten him on that on.
I've always wondered why proponents of term limits even bother. Even if we change the faces, we don't know what they're up to or who they're working for. Everything term limit proponents hope to gain by term limits can be achieved, and more, by simply requiring every public act of elected officials to be a matter of conveniently accessible public record. Until that happens we aren't electing public officials, we're electing rulers.
I came across this site http://thirty-thousand.org/ and had a good laugh. Basically they want one house rep per 30,000 citizens. It comes out to something around 6,000 house reps. Basically about the time of WWI the house froze the number of reps and it's been capped at 435 ever since then. The logic of it is that 6,000 house reps are harder to nationally lobby. They wouldn't have to have massive funds or campaigns to be elected. They don't have to represent the entire state either.
Given cities or small towns could basically get their guy elected into a house rep slot. Huckabee would easily swing Texarkana and Miller county in general for a house rep slot. It would be much more difficult for him to get the entire state or selected major state cities behind him. Basically their other big complaint is that the only reason that the house needs such large staffs is because their congressional districts are so large. If they were only 30,000, one person should be able to manage that. Plus most house stuff gets done in various subcommittees.
After reading some it, it does make sense. Why have a small handful of folks represent your state when you could have more? O.k. it would end up the population of a small town, but that's even better. That means nothing gets passed if not a large part of the country wants it.
The thought might be good. But what percentage of our taxes will be listed as "other" for the NSA, CIA, classified Defense, State and God knows what? On the other hand, if Americans realize how much is "other", it could be an eye-opener. People will have more to complain about than welfare mothers and mass transit.
Scariest site on the net. After viewing that, I thought wouldn't it be great if we could tell each of those departments that they are getting only $1 billion next year and until the debt is paid off. All the other billions would to straight to paying off the national debt. Foreign relations would improve if we just cut our military budget. Call them home and give them only a $1 billion in funding to play around with. Yeah, it'd never pass, but we'd be free to spend that money other places after only 10 years or so. (I doubt it would really take that long to pay it off, but the problem is each government not even bothering to try or sticking with a plan.)
Letting random internet users vote on each line item would change the power balance in government. It would let a non representative sample of people influence the government "outside" the house or senate. On the surface, the idea of letting internet users "vote" on bills sounds good, but there would be a lot of unintended consequences. You'd have to re-balance a lot of how government operates before you let people vote digg-style on legislation.
Hmm, I don't think digg style or even slashdot style would be the best. I think each user needs to login and put in their zip code so the site could determine who the heck their representative is. Then the representative for your state will only see the stuff modded up by those that they are supposed to represent.
Everyone that doesn't post a zip, address, or a representative under their profile could be treated one of two ways. First and simplest by the reps treat them all as a national A/C with the min of base modding allowed. The second is to filter out all their mods and such and only show them as unverified national views at the national level. As far as the house cares, they can damn near ignore that. It's who they are supposed to be representing that they have to try to please not the national folks. (Now, if the national thing was a like a page brief and his state brief was ten pages, the rep might look at both esp the shorter one.)
Don't bug them, just ask them how much they are paying for dailup. I paid about $20 a month for dailup for what seems like forever. (It varied from ISP to ISP from $18 to $25.) Now about a year ago we got DSL through our land line provider. Why? Because it cost about $20 a month. O.k. It's been from $20-25, but that's much better than early broadband prices. We tried it, and much of the internet is far more usable now. I sometimes talk with folks at work about this. Far more non-computer people there have had broadband for years now because of the price not the speed. I got it because the price was about the same as dial up and the speed was more than 10x.
I say don't push anyone on this. If they've got dail up, just ask if they even know how much broad band in their area costs. Many will be like me and switch since hey its close to what we are paying now, but higher speeds!;)
Oh I wonder if they are using this to reduce the pricing of MS licenses or if they really thought about it? If they really thought about it, they could just translate every out of english into russian and recompile everything. That the US uses MS Windows is the biggest reason for Russia to chose to use anything else. Preferably they want a domestic Russian company being MS or IBM. They don't want to clone windows or linux. They want their own Russian developed thing.
I'd be mixed. I think that's something that Russia, China, India and the EU should each push for themselves. They should each produce a national open source OS/suite of programs for their respective countries. Think this is sort of like the space race except more easily viewable by citizens that hey this is how we are ahead of them.
This is more along the lines of hey our citizens have a better X than you. Well, currently the world can say that they've bought a version of Windows or work on a linux thing. If your country has thousands of IT grads that you need to give busy work to, what better long term project than a national OS + apps? It's not like they'll just tell them to work on a national open source health information database + clients.;)
It starts off with what first appears a nuclear level explosion without any radiation or EMP at a major university. It's quickly determined that it wasn't terrorists or nuclear research. So WTH did the guy do to not only blow up the university but a good chuck of the nearby city as well?
The first chapters of getting a multiple PHd guy in to look at it were pretty much all. "This shouldn't be possible by what we we know!"
I'll agree that comic rays are most likely safe. It's obvious that Earth or the Sun can handle them. It isn't really obvious at all WTH this stuff will do. Sort of reminds me of the early nuclear experiments. They were worried about igniting Earth's atmosphere on fire with the first couple of tests and not being able to stop it. Sort of like a Perry Rhodan's Arkon Bomb. (That thing was a fictional bomb that once set off on a planet would start an unstoppable nuclear chain reaction in everything above atomic number 12.)
