You're missing out on simple pragmatism. The Native Americans have largely been wiped out, unfortunately, by some peoples' ancestors. What are we going to do now, ship 300M people back to Europe or wherever their ancestors came from? What if they're biracial? What about the black people? Their ancestors didn't ask to be brought here. So you're going to punish them too? And why should people pay for the sins of their long-dead ancestors? Don't fonget, many white people in this country aren't party to this; if your ancestors immigrated here from Ireland or Italy in the early 1900s, for instance, then you're blameless for what happened to the Native Americans. What if you're half-Native and half-white? Do you need to be chopped in half, with one half being shipped back to Europe and the other half getting to stay? Many Natives these days aren't even full-blooded, in fact I think that's become pretty rare. So how do you deal with that? And, many white people have some bit of Native blood in them.
A simple answer to this insanity is to let the past stay in the past, and deal with the present only.
"it's our damn land now, and stop invading it or we'll kill you.".
No one seriously proposes genocide for immigrants, they just want them deported, and kept out. What's wrong with that? It's what every other first-world country does. The simple fact is that there's far more impoverished third-worlders than there are first-worlders, and there's simply no way to take them all in and support them all, and not only that, it would ruin our societies. If you disagree, why don't you try taking in 8 dirt-poor uneducated immigrants into your house, and providing them with free food, shelter, and education. Think your budget can handle that? Mine can't. If you want to help them, do things to help them fix their countries. Bringing them here doesn't do anything to fix the problems in their home countries.
Republicans blame a shitty economy (or whatever) on government, and Democrats blame it on corporations.
Nope. The Democrats claim the economy is doing great. This happens every time I say the economy sucks online: some Democrat voter comes out of the woodwork to claim that, because Wall Street is doing great, the whole economy is doing great.
Ok then, compare against France instead. Still not looking good.
France is #12 in the world in firearm ownership, with over 30 guns per 100 residents.
Obviously, they have far less gun-related deaths because they have much less crime. That's a function of their culture. You can't change culture with prohibition laws.
Germany isn't as anti-gun as the UK by a long shot. See this list. Germany has 1/3 the gun ownership the US does, and about 5 times the gun ownership of the UK. Germany comes in at #15 worldwide. 30 guns (privately-owned) per 100 residents isn't a small number.
It strikes me as quite ironic that a lot of your comment is essentially a backhanded concession that there are considerable advantages to a country with substantially more left-wing culture and policies.
That's not backhanded, that's intended. The problem is that liberals in this country think that just by adopting policies of, say, Sweden, that somehow the USA will become just like Sweden. It doesn't work like that. A country can't just will itself to be like some prosperous Scandinavian country. You might as well go to Zimbabwe or Sudan or Iraq and tell them "the answer to your problems is simple! Just be like Sweden!". If you want to be like those countries, you need to adopt their culture too, and other traits those countries have, such as being small and homogeneous. But strangely, liberals run around touting "multiculturalism" as if it's some panacea, and then point to countries which are completely the opposite as countries they'd like to emulate. If you want multiculturalism, Iraq is an excellent model for that. The simple fact is that you're never going to get the standard of living that Sweden has with an extremely large and culturally and ethnically diverse country and population, and cultures that celebrate violence and are accepting of corruption.
The problem with these stats is that they lump everyone in together. Gun-related suicides, for instance, aren't even worth considering in these stats; people will kill themselves one way or another, guns just make it easier and faster. Homicides are the important stat. However, even here most gun-related homicides in this country are likely because of gang-related violence. If you're not a gang member or other violent criminal, you have much less to worry about. So how about some stats which exclude gang members? It'd be interesting to see how the US ranks there.
Last I heard, El Salvador was the most dangerous country for an adult male to live in, as every adult male there has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered in their lifetime. What are the gun laws like there?
As for first-world countries, the US doesn't really count there. There's too much poverty and income disparity for the US to really be considered an advanced nation. Mexico has the richest man in the world (Carlos Slim), and lots of affluence too, but no one considers them an advanced nation either. It's not gun proliferation that causes America's problems with crime, violence, and poverty. Somehow liberals seem to think that if we just get rid of the guns, we'll suddenly turn into a gigantic version of Sweden or Norway. It doesn't work that way. Those countries are ultra-safe because of their culture. We don't have that kind of culture. Our culture is more like that of El Salvador, in many areas of the country.
Better yet, forget all that stuff and teach them to arrange clothing at a store like Abercrombie or to make a coffee at Starbuck's, because that's where all the jobs in the future will be: retail.
Oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers are for examining analog signals. Logic analyzers are only useful for digital signals. They're in two different domains. You can't use a logic analyzer to debug a power supply design.
The National Guard didn't exist until the 20th century. The Founders didn't envision such a thing. If you want to go back to what the original Constitution allowed, you need to just have state militias.
What success? The UK is an island, in case you didn't notice. Australia is too. It's much easier to prevent the smuggling of contraband (like weapons) into an island than into a country with vast, undefended borders.
I live in NJ, and I have Comcast. I also have a fiber to my home, from Verizon, and I don't use it for two reasons: 1) it's more expensive than Comcrap (not by much), and 2) it's slower than Comcrap. Did you miss the recent rash of articles about Netflix and Verizon getting into a row about Verizon being too slow? I don't have that problem with Comcrap lately, after they did their peering agreement with Netflix.
Fiber from Verizon is most certainly not "the greatest thing since sliced bread". That's utterly insane.
And he gets rude. Once he yelled at my wife.
It'd be funny if a Comcast (or Verizon) salesperson did this in Texas or Florida and was shot.
I called the office and complained. Of course, nothing came of it.
You should have called the police and filed a report, then gone to court and gotten a restraining order against the company.
And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on?
They don't have to; that's what Google/Bing/DDG is for.
If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do)
That shouldn't be done either. If they sell in a country, it'd be in their interest to have a domain in that country's domain: Sony would have sony.co.jp for Japan, and sony.co.us for the US, and sony.co.uk for the UK, etc. Google/Bing/DDG would direct you to the one for your country as the first choice, since it's most likely that's what you're looking for.
I'm not saying companies have to be restricted to one country's TLD, if that's what you're thinking. They could have different sites in different countries. However, it'd be nice to not have to select which country I'm in when I go to fedex.com; instead, I'd go to fedex.co.us, and get the American site. (Yes, I can go to fedex.com/us, but that's not a standard or convention, and differs from site to site.) Most likely, browsers would tack on your country code automatically, so I could just type in fedex.co, and it'd automatically tack on the.us and send me there.
Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.
I don't see how this would make that any more difficult.
Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact
Globalization is not a fact. Quick question: should selling Nazi paraphernalia be legal or not? The US says yes, Germany says no. Whose law is Ebay supposed to follow? If Ebay has ebay.co.us and ebay.co.de, they can follow different laws in each site. (Those domains can direct to a server farm in the US even, but the.co.de-facing version would have to follow.de laws.) Instead, today, we have things like France trying to force its laws on American companies on their "global".com sites.
If you want a globalized internet without country codes, then you need to get rid of all countries first, and set up a single planetary government. Until that day comes (which won't be anytime soon), we should keep the internet's TLDs segregated by country, so each country has sovereignty over its TLD. Obviously, this doesn't mean someone in the US can't go visit the.co.de site of some company if they want, but it'll be completely obvious that they're now "virtually" in another country, and the site is going to follow the laws of that country, rather than their home country.
Other than 40 years of Star Trek finding civilizations everywhere, do we have anything scientific to base our estimates on?
Star Trek actually didn't postulate the existence of tons of different civilizations evolving independently; there was a TOS episode where they introduced the idea of some early civilization which seeded the galaxy (or at least this part of it), explaining why there were so many worlds with humanoid lifeforms.
How would a Dyson sphere be detected? If it's partially or completely blocking its host star, we wouldn't see it. We only see other planets because of the way they dim light from their host stars.
This is just another example of people in the industry being out of touch with reality. Maybe if they would spend more time out of their cube watching how real people perform their work,
Where are these "cubes" (short for "cubicle") you speak of? I haven't seen a cubicle in over a decade now. Every workplace has moved to "open-plan work areas". Sometimes they still call them "cubes", but if you can see over the wall while seated, it's not a cubicle, it's open-plan.
You complain about "people in the industry"; I contend that industry was much better back when engineers actually sat in cubicles, or better yet, offices.
The comment from "ExecutorElassus" above. He advocates making immigrants work "awful, backbreaking work that pays bullshit", and threatens that the US economy will collapse if we don't exploit these people this way. Did you somehow miss this?
It's weird how liberals on one hand argue for high minimum wages and unions, and then on the other hand openly advocate labor exploitation. I'm starting to think liberals are the real racists.
Here's a picture of an actual prototype SkyTran car. You're probably right; those first pictures were just early artistic concepts. Here's another. They're building this system now in Tel Aviv.
As for all your stuff about cars, do you have any examples of cars which are decent aerodynamically, and not just infeasible prototypes and concepts?
Honestly, I'll be happy if we can just get people's style preferences to shift away from naturally high-drag forms like those ridiculous oversized front-end things where you can barely see over the hood.
Part of the reason cars still look like this is for crash protection. Even mid-engine cars like Ferraris, as well as Teslas which have the motor in the back and batteries on the bottom, have long hoods, for crash protection. If you stick the passengers at the front of the car, you'll have no crumple zone and therefore no survivability in the event of a frontal crash.
If you want to see a vehicle with REAL aerodynamics, check out SkyTran PRT. Since these vehicles are designed for maximal efficiency, and don't have to worry much about crashes since they're on rails, the people pods are designed for optimal aerodynamics.
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You're missing out on simple pragmatism. The Native Americans have largely been wiped out, unfortunately, by some peoples' ancestors. What are we going to do now, ship 300M people back to Europe or wherever their ancestors came from? What if they're biracial? What about the black people? Their ancestors didn't ask to be brought here. So you're going to punish them too? And why should people pay for the sins of their long-dead ancestors? Don't fonget, many white people in this country aren't party to this; if your ancestors immigrated here from Ireland or Italy in the early 1900s, for instance, then you're blameless for what happened to the Native Americans. What if you're half-Native and half-white? Do you need to be chopped in half, with one half being shipped back to Europe and the other half getting to stay? Many Natives these days aren't even full-blooded, in fact I think that's become pretty rare. So how do you deal with that? And, many white people have some bit of Native blood in them.
A simple answer to this insanity is to let the past stay in the past, and deal with the present only.
"it's our damn land now, and stop invading it or we'll kill you.".
No one seriously proposes genocide for immigrants, they just want them deported, and kept out. What's wrong with that? It's what every other first-world country does. The simple fact is that there's far more impoverished third-worlders than there are first-worlders, and there's simply no way to take them all in and support them all, and not only that, it would ruin our societies. If you disagree, why don't you try taking in 8 dirt-poor uneducated immigrants into your house, and providing them with free food, shelter, and education. Think your budget can handle that? Mine can't. If you want to help them, do things to help them fix their countries. Bringing them here doesn't do anything to fix the problems in their home countries.
Republicans blame a shitty economy (or whatever) on government, and Democrats blame it on corporations.
Nope. The Democrats claim the economy is doing great. This happens every time I say the economy sucks online: some Democrat voter comes out of the woodwork to claim that, because Wall Street is doing great, the whole economy is doing great.
Ok then, compare against France instead. Still not looking good.
France is #12 in the world in firearm ownership, with over 30 guns per 100 residents.
Obviously, they have far less gun-related deaths because they have much less crime. That's a function of their culture. You can't change culture with prohibition laws.
Germany isn't as anti-gun as the UK by a long shot. See this list. Germany has 1/3 the gun ownership the US does, and about 5 times the gun ownership of the UK. Germany comes in at #15 worldwide. 30 guns (privately-owned) per 100 residents isn't a small number.
It strikes me as quite ironic that a lot of your comment is essentially a backhanded concession that there are considerable advantages to a country with substantially more left-wing culture and policies.
That's not backhanded, that's intended. The problem is that liberals in this country think that just by adopting policies of, say, Sweden, that somehow the USA will become just like Sweden. It doesn't work like that. A country can't just will itself to be like some prosperous Scandinavian country. You might as well go to Zimbabwe or Sudan or Iraq and tell them "the answer to your problems is simple! Just be like Sweden!". If you want to be like those countries, you need to adopt their culture too, and other traits those countries have, such as being small and homogeneous. But strangely, liberals run around touting "multiculturalism" as if it's some panacea, and then point to countries which are completely the opposite as countries they'd like to emulate. If you want multiculturalism, Iraq is an excellent model for that. The simple fact is that you're never going to get the standard of living that Sweden has with an extremely large and culturally and ethnically diverse country and population, and cultures that celebrate violence and are accepting of corruption.
The problem with these stats is that they lump everyone in together. Gun-related suicides, for instance, aren't even worth considering in these stats; people will kill themselves one way or another, guns just make it easier and faster. Homicides are the important stat. However, even here most gun-related homicides in this country are likely because of gang-related violence. If you're not a gang member or other violent criminal, you have much less to worry about. So how about some stats which exclude gang members? It'd be interesting to see how the US ranks there.
Last I heard, El Salvador was the most dangerous country for an adult male to live in, as every adult male there has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered in their lifetime. What are the gun laws like there?
As for first-world countries, the US doesn't really count there. There's too much poverty and income disparity for the US to really be considered an advanced nation. Mexico has the richest man in the world (Carlos Slim), and lots of affluence too, but no one considers them an advanced nation either. It's not gun proliferation that causes America's problems with crime, violence, and poverty. Somehow liberals seem to think that if we just get rid of the guns, we'll suddenly turn into a gigantic version of Sweden or Norway. It doesn't work that way. Those countries are ultra-safe because of their culture. We don't have that kind of culture. Our culture is more like that of El Salvador, in many areas of the country.
Better yet, forget all that stuff and teach them to arrange clothing at a store like Abercrombie or to make a coffee at Starbuck's, because that's where all the jobs in the future will be: retail.
Oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers are for examining analog signals. Logic analyzers are only useful for digital signals. They're in two different domains. You can't use a logic analyzer to debug a power supply design.
(Caveat: The name on the box notwithstanding, Verizon no longer owns our fiber connection,
That might have something to do with it....
Well, it's new jersey. I don't have any other explanation.
All the articles about the Verizon/Netflix war of words and low performance are not about New Jersey, they're nationwide.
The National Guard didn't exist until the 20th century. The Founders didn't envision such a thing. If you want to go back to what the original Constitution allowed, you need to just have state militias.
What success? The UK is an island, in case you didn't notice. Australia is too. It's much easier to prevent the smuggling of contraband (like weapons) into an island than into a country with vast, undefended borders.
I live in NJ, and I have Comcast. I also have a fiber to my home, from Verizon, and I don't use it for two reasons: 1) it's more expensive than Comcrap (not by much), and 2) it's slower than Comcrap. Did you miss the recent rash of articles about Netflix and Verizon getting into a row about Verizon being too slow? I don't have that problem with Comcrap lately, after they did their peering agreement with Netflix.
Fiber from Verizon is most certainly not "the greatest thing since sliced bread". That's utterly insane.
And he gets rude. Once he yelled at my wife.
It'd be funny if a Comcast (or Verizon) salesperson did this in Texas or Florida and was shot.
I called the office and complained. Of course, nothing came of it.
You should have called the police and filed a report, then gone to court and gotten a restraining order against the company.
And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on?
They don't have to; that's what Google/Bing/DDG is for.
If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do)
That shouldn't be done either. If they sell in a country, it'd be in their interest to have a domain in that country's domain: Sony would have sony.co.jp for Japan, and sony.co.us for the US, and sony.co.uk for the UK, etc. Google/Bing/DDG would direct you to the one for your country as the first choice, since it's most likely that's what you're looking for.
I'm not saying companies have to be restricted to one country's TLD, if that's what you're thinking. They could have different sites in different countries. However, it'd be nice to not have to select which country I'm in when I go to fedex.com; instead, I'd go to fedex.co.us, and get the American site. (Yes, I can go to fedex.com/us, but that's not a standard or convention, and differs from site to site.) Most likely, browsers would tack on your country code automatically, so I could just type in fedex.co, and it'd automatically tack on the .us and send me there.
Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.
I don't see how this would make that any more difficult.
Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact
Globalization is not a fact. Quick question: should selling Nazi paraphernalia be legal or not? The US says yes, