'Tis not the paying back of loans that is in question here, but how to do it as quickly and completely as possible.
I have a friend who attended what is considered by some lists as one of the most expensive universities in the US. Putting aside his lifestyle choices and various other problems (parents are divorced, and he changed his major 3 times), he has supposedly completed all of his requirements for graduation (started off in IT, ended up in Marketing). Anyway, without that last payment, he cannot graduate. So he needs to find (best guess) $30,000 or so in order to get his degree. However, he cannot get a loan, and his parents do not want to help out. As such, he is stuck earning some rather sorry wages at fly by night companies, up and until he earns enough to make that final payment, which grants him the degree, which lets him earn (I believe) a better lifestyle. However, given the wages he's earning, it should only take another 6 or 7 years for him to earn enough to get that degree.
With a degree, he might be earning $60,000 / year. Without it, he might be earning $10,000 / year. I keep telling him that if he just stops eating for a few years, he will have enough to get that degree sooner. My sympathies to him, as the university has a ten year rule, so the credits he does have will expire by September, and at some point, the loans he does have will be called in...
Ah, the re-emergence of the idea behind debtor prisons.
Someone, quick, lend me some magnets and copper wiring. I need to make visit to the graves of the Founding Fathers, as I imagine they should be up to about 7000 RPMs as of late.
This could be taken in any number of ways, but I'd go for two here:
1.) (Giving DHS the benefit of the doubt) -> They *want* the cyber-spies (what name, Industrial Espionage would fit better here) to find and copy some of the firm's software. Why? Because they (DHS) are going to ensure that the copies the spies get will have some small, but interesting changes to them. Something the CIA pulled with the Soviets a while back. Though I would be surprised that they would think that strategy would work again.
2.) (Not giving DHS the benefit of the doubt, *puts on tinfoil hat*) DHS needs to justify their (let's be honest) rather large and expensive budget, as well as the various civil rights that have been...temporarily re-purposed. As such, from a realpolitik approach, it's in their best interest to have a few 'terrorists' succeed from time to time; and if those 'terrorists' aren't bright enough, or capable enough, to pull something off, then the DHS is willing to give them a helping hand from time to time; all in the best interests of National Security, mind you. Their argument, if pressed, would be that they need to remain ever-vigilant if they are going to catch the really bad guys, and sometimes the cost of that vigilance is a few lives. The counter argument, of course, possibly made by any of the various Generals / Admirals of our military, would be that we would then be that we are specializing for only certain kinds of attacks, wasting valuable resources, and increasing the amount of 'noise,' possibly / probably resulting in us missing a weaker signal that might more foretelling of an unanticipated attack via a previously unknown vector.
As brain-damaged as MS's politics may be these days, I have a severe doubt they will play any card with regards to C#. C# is kind of...the language that is keeping MS afloat these days; playing patent games with regards to it would result in some fairly severe revenue shortage, and one very unhappy Ballmer being paddled by Gates for pissing off the developers ("Why Steve? WHY!? We had a good thing here, Steve. Why did you have to ruin it?"). And I am fairly certain that the language is ISOed, so no copyright issues...
Plus MS could spend its free time convincing people that they might want some Windows Servers to run that C# code on...
So, should we begin buying torches and pitchforks before the judge's ruling, or after, when there will probably be a shortage?
*facepinch* It appears we need to send someone to where-ever they mint judges, and 'teach' them about technology, lest we encounter more of these problems in the future. I favor having them build their own machines, and pass some basic computer certs (Server+, etc.).
Indeed. But now we have precedents and what not, which make it hard to back-track on any of the less than honest reading of that esoteric document. Judges hate having to take a stand on something the rest of their kin was already decided is interpreted one way or the other...perhaps that's the reason for the rise of activist judges...remember, they are only an activist if they espouse an opinion different from your own.
We do, however, need to keep politics from infecting science; 'Tis easier to get someone to acknowledge the results of an experiment they've seen before their eyes, and the possible conclusions that may be drawn from it, than to attack what is, like or not, part of their belief system. We certainly don't need the Republican / Democrat / whatever sh*t going down in the lab; it'll color the results, have people making (more) mistakes than they already do (how many times must we discuss cleaning that glassware with the autoclave?), and in general, make what is a serious, but happy environment, a third-world country experiencing civil unrest.
Fair enough, then let's find some people we can all agree on to run this experiment, so we can put an end to this meandering discussion.
I nominate Cmdr Taco & friends to run this experiment, and to put that results up on Slashdot TV. It's not costly ($300) to run this experiment, and it can be probably be written off as a business expense. Make a post detailing the results, with a link to the video(s) when it's ready.
Hmm. However, I will note that human beings in developed countries are somewhat closer to (and at times below) the replacement rate. And these are also the countries that are most heavily promoting green technologies to their own people.
What more, contrary to popular fiction, the earth is more than capable of sustaining a human population much larger than the one today (a few quintillion before start running into issues), and comfortably, I might add. And while it is only a small part of the global population, the US's population, if I remember the calculations correctly, can reasonably fit into the state of Rhode Island. We have so spread out in the US that we have not attained the population density necessary to make a high-speed rail system actually worth building. That's saying something.
I mean, come on. Canada is, like it or not, rather empty, as is Australia (a continent), and if we really, really get desperate, there's Antarctica (another continent that has a near zero population).
And yes, pollution is an issue, and should be dealt with, but with some understanding of reason; otherwise we will have pipes attached to our asses to capture the methane as it evacuates, and carbon taxes that measure exactly what goes in, and what comes out. You don't want that lifestyle, and neither do I: why? Because it fails to pass the smell test; it stinks of fear, chronically being pushed down people's throats over something that we are really, really unsure may happen; because it's a power-grab disguised as socially-aware agenda, and like the agendas of a similar nature before them (the colonists once attempted similar ideas, and found that they did not work -> social engineering was the reason behind a lot of colony collapses back in the day), they are both always tyrants and always wrong. And yes, mankind has progressed a fair amount technologically and socially since those days, but the emotions governing them have not; as such, power-lust is still an issue, and typically we are blind to those who lust the most powerfully; it's always, "we didn't see it happening! we couldn't have known it would go wrong like this!," when they have turned a closed-eye to reality, because their cause was just, because they were righteous, because the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, because it couldn't possibly happen here, because...they were getting something that they wanted, and didn't care that the cost would not be borne by them.
tldr; Earth has plenty of space and ability to provide; On the matters of mercury, smoke, and uncommon wastes, we should definitely limit, or preferably, providing it's technologically feasible, their dissemination into the environment; However, we should be wary of paramilitary factions, the loss of civil liberties that some of these changes may bring about, and that hubris is a staple of mankind.
*Breaks out the marshmallows, chocolates, and graham crackers.*
So, have you tried explaining it to them in a different way? As the saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different result is an act of insanity. Sure, you're combating what you consider an alien way of life (going to say Republican / Conservative? here), but what inroads have you made other than declaring that they are beyond reason and need to be neutralized? Have you spent a week or two among them, away from your friends of a similar mindset and comfort zone, where you are forced to interact with them on a minute by minute basis? Try it sometime, and you mind that that it's not them who change, but you. You'll understand how a single glance means one thing to one group, and something entirely different to another group. That the same phrases and words have different...emotional connotations for each group. And finally, if and when it's appropriate to allow your emotions to surface. I'd argue, though I could be wrong here, that it might be better to display anger after you have soundly laid out your argument, made your final points, and allowed some time to elapse so that its merits can be weighed and digested, rather than displaying raw emotion at the beginning of an argument, which will almost always have you immediately labeled an 'extremist,' no matter how right you are. It's unfortunate, but it appears this is the way of humanity.
Tired of the constant bullsh*t from the most charismatic & slimy bastards you will encounter outside of a courtroom, as they play their little duopoly black and white game (or good copy / bad cop, as the case is). They are both on the same team!
You say that like you don't think it will happen...
This whole scenario is, of course, just some minor misdirection and a flimsy pretext to what has already been planned...to save you, and humanity from itself. The final battle -> the triumph of man over himself.
Perhaps because soldiers, at the time of the colonies, were the most common representatives of the Crown that the common folk were likely to encounter and be put upon. While I will be the first to admit that I am not a history scholar (perhaps someone with more knowledge could chime in here?), the common history we are taught is that any ranking official had an estate of their own (Hello Governor), and that it was the poorer soldiers, lacking such lofty estates, that had to find lodgings where they could. As it would be...unheard of (scandalous) for the Governor of New York to demand prolonged lodgings for himself with the colonists (imagine the President barging into a two-story single-family home, and saying that he was going to live there for the foreseeable future; the tabloids would run out of ink), it may have never occurred to the framers of the Constitution that such a possibility would exist in the future (that's typically not a *good* thing).
As such, it might be argued that what passed as a common understanding of intent during that time period has since been lost, leaving with us the more literal interpretation available today.
Exactly. The point with the 3rd, I believe, was to limit the 'national security takes priority over everything else' angle.
And the best part is, it's all true. Those agents or 'cyber-soldiers' as the name may be, are sucking up a fair amount of resources. And if we want to go with the scare angle here, let's suppose that one of those agents ends up where it shouldn't be (a medical device, for instance). Appeasing the security people's lust for power and paranoid desires for spying on Americans inside their own homes is...costly, very costly.
Put simply, one agent, on one machine, is as a mosquito, and so people will argue that it's just a little disk space here, and a few processor cycles there. But a hundred agents on a hundred machines...well, that's a few hundred mosquitoes. And just like those annoying flying hypodermic syringes, these agents will soon become carriers for a host of nasty pathogens (the machine equivalent of malaria and West Nile; you think crackers won't repurpose them for their own ends? Hear that? It's my Russian colleagues laughing at us.). It'll probably be illegal to patch those holes (Citizen! Patching a security hole that doesn't exist will have you sent to Gitmo!) or to detect those agents (*These are not the agents you are looking for MS, Symantec, Kapersky and friends*), so the infections will just spread and spread...
Well, the security people have already done the spade work for us by declaring it a "War on Cyber-Terrorists." What more, the DoD has received funding for their 'cyber-warriors,' so again, making the case that this is, by the same parties that want this kind of power, a war, should not be terribly difficult to make.
MP Claire Perry, who said, 'There is a "hands off our internet" movement that sees any change in how access is delivered as censorship.'" -> Because it is?
Censor (courtesy of MW): 2censor verb censoredcensoring
Definition of CENSOR
transitive verb : to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
See censor defined for English-language learners
Slashdot Mirror
Had I the money, I wouldn't loan it to him. I'd have given it to him, or more appropriately, the bursar.
'Tis not the paying back of loans that is in question here, but how to do it as quickly and completely as possible.
I have a friend who attended what is considered by some lists as one of the most expensive universities in the US. Putting aside his lifestyle choices and various other problems (parents are divorced, and he changed his major 3 times), he has supposedly completed all of his requirements for graduation (started off in IT, ended up in Marketing). Anyway, without that last payment, he cannot graduate. So he needs to find (best guess) $30,000 or so in order to get his degree. However, he cannot get a loan, and his parents do not want to help out. As such, he is stuck earning some rather sorry wages at fly by night companies, up and until he earns enough to make that final payment, which grants him the degree, which lets him earn (I believe) a better lifestyle. However, given the wages he's earning, it should only take another 6 or 7 years for him to earn enough to get that degree.
With a degree, he might be earning $60,000 / year. Without it, he might be earning $10,000 / year. I keep telling him that if he just stops eating for a few years, he will have enough to get that degree sooner. My sympathies to him, as the university has a ten year rule, so the credits he does have will expire by September, and at some point, the loans he does have will be called in...
Ah, the re-emergence of the idea behind debtor prisons.
Someone, quick, lend me some magnets and copper wiring. I need to make visit to the graves of the Founding Fathers, as I imagine they should be up to about 7000 RPMs as of late.
This could be taken in any number of ways, but I'd go for two here:
1.) (Giving DHS the benefit of the doubt) -> They *want* the cyber-spies (what name, Industrial Espionage would fit better here) to find and copy some of the firm's software. Why? Because they (DHS) are going to ensure that the copies the spies get will have some small, but interesting changes to them. Something the CIA pulled with the Soviets a while back. Though I would be surprised that they would think that strategy would work again.
2.) (Not giving DHS the benefit of the doubt, *puts on tinfoil hat*) DHS needs to justify their (let's be honest) rather large and expensive budget, as well as the various civil rights that have been...temporarily re-purposed. As such, from a realpolitik approach, it's in their best interest to have a few 'terrorists' succeed from time to time; and if those 'terrorists' aren't bright enough, or capable enough, to pull something off, then the DHS is willing to give them a helping hand from time to time; all in the best interests of National Security, mind you. Their argument, if pressed, would be that they need to remain ever-vigilant if they are going to catch the really bad guys, and sometimes the cost of that vigilance is a few lives. The counter argument, of course, possibly made by any of the various Generals / Admirals of our military, would be that we would then be that we are specializing for only certain kinds of attacks, wasting valuable resources, and increasing the amount of 'noise,' possibly / probably resulting in us missing a weaker signal that might more foretelling of an unanticipated attack via a previously unknown vector.
Paranoia can be a dangerous thing.
ASP.NET, or Ruby.
As brain-damaged as MS's politics may be these days, I have a severe doubt they will play any card with regards to C#. C# is kind of...the language that is keeping MS afloat these days; playing patent games with regards to it would result in some fairly severe revenue shortage, and one very unhappy Ballmer being paddled by Gates for pissing off the developers ("Why Steve? WHY!? We had a good thing here, Steve. Why did you have to ruin it?"). And I am fairly certain that the language is ISOed, so no copyright issues...
Plus MS could spend its free time convincing people that they might want some Windows Servers to run that C# code on...
So, should we begin buying torches and pitchforks before the judge's ruling, or after, when there will probably be a shortage?
*facepinch* It appears we need to send someone to where-ever they mint judges, and 'teach' them about technology, lest we encounter more of these problems in the future. I favor having them build their own machines, and pass some basic computer certs (Server+, etc.).
And Europe is sounding saner and saner by the moment.
Indeed. But now we have precedents and what not, which make it hard to back-track on any of the less than honest reading of that esoteric document. Judges hate having to take a stand on something the rest of their kin was already decided is interpreted one way or the other...perhaps that's the reason for the rise of activist judges...remember, they are only an activist if they espouse an opinion different from your own.
We do, however, need to keep politics from infecting science; 'Tis easier to get someone to acknowledge the results of an experiment they've seen before their eyes, and the possible conclusions that may be drawn from it, than to attack what is, like or not, part of their belief system. We certainly don't need the Republican / Democrat / whatever sh*t going down in the lab; it'll color the results, have people making (more) mistakes than they already do (how many times must we discuss cleaning that glassware with the autoclave?), and in general, make what is a serious, but happy environment, a third-world country experiencing civil unrest.
Fair enough, then let's find some people we can all agree on to run this experiment, so we can put an end to this meandering discussion.
I nominate Cmdr Taco & friends to run this experiment, and to put that results up on Slashdot TV. It's not costly ($300) to run this experiment, and it can be probably be written off as a business expense. Make a post detailing the results, with a link to the video(s) when it's ready.
Hmm. However, I will note that human beings in developed countries are somewhat closer to (and at times below) the replacement rate. And these are also the countries that are most heavily promoting green technologies to their own people.
What more, contrary to popular fiction, the earth is more than capable of sustaining a human population much larger than the one today (a few quintillion before start running into issues), and comfortably, I might add. And while it is only a small part of the global population, the US's population, if I remember the calculations correctly, can reasonably fit into the state of Rhode Island. We have so spread out in the US that we have not attained the population density necessary to make a high-speed rail system actually worth building. That's saying something.
I mean, come on. Canada is, like it or not, rather empty, as is Australia (a continent), and if we really, really get desperate, there's Antarctica (another continent that has a near zero population).
And yes, pollution is an issue, and should be dealt with, but with some understanding of reason; otherwise we will have pipes attached to our asses to capture the methane as it evacuates, and carbon taxes that measure exactly what goes in, and what comes out. You don't want that lifestyle, and neither do I: why? Because it fails to pass the smell test; it stinks of fear, chronically being pushed down people's throats over something that we are really, really unsure may happen; because it's a power-grab disguised as socially-aware agenda, and like the agendas of a similar nature before them (the colonists once attempted similar ideas, and found that they did not work -> social engineering was the reason behind a lot of colony collapses back in the day), they are both always tyrants and always wrong. And yes, mankind has progressed a fair amount technologically and socially since those days, but the emotions governing them have not; as such, power-lust is still an issue, and typically we are blind to those who lust the most powerfully; it's always, "we didn't see it happening! we couldn't have known it would go wrong like this!," when they have turned a closed-eye to reality, because their cause was just, because they were righteous, because the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, because it couldn't possibly happen here, because...they were getting something that they wanted, and didn't care that the cost would not be borne by them.
tldr; Earth has plenty of space and ability to provide; On the matters of mercury, smoke, and uncommon wastes, we should definitely limit, or preferably, providing it's technologically feasible, their dissemination into the environment; However, we should be wary of paramilitary factions, the loss of civil liberties that some of these changes may bring about, and that hubris is a staple of mankind.
*Breaks out the marshmallows, chocolates, and graham crackers.*
So, have you tried explaining it to them in a different way? As the saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different result is an act of insanity. Sure, you're combating what you consider an alien way of life (going to say Republican / Conservative? here), but what inroads have you made other than declaring that they are beyond reason and need to be neutralized? Have you spent a week or two among them, away from your friends of a similar mindset and comfort zone, where you are forced to interact with them on a minute by minute basis? Try it sometime, and you mind that that it's not them who change, but you. You'll understand how a single glance means one thing to one group, and something entirely different to another group. That the same phrases and words have different...emotional connotations for each group. And finally, if and when it's appropriate to allow your emotions to surface. I'd argue, though I could be wrong here, that it might be better to display anger after you have soundly laid out your argument, made your final points, and allowed some time to elapse so that its merits can be weighed and digested, rather than displaying raw emotion at the beginning of an argument, which will almost always have you immediately labeled an 'extremist,' no matter how right you are. It's unfortunate, but it appears this is the way of humanity.
Shhhh. He's trying to take the moral high ground...let's get some nachos and drinks, and watch it through the CCTV behind the 5th Comms Riser. (BOFH)
Fair enough. And what of us who are Pro-Climate Change? ^_^
OMG. Someone please mod him up!
Tired of the constant bullsh*t from the most charismatic & slimy bastards you will encounter outside of a courtroom, as they play their little duopoly black and white game (or good copy / bad cop, as the case is). They are both on the same team!
Indeed. What we need is a climate control device, I say sarcastically.
Hmm. Two Anonymous cowards, fighting it out. *Grabs popcorn*
You say that like you don't think it will happen...
This whole scenario is, of course, just some minor misdirection and a flimsy pretext to what has already been planned...to save you, and humanity from itself. The final battle -> the triumph of man over himself.
Perhaps because soldiers, at the time of the colonies, were the most common representatives of the Crown that the common folk were likely to encounter and be put upon. While I will be the first to admit that I am not a history scholar (perhaps someone with more knowledge could chime in here?), the common history we are taught is that any ranking official had an estate of their own (Hello Governor), and that it was the poorer soldiers, lacking such lofty estates, that had to find lodgings where they could. As it would be...unheard of (scandalous) for the Governor of New York to demand prolonged lodgings for himself with the colonists (imagine the President barging into a two-story single-family home, and saying that he was going to live there for the foreseeable future; the tabloids would run out of ink), it may have never occurred to the framers of the Constitution that such a possibility would exist in the future (that's typically not a *good* thing).
As such, it might be argued that what passed as a common understanding of intent during that time period has since been lost, leaving with us the more literal interpretation available today.
Yes, but let's be honest. That Dell probably wasn't anything special to begin with.
*Puts on Morpheus glasses*
What if I told you more than 50% of those votes were never cast by anyone living?
Exactly. The point with the 3rd, I believe, was to limit the 'national security takes priority over everything else' angle.
And the best part is, it's all true. Those agents or 'cyber-soldiers' as the name may be, are sucking up a fair amount of resources. And if we want to go with the scare angle here, let's suppose that one of those agents ends up where it shouldn't be (a medical device, for instance). Appeasing the security people's lust for power and paranoid desires for spying on Americans inside their own homes is...costly, very costly.
Put simply, one agent, on one machine, is as a mosquito, and so people will argue that it's just a little disk space here, and a few processor cycles there. But a hundred agents on a hundred machines...well, that's a few hundred mosquitoes. And just like those annoying flying hypodermic syringes, these agents will soon become carriers for a host of nasty pathogens (the machine equivalent of malaria and West Nile; you think crackers won't repurpose them for their own ends? Hear that? It's my Russian colleagues laughing at us.). It'll probably be illegal to patch those holes (Citizen! Patching a security hole that doesn't exist will have you sent to Gitmo!) or to detect those agents (*These are not the agents you are looking for MS, Symantec, Kapersky and friends*), so the infections will just spread and spread...
Well, the security people have already done the spade work for us by declaring it a "War on Cyber-Terrorists." What more, the DoD has received funding for their 'cyber-warriors,' so again, making the case that this is, by the same parties that want this kind of power, a war, should not be terribly difficult to make.
MP Claire Perry, who said, 'There is a "hands off our internet" movement that sees any change in how access is delivered as censorship.'" -> Because it is?
Censor (courtesy of MW):
2censor verb
censoredcensoring
Definition of CENSOR
transitive verb
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
See censor defined for English-language learners