When you've only got one planet, and no means of escape, you shouldn't be doing some tests there. There are some tests that we'd most likely rather be held on Pluto or in the next solar system. The problem is that its far easier to worry about this stuff than to know one way or another if you even need to worry about it.
I'm sure that if we were an FTL species looking at others that we'd find many "oops" worlds where civs higher than our wiped themselves out by unexplainable means. Problem being is that we don't know what "oops" tech lines to really avoid. (We'd still research them though. You know we would.)
They could host the videos themselves, use another site that doesn't use cookies, or use an alternative version of YouTube's creation that would not use cookies. There are lots of options, this is simply the easiest.
Well, it would cost money for them to replicate YouTube just for government stuff. It's much easier just to use the "free" YouTube service for that. Now if the free service has tracking cookies, well either you decide it wasn't that big of a deal in the first place or stop posting videos. Since everyone seems to really like the videos, and most folks ignore or delete cookies that they don't like; they've decided to live with it.
That's like complaining that google, slashdot, or wikipedia gave you cookies. I mean come on if you use the internet, you'll get cooties, um cookies.
From a parent's perspective of keeping their kids out of trouble, that makes perfect sense. But you can go too far. *Most* kids left to their own devices would party too much, so society and parents try to discourage that. But there are a minority of kids (probably well represented on/.) who given the choice would spend almost all their time reading or studying or playing video games or other solitary activities. These kids should actually be nudged toward hanging out with friends and going to parties and staying out too late, because not doing those things means they miss out on developing social skills that are very important, both professionally and in their personal lives.
Yes, I'm speaking from experience.
I find this funny. My wife has never really attended a real party with alcohol in her life. To be honest, I've only really attended two such events myself. Most of the events were alcohol was served was a formal thing and "being drunk" was very frowned on there. My wife did have parties of the same 4-6 people. Her parents didn't worry about them drinking, smoking, or sex because the only one of those that would have tempted them was sex and well (they make sibling/cousin jokes if you start doing it within those circles so that's also avoided. What did they do? She and the girls would sit around and talk while watching her brother and his friends play video games.
Heck, matches her married life rather well. I play video games with the kids, and she watches or reads bible stuff.
If anything, I'd have been the one that would have liked to do more partying, but really I hate smokers with a passion, (both my brothers and most of their friends fall into that camp.) and dislike drunks. Sex was or female interaction was the only thing that really tempted me. I get far more of that being married than I ever did HS or college partying though. (Well let's rephrase that. I get sex atleast once a week being married. I never had sex result from partying in HS or college so marriage out classes that for sex.)
my POV is this: in the lunch buffet that is life, i want to try all the tasty looking things. its that simple. so while you think public school + church + family = fulfilling life (or existence), i think the opposite
Hey, it was through public school + church + family that I learned that all those apparently tasty looking things are "bad for you."
i worry that the existential realization will haunt your kids as they realize that there is much much more to life then being a good kid or pleasing god.
I said that I was dragged to church. I hated it. I don't go now. While my wife takes the kids Wednesdays and Sundays, I don't go. I'll wait until they hit college to really worry about it one way or another. We live in the south. They are going to have to learn how to live a sane life around everyone else that is bible thumping. It's a survival skill. The two big things that I learned in church: God hates sin, which is anything God doesn't like. The other is that it generally doesn't really matter if you believe as long as you you attend or appear to attend a church. Then everyone will leave you alone.
I've always thought of it like joining a gang except death releases you from being in a gang. Churches want a cut of your income now and your life forever after.
Starting in High School we were taught never to do research off an encyclopedia. You use it to get a general idea about the topic which will help guide you to more appropriate sources for your research. Britannica has been putting themselves on the high ground when they really weren't so high up. While Britannnica may have better researched articles, however Wikipedia for the most part does a good job at what encyclopedias are good for. A way to get a basic understanding of the topic so you then can go further in and do some real research.
I'm just waiting for schools be it junior, high or college to assign "wikipedia papers" as assignments. You could do it a variety of ways. I'd give each student a randomly generated article, then have them "grade it." Explain what's wrong with it in content, citations, grammar. Then I'd assign the student's to fix everything that they've ID'd as wrong with the given article. I'd then have students review and grade each others articles. You'd start of with existing known good articles and then you'd eventually have them build up to writing full articles on randomly assigned topics.
The educational value of this isn't about improving wikipedia at all. It's about educating students to ID poorly written/researched work, fix it, and write their own fairly decently researched "papers"/articles. Using wikipedia as a classroom tool though helps in several things. They actually learn through experience that not everything written in wikipedia is holy writ "right," and that other sources have the same sort of flaws. They then become used to improving stuff out of habit.
Long term it does end up improving wikipedia and it becomes more and more difficult to find grammer or factual mistakes.
In 1945 alone Hanford released over 500,000 curies of radioactive iodine into the air. Three Mile Island, by comparison, released about 20 curies by accident and everyone freaked out.
Well duh. We happen to smart enough to regulate power producers. We haven't yet learned to be smart enough to regulate trash folks though. This applies to every form of power though not just nuclear.;)
The biggest issue, it seems to me, is that people who spend a lot of time playing video games generally lack social skills. While everyone else was learning how to relate to the world, video game players were learning how to relate to video games.
Those who play games don't realize that they are socially backward because they are socially backward.
As I parent and actually remembering my teenage years that's a good thing. Why? Because if they are at home watching TV or playing video games, I know exactly where they are, what they are doing, and what they aren't doing. During my teenage years those "not socially backward" kids as you would put them would be drinking, smoking, having sex, or sometimes partying. So I'd much rather my kids be "socially backward" in that respect. My wife and I don't drink or smoke, and we close and lock the door when we have sex. What other good example do we have to be to our kids?
My kids go to public school and get dragged to church by the wife. It's how I grew up. Why shouldn't that be enough outside the family socialization?
The whole thing is pointless - why not just put 64GBs of ram in your PC and let it fill it up with disk cache. This makes no sense. If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides. The data is vulnerable, it's massively expensive and an inefficient use of the RAM modules. Madness.
Well, from everything on this product that slashdot has mentioned, just sticking RAM on a motherboard would be a better solution. It's not always the best though.
I've wanted one of these things for awhile: http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Storage-Devices/CENATEK-Rocket-Drive-SSD/ But could never justify the cost to myself. Were real RAM drives comes into their stride is any app that is HD I/O bound gets hugely speed up. You've also got to consider that this stuff is scaled down industrial stuff. I'd glance at the real 64 GB RAM disk and the all cost around 40-50K. They weren't for joe slashdot home user unless you had a few tens of K you wanted to spend. Now the real stuff had a builtin HD that the RAM was mirrored and it wasn't that difficult for them to convince business users to use a good UPS on the thing. You wouldn't believe the differences sticking any DB app on one of these things makes. Trust me you know when you really need one of these.
Now where Cenatek came along they tried to cut the cost for a PCI plugin board to $500-600 and then charged you a bit for the different amounts of RAM you'd put in their device. Sure it had to be externally powered or go dead. That's a draw back. But it did do "cheaply" what the real RAM drives did for the big boys. So if you really could afford it, you could stick your OS and favorite apps on there and notice a very responsive increase. They really started selling that thing somewhere between Win2000-WinXP when anything over 1 GB was rarely seen in a desktop. (It was easier adding a PCI card with 4 GB RAM than changing mother boards.)
Now a days with 3-4 GBs in "budget" desktops, I'd want a 64 or 128 GB RAM drive, but I'm also kinda like you, if I had the money I'd most likely see more immediate bang for the buck just adding system RAM. You do see really big increases though in real RAM drives. Then again how many mother boards do you see that'll let you plug in 64 GB of RAM? Actually, I think that some of this is just a stop gap especially at any individually affordable price. Just wait until you see 128 GB RAM in the $200 walmart special desktop.
The difficult part is to change the perception of open source from the one like yours "Everything is free as in Beer and the brewer goes broke" to "Everything is free as in speech and you get paid for the quality and sustainability of your work". I wouldn't mind having companies go broke that re-release the same product year after year with little to no improvements. If there are other companies that do the job better and improve over time I guess it would only be fair. The current market is based on monopolism and power struggle between the monopolies. That's what has to change for FOSS to succeed and we need to start in the heads.
Nah people understand pay for what you want. People understand "free" as in some one else paid for what they wanted and are giving away freebies that we may not want/need. People can't wrap their heads around its free/open, but you still want me to pay for it, and those that make similar products as yours can use the work with and you want me to agree to give way what I've funded you to develop so those that are in my industry get it for free to them? Trying to explain it gets a "are you insane?" response.
My landlord was cleaning house once for a dinner party they were having, and running short of one type of cleaner he added another (Clorox) to the bucket. We ran around the house opening all the windows (Germany in February is rather cold). Don't think "everyone knows". What "everyone knows" will get someone killed.
I hate to be cruel to your real world example, but that's sort of why darwin awards where invented. It's not that its impossible or unlikely for people to do bad or stupid things with household chemicals. It's that 100's of millions of people have no problem following the simple directions on the most of the products and never ever think of combining/mixing things together and somehow live. That's why the 10-100 people a year that do screw up and maybe get sent to the hospital or die make major news or get labeled with titles such as darwin award.
It's like if some one died or got sent the hospital by just walking down a side walk while chewing gum and/or talking on cell phone. I mean come on we do things like that every single day. Some one out there is the statistic that gets killed by that stray car or bike, it takes real talent to do a heart attack or something and just die during a normal routine. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's just unlikely or news worthy when put in funny situations.
They want, for example, a firewall system for their OS. So they write one. Their need sated, they let people have it for free. It costs them nothing to do so (since their need was for a firewall and they paid for it by writing one). It costs no more to let people have it than to keep it secret.
Other people want a firewall that works with a VPN. So they take the free firewall the others made and add VPN knowledge to it. Their need sated and the cost paid for (by their time) and the benefit offsetting that cost (having a firewall that knows about VPNs) they give it to others to use.
The first group now has a better firewall and didn't have to pay for it.
Truly free.
You seem to be a democrat. I'll explain it. Some one not you was forced to spend their resources to develop said product. Two people/entities in your example paid for work or had their in house guys develop the app and release it. Now in both cases the entities still had to pay those developers to write code. Even if I were a third party, and to me I never paid a cent to it, but use it, the software isn't totally free. Some one (not you) paid for it. It's like the platform give everyone the toys that they want and ignore where the resources to pay for it actually come from. I guess lots of people like getting stuff "for free" when they aren't the ones that are being forced to pay for it. Sooner or later everything rolls around and you'll have to pay for it if you need/want anything done.
The number 1 spy in America IS Chinese. They are VERY active. Nearly all of the spies that we have caught over the last 20 years, have been Chinese that are working in DOD or intel jobs who then send back data to mainland. The same is true in Canada, Australia, EU, and I suspect, Russia. Any place that has more advanced military secrets is being actively infiltrated.
Worse, we are not just sending our goods over there and having them come back loaded with virus, we continue to do so even KNOWING this. You may not have liked the tone of the parent, but it was still accurate.
At last count there were something like over a billion chinese. There were around 350 million US citizens the last time I bothered to check. Do you seriously expect either country to stop doing business with each other if say around 10K of each group are spies spying on every foreign country that they can? Heck, we'd still trade with each other if we were in any state short of total war with each other.
Actually, I think pretty much all of us that have grown up with pervasive advertising have an internal trip switch these days. It's a sad fact, but the way to keep sane in the modern (urban) environment is to selectively ignore most of the world around you.
Advertisers look for ever more invasive ways to get our attention, and then wonder why advertising has less and less effect. it's because we hate you and have learned to ignore you to the extent we don't even realise you're there half the time.
Reminds me sort of at college to. I mean walk down any given hall way and you'd have all sorts of crap posted by various professor and such on each wall. Now the only board that we'd all stop and spend 30 seconds reading over was just a general post it board outside of the cross roads to several buildings. It was where students posted things like used books for sell or looking for a roommate or party at such and such. What format where they generally in? One sheet of paper with a single large header, 2-3 paragraphs stating what the heck it was about, then phone number/address/time ribbons along the bottom or around the entire edges for you to tear off and take the contact info with you.
This Whitehouse Administration is seeking a x86-64 64 bit computer operating system (OS) that is free of cumbersome and expensive licensing issues, can be secured and is not vulnerable to Windows security flaws, and which the Whitehouse Administration IT department can view, modify, and re-issue the source code in compiled form.....
Well, open source generally isn't free. Some one else generally pays for it somewhere. I do think that it is 30-40 years past to do this though. The government "pays" for tons of software development just for it. There should be a push from top down that every spec that the feds push out to contractors makes the source, apis, file formats, all open as far as the government is concerned. If they pay your company 10 million and they turn in a half assed product, well instead of spending another $30 million at the same place trying to fix things, you could have other contractors fix it in theory.
The government is still paying for development to be done somewhere by some one, but this time it knows to either own or open up the code, file formats, and APIs needed to get multiple contractors to work on it without being tied to any of them. That's the real benefit of open source to government. Of course, if the feds or states really wanted to be nasty or evil, they could just pass a law that said any software that the government runs has to turn over the source and be modifiable by the government. If the government really wants something, they can and will use eminent domain to take it away from those that currently "own" it.
Huh? Could a black guy have been elected in the 60s? No. Can a black guy be elected now? Yes. That, my friend, is a demonstrable improvement.
Um, I don't really count him as black though. Esp after a few of the percentages of how black he is got out. I count him as slightly tanned at most.
My big issue is all the look at us because we elected a black guy crap. I'm sorry, but we aren't any where we need to be if this guy or a woman of any color or background sparks this much news and most of the news is about the first person of this background look at how great and open we are BS.
We'd be there if he could win or lose without stating crap about race anywhere when running. This election has actually been more racially charged due to all the look at the black guy we are electing crap than anything else. If this guy could be elected and no one makes a single remark on his background because his race/church wasn't an issue than we'd be where ever there is supposed to be.
I don't think we really want to go there though. We want to make value judgments based on his culture, race, education, and church on if we are going to vote for him or not. This just says more of the obvious about us though.
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That's really not true. a good deal of money is funneled into Massachusetts through the Federal government for all sorts of wacky things, and it certainly isn't because this state lacks money to for things itself (we have the second highest per capita income along with a relatively high tax rate... which I love saying just because it frustrates right-wingers trying to justify how that makes sense without blowing their own theories completely out of the water) or we have such an enormous population. It's because they actually do what Senators are supposed to do, and represent the interests of their state.
Yeah, it really frustrates folks that you can manage to vote in and rig to have the rest of the nation to have higher tax rates to support your states toys. If you want to have toys in your state, have it funded at the state level. There are a few things that other states do what in your state though and will vote to build.
AR wouldn't ever build highways if it was up to it. There is just too much land and not enough population base to support those things all over properly. Now, it really helps the rest of the nation to be able to drive through Arkansas rather than around it. I actually wonder some times how much rail roads or boats would have been used if we just didn't have a national highway system. Well, the point is things that really indirect benefit US as well we will support. Things like Ports we do support because they increase trade for everyone.
I'm so glad that the US has basically an internal free trade zone that the feds or states can't really screw up too much anyway.
We should just limit bills to 10 pages. If it can't be said in 10 pages, it needs to be broken up into smaller chunks.
Are you kidding me? 10 sentences with word count limits. We should also have a max limit of number of bills that congress is allowed to run by. That number should be 1 publishable and readable sized book. Say 300-500 pages for every federal US bill that congress wants to operate by. If they don't all fit down into that size, then they need to start removing crap until it fits. Then you need to require the entire 300-500 page novel of bills to be read and signed that they understood it by anyone who wants to run for federal office. Think of it as the paper work reading torture test for running for office.
Obama says "figure out what is wrong, and solve that". If a government program sucks, kill it. If it is a good program but badly managed, fix the management. If it is a good program and well managed, reward it.
Regan's entire argument was wrong. The entire argument was an excuse and a rationalization for poorly managed government. "Make something smaller" is a solution to specific problems, not a solution to all problems. The goal is to make the government work for the people, not make it bigger or smaller. If the government works well, who cares what the size is!
You don't get it do you? I couldn't care less if Obama or Bush was the worst elected tyrant that beat Hilter, Stalin, and others for evil that they've passed, as long as the size of the government is that it's impossible for them to carry out any evil programs! What's the ideal size of the federal government? x number of judges, let's say 10 including staff in the white house, 2 senators per state, and 435 house reps. That's about 565 people only that the federal government needs to employ.
Let's get rid of NASA, DOD, Health and Human services, and the SSA. We've just stopped spending 20+600+600+600 billion dollars. Couldn't you think of better uses of tax money closer to home?
Actually it isn't. You don't judge a book by its size, do you? You don't judge how good a computer is based on its size, do you? No. You judge them based on how well they do their job, not based on their physical makeup.
Regan was wrong. Size doesn't matter. It is how well you do the job that matters.
Go read Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. Afterwords read any other fantasy trilogy and try to say that size doesn't matter that's its all about quality or doing the job. Just try to say it without choking.
Oh, we do judge computers on size and speed. My dad asked what would be good for a tower replacement for mom. I checked out office depot, staples, and best buy just to see what the current low end $400-600 was. I was stunned to find out for $500 that you can get 3GB RAM, 320 GB HD, DVD burner, and it was quad core. Size and speed does sell computers. I almost ran out and bought one.
Next you are going to say that we don't judge mates on how they look, but strictly on how well they do their jobs. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader to enlighten him on that on.
I've always wondered why proponents of term limits even bother. Even if we change the faces, we don't know what they're up to or who they're working for. Everything term limit proponents hope to gain by term limits can be achieved, and more, by simply requiring every public act of elected officials to be a matter of conveniently accessible public record. Until that happens we aren't electing public officials, we're electing rulers.
I came across this site http://thirty-thousand.org/ and had a good laugh. Basically they want one house rep per 30,000 citizens. It comes out to something around 6,000 house reps. Basically about the time of WWI the house froze the number of reps and it's been capped at 435 ever since then. The logic of it is that 6,000 house reps are harder to nationally lobby. They wouldn't have to have massive funds or campaigns to be elected. They don't have to represent the entire state either.
Given cities or small towns could basically get their guy elected into a house rep slot. Huckabee would easily swing Texarkana and Miller county in general for a house rep slot. It would be much more difficult for him to get the entire state or selected major state cities behind him. Basically their other big complaint is that the only reason that the house needs such large staffs is because their congressional districts are so large. If they were only 30,000, one person should be able to manage that. Plus most house stuff gets done in various subcommittees.
After reading some it, it does make sense. Why have a small handful of folks represent your state when you could have more? O.k. it would end up the population of a small town, but that's even better. That means nothing gets passed if not a large part of the country wants it.
The thought might be good. But what percentage of our taxes will be listed as "other" for the NSA, CIA, classified Defense, State and God knows what?
On the other hand, if Americans realize how much is "other", it could be an eye-opener. People will have more to complain about than welfare mothers and mass transit.
http://www.federalbudget.com/
Scariest site on the net. After viewing that, I thought wouldn't it be great if we could tell each of those departments that they are getting only $1 billion next year and until the debt is paid off. All the other billions would to straight to paying off the national debt. Foreign relations would improve if we just cut our military budget. Call them home and give them only a $1 billion in funding to play around with. Yeah, it'd never pass, but we'd be free to spend that money other places after only 10 years or so. (I doubt it would really take that long to pay it off, but the problem is each government not even bothering to try or sticking with a plan.)
Letting random internet users vote on each line item would change the power balance in government. It would let a non representative sample of people influence the government "outside" the house or senate. On the surface, the idea of letting internet users "vote" on bills sounds good, but there would be a lot of unintended consequences. You'd have to re-balance a lot of how government operates before you let people vote digg-style on legislation.
Hmm, I don't think digg style or even slashdot style would be the best. I think each user needs to login and put in their zip code so the site could determine who the heck their representative is. Then the representative for your state will only see the stuff modded up by those that they are supposed to represent.
Everyone that doesn't post a zip, address, or a representative under their profile could be treated one of two ways. First and simplest by the reps treat them all as a national A/C with the min of base modding allowed. The second is to filter out all their mods and such and only show them as unverified national views at the national level. As far as the house cares, they can damn near ignore that. It's who they are supposed to be representing that they have to try to please not the national folks. (Now, if the national thing was a like a page brief and his state brief was ten pages, the rep might look at both esp the shorter one.)
Don't bug them, just ask them how much they are paying for dailup. I paid about $20 a month for dailup for what seems like forever. (It varied from ISP to ISP from $18 to $25.) Now about a year ago we got DSL through our land line provider. Why? Because it cost about $20 a month. O.k. It's been from $20-25, but that's much better than early broadband prices. We tried it, and much of the internet is far more usable now. I sometimes talk with folks at work about this. Far more non-computer people there have had broadband for years now because of the price not the speed. I got it because the price was about the same as dial up and the speed was more than 10x.
I say don't push anyone on this. If they've got dail up, just ask if they even know how much broad band in their area costs. Many will be like me and switch since hey its close to what we are paying now, but higher speeds! ;)
Oh I wonder if they are using this to reduce the pricing of MS licenses or if they really thought about it? If they really thought about it, they could just translate every out of english into russian and recompile everything. That the US uses MS Windows is the biggest reason for Russia to chose to use anything else. Preferably they want a domestic Russian company being MS or IBM. They don't want to clone windows or linux. They want their own Russian developed thing.
I'd be mixed. I think that's something that Russia, China, India and the EU should each push for themselves. They should each produce a national open source OS/suite of programs for their respective countries. Think this is sort of like the space race except more easily viewable by citizens that hey this is how we are ahead of them.
This is more along the lines of hey our citizens have a better X than you. Well, currently the world can say that they've bought a version of Windows or work on a linux thing. If your country has thousands of IT grads that you need to give busy work to, what better long term project than a national OS + apps? It's not like they'll just tell them to work on a national open source health information database + clients. ;)
It reminds me of the start of this book...
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/16-ClawsThatCatchCD/ClawsThatCatchCD/Into%20the%20Looking%20Glass/Into_the_Looking_Glass.htm
It starts off with what first appears a nuclear level explosion without any radiation or EMP at a major university. It's quickly determined that it wasn't terrorists or nuclear research. So WTH did the guy do to not only blow up the university but a good chuck of the nearby city as well?
The first chapters of getting a multiple PHd guy in to look at it were pretty much all. "This shouldn't be possible by what we we know!"
I'll agree that comic rays are most likely safe. It's obvious that Earth or the Sun can handle them. It isn't really obvious at all WTH this stuff will do. Sort of reminds me of the early nuclear experiments. They were worried about igniting Earth's atmosphere on fire with the first couple of tests and not being able to stop it. Sort of like a Perry Rhodan's Arkon Bomb. (That thing was a fictional bomb that once set off on a planet would start an unstoppable nuclear chain reaction in everything above atomic number 12.)
When you've only got one planet, and no means of escape, you shouldn't be doing some tests there. There are some tests that we'd most likely rather be held on Pluto or in the next solar system. The problem is that its far easier to worry about this stuff than to know one way or another if you even need to worry about it.
I'm sure that if we were an FTL species looking at others that we'd find many "oops" worlds where civs higher than our wiped themselves out by unexplainable means. Problem being is that we don't know what "oops" tech lines to really avoid. (We'd still research them though. You know we would.)
They could host the videos themselves, use another site that doesn't use cookies, or use an alternative version of YouTube's creation that would not use cookies.
There are lots of options, this is simply the easiest.
Well, it would cost money for them to replicate YouTube just for government stuff. It's much easier just to use the "free" YouTube service for that. Now if the free service has tracking cookies, well either you decide it wasn't that big of a deal in the first place or stop posting videos. Since everyone seems to really like the videos, and most folks ignore or delete cookies that they don't like; they've decided to live with it.
That's like complaining that google, slashdot, or wikipedia gave you cookies. I mean come on if you use the internet, you'll get cooties, um cookies.
From a parent's perspective of keeping their kids out of trouble, that makes perfect sense. But you can go too far. *Most* kids left to their own devices would party too much, so society and parents try to discourage that. But there are a minority of kids (probably well represented on /.) who given the choice would spend almost all their time reading or studying or playing video games or other solitary activities. These kids should actually be nudged toward hanging out with friends and going to parties and staying out too late, because not doing those things means they miss out on developing social skills that are very important, both professionally and in their personal lives.
Yes, I'm speaking from experience.
I find this funny. My wife has never really attended a real party with alcohol in her life. To be honest, I've only really attended two such events myself. Most of the events were alcohol was served was a formal thing and "being drunk" was very frowned on there. My wife did have parties of the same 4-6 people. Her parents didn't worry about them drinking, smoking, or sex because the only one of those that would have tempted them was sex and well (they make sibling/cousin jokes if you start doing it within those circles so that's also avoided. What did they do? She and the girls would sit around and talk while watching her brother and his friends play video games.
Heck, matches her married life rather well. I play video games with the kids, and she watches or reads bible stuff.
If anything, I'd have been the one that would have liked to do more partying, but really I hate smokers with a passion, (both my brothers and most of their friends fall into that camp.) and dislike drunks. Sex was or female interaction was the only thing that really tempted me. I get far more of that being married than I ever did HS or college partying though. (Well let's rephrase that. I get sex atleast once a week being married. I never had sex result from partying in HS or college so marriage out classes that for sex.)
my POV is this: in the lunch buffet that is life, i want to try all the tasty looking things. its that simple. so while you think public school + church + family = fulfilling life (or existence), i think the opposite
Hey, it was through public school + church + family that I learned that all those apparently tasty looking things are "bad for you."
i worry that the existential realization will haunt your kids as they realize that there is much much more to life then being a good kid or pleasing god.
I said that I was dragged to church. I hated it. I don't go now. While my wife takes the kids Wednesdays and Sundays, I don't go. I'll wait until they hit college to really worry about it one way or another. We live in the south. They are going to have to learn how to live a sane life around everyone else that is bible thumping. It's a survival skill. The two big things that I learned in church: God hates sin, which is anything God doesn't like. The other is that it generally doesn't really matter if you believe as long as you you attend or appear to attend a church. Then everyone will leave you alone.
I've always thought of it like joining a gang except death releases you from being in a gang. Churches want a cut of your income now and your life forever after.
Starting in High School we were taught never to do research off an encyclopedia. You use it to get a general idea about the topic which will help guide you to more appropriate sources for your research.
Britannica has been putting themselves on the high ground when they really weren't so high up. While Britannnica may have better researched articles, however Wikipedia for the most part does a good job at what encyclopedias are good for. A way to get a basic understanding of the topic so you then can go further in and do some real research.
I'm just waiting for schools be it junior, high or college to assign "wikipedia papers" as assignments. You could do it a variety of ways. I'd give each student a randomly generated article, then have them "grade it." Explain what's wrong with it in content, citations, grammar. Then I'd assign the student's to fix everything that they've ID'd as wrong with the given article. I'd then have students review and grade each others articles. You'd start of with existing known good articles and then you'd eventually have them build up to writing full articles on randomly assigned topics.
The educational value of this isn't about improving wikipedia at all. It's about educating students to ID poorly written/researched work, fix it, and write their own fairly decently researched "papers"/articles. Using wikipedia as a classroom tool though helps in several things. They actually learn through experience that not everything written in wikipedia is holy writ "right," and that other sources have the same sort of flaws. They then become used to improving stuff out of habit.
Long term it does end up improving wikipedia and it becomes more and more difficult to find grammer or factual mistakes.
In 1945 alone Hanford released over 500,000 curies of radioactive iodine into the air. Three Mile Island, by comparison, released about 20 curies by accident and everyone freaked out.
Well duh. We happen to smart enough to regulate power producers. We haven't yet learned to be smart enough to regulate trash folks though. This applies to every form of power though not just nuclear. ;)
The biggest issue, it seems to me, is that people who spend a lot of time playing video games generally lack social skills. While everyone else was learning how to relate to the world, video game players were learning how to relate to video games.
Those who play games don't realize that they are socially backward because they are socially backward.
As I parent and actually remembering my teenage years that's a good thing. Why? Because if they are at home watching TV or playing video games, I know exactly where they are, what they are doing, and what they aren't doing. During my teenage years those "not socially backward" kids as you would put them would be drinking, smoking, having sex, or sometimes partying. So I'd much rather my kids be "socially backward" in that respect. My wife and I don't drink or smoke, and we close and lock the door when we have sex. What other good example do we have to be to our kids?
My kids go to public school and get dragged to church by the wife. It's how I grew up. Why shouldn't that be enough outside the family socialization?
The whole thing is pointless - why not just put 64GBs of ram in your PC and let it fill it up with disk cache. This makes no sense. If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides. The data is vulnerable, it's massively expensive and an inefficient use of the RAM modules. Madness.
Well, from everything on this product that slashdot has mentioned, just sticking RAM on a motherboard would be a better solution. It's not always the best though.
I've wanted one of these things for awhile:
http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Storage-Devices/CENATEK-Rocket-Drive-SSD/
But could never justify the cost to myself. Were real RAM drives comes into their stride is any app that is HD I/O bound gets hugely speed up. You've also got to consider that this stuff is scaled down industrial stuff. I'd glance at the real 64 GB RAM disk and the all cost around 40-50K. They weren't for joe slashdot home user unless you had a few tens of K you wanted to spend. Now the real stuff had a builtin HD that the RAM was mirrored and it wasn't that difficult for them to convince business users to use a good UPS on the thing. You wouldn't believe the differences sticking any DB app on one of these things makes. Trust me you know when you really need one of these.
Now where Cenatek came along they tried to cut the cost for a PCI plugin board to $500-600 and then charged you a bit for the different amounts of RAM you'd put in their device. Sure it had to be externally powered or go dead. That's a draw back. But it did do "cheaply" what the real RAM drives did for the big boys. So if you really could afford it, you could stick your OS and favorite apps on there and notice a very responsive increase. They really started selling that thing somewhere between Win2000-WinXP when anything over 1 GB was rarely seen in a desktop. (It was easier adding a PCI card with 4 GB RAM than changing mother boards.)
Now a days with 3-4 GBs in "budget" desktops, I'd want a 64 or 128 GB RAM drive, but I'm also kinda like you, if I had the money I'd most likely see more immediate bang for the buck just adding system RAM. You do see really big increases though in real RAM drives. Then again how many mother boards do you see that'll let you plug in 64 GB of RAM? Actually, I think that some of this is just a stop gap especially at any individually affordable price. Just wait until you see 128 GB RAM in the $200 walmart special desktop.
The difficult part is to change the perception of open source from the one like yours "Everything is free as in Beer and the brewer goes broke" to "Everything is free as in speech and you get paid for the quality and sustainability of your work". I wouldn't mind having companies go broke that re-release the same product year after year with little to no improvements. If there are other companies that do the job better and improve over time I guess it would only be fair. The current market is based on monopolism and power struggle between the monopolies. That's what has to change for FOSS to succeed and we need to start in the heads.
Nah people understand pay for what you want.
People understand "free" as in some one else paid for what they wanted and are giving away freebies that we may not want/need.
People can't wrap their heads around its free/open, but you still want me to pay for it, and those that make similar products as yours can use the work with and you want me to agree to give way what I've funded you to develop so those that are in my industry get it for free to them?
Trying to explain it gets a "are you insane?" response.
My landlord was cleaning house once for a dinner party they were having, and running short of one type of cleaner he added another (Clorox) to the bucket. We ran around the house opening all the windows (Germany in February is rather cold). Don't think "everyone knows". What "everyone knows" will get someone killed.
I hate to be cruel to your real world example, but that's sort of why darwin awards where invented. It's not that its impossible or unlikely for people to do bad or stupid things with household chemicals. It's that 100's of millions of people have no problem following the simple directions on the most of the products and never ever think of combining/mixing things together and somehow live. That's why the 10-100 people a year that do screw up and maybe get sent to the hospital or die make major news or get labeled with titles such as darwin award.
It's like if some one died or got sent the hospital by just walking down a side walk while chewing gum and/or talking on cell phone. I mean come on we do things like that every single day. Some one out there is the statistic that gets killed by that stray car or bike, it takes real talent to do a heart attack or something and just die during a normal routine. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's just unlikely or news worthy when put in funny situations.
They want, for example, a firewall system for their OS. So they write one. Their need sated, they let people have it for free. It costs them nothing to do so (since their need was for a firewall and they paid for it by writing one). It costs no more to let people have it than to keep it secret.
Other people want a firewall that works with a VPN. So they take the free firewall the others made and add VPN knowledge to it. Their need sated and the cost paid for (by their time) and the benefit offsetting that cost (having a firewall that knows about VPNs) they give it to others to use.
The first group now has a better firewall and didn't have to pay for it.
Truly free.
You seem to be a democrat. I'll explain it. Some one not you was forced to spend their resources to develop said product. Two people/entities in your example paid for work or had their in house guys develop the app and release it. Now in both cases the entities still had to pay those developers to write code. Even if I were a third party, and to me I never paid a cent to it, but use it, the software isn't totally free. Some one (not you) paid for it. It's like the platform give everyone the toys that they want and ignore where the resources to pay for it actually come from. I guess lots of people like getting stuff "for free" when they aren't the ones that are being forced to pay for it. Sooner or later everything rolls around and you'll have to pay for it if you need/want anything done.
The number 1 spy in America IS Chinese. They are VERY active. Nearly all of the spies that we have caught over the last 20 years, have been Chinese that are working in DOD or intel jobs who then send back data to mainland. The same is true in Canada, Australia, EU, and I suspect, Russia. Any place that has more advanced military secrets is being actively infiltrated.
Worse, we are not just sending our goods over there and having them come back loaded with virus, we continue to do so even KNOWING this. You may not have liked the tone of the parent, but it was still accurate.
At last count there were something like over a billion chinese. There were around 350 million US citizens the last time I bothered to check. Do you seriously expect either country to stop doing business with each other if say around 10K of each group are spies spying on every foreign country that they can? Heck, we'd still trade with each other if we were in any state short of total war with each other.
Actually, I think pretty much all of us that have grown up with pervasive advertising have an internal trip switch these days. It's a sad fact, but the way to keep sane in the modern (urban) environment is to selectively ignore most of the world around you.
Advertisers look for ever more invasive ways to get our attention, and then wonder why advertising has less and less effect. it's because we hate you and have learned to ignore you to the extent we don't even realise you're there half the time.
Reminds me sort of at college to. I mean walk down any given hall way and you'd have all sorts of crap posted by various professor and such on each wall. Now the only board that we'd all stop and spend 30 seconds reading over was just a general post it board outside of the cross roads to several buildings. It was where students posted things like used books for sell or looking for a roommate or party at such and such. What format where they generally in? One sheet of paper with a single large header, 2-3 paragraphs stating what the heck it was about, then phone number/address/time ribbons along the bottom or around the entire edges for you to tear off and take the contact info with you.
The summary goes something like this:
This Whitehouse Administration is seeking a x86-64 64 bit computer operating system (OS) that is free of cumbersome and expensive licensing issues, can be secured and is not vulnerable to Windows security flaws, and which the Whitehouse Administration IT department can view, modify, and re-issue the source code in compiled form. ....
Well, open source generally isn't free. Some one else generally pays for it somewhere. I do think that it is 30-40 years past to do this though. The government "pays" for tons of software development just for it. There should be a push from top down that every spec that the feds push out to contractors makes the source, apis, file formats, all open as far as the government is concerned. If they pay your company 10 million and they turn in a half assed product, well instead of spending another $30 million at the same place trying to fix things, you could have other contractors fix it in theory.
The government is still paying for development to be done somewhere by some one, but this time it knows to either own or open up the code, file formats, and APIs needed to get multiple contractors to work on it without being tied to any of them. That's the real benefit of open source to government. Of course, if the feds or states really wanted to be nasty or evil, they could just pass a law that said any software that the government runs has to turn over the source and be modifiable by the government. If the government really wants something, they can and will use eminent domain to take it away from those that currently "own" it.
The real one seems lame. Now the Lego one though was what should have made slashdot.
Lego Obama Presidential Inauguration Brings Hope to Bricks Too
http://i.gizmodo.com/photogallery/legoobamainauguration/1006247332
Huh? Could a black guy have been elected in the 60s? No. Can a black guy be elected now? Yes. That, my friend, is a demonstrable improvement.
Um, I don't really count him as black though. Esp after a few of the percentages of how black he is got out. I count him as slightly tanned at most.
My big issue is all the look at us because we elected a black guy crap. I'm sorry, but we aren't any where we need to be if this guy or a woman of any color or background sparks this much news and most of the news is about the first person of this background look at how great and open we are BS.
We'd be there if he could win or lose without stating crap about race anywhere when running. This election has actually been more racially charged due to all the look at the black guy we are electing crap than anything else. If this guy could be elected and no one makes a single remark on his background because his race/church wasn't an issue than we'd be where ever there is supposed to be.
I don't think we really want to go there though. We want to make value judgments based on his culture, race, education, and church on if we are going to vote for him or not. This just says more of the obvious about us though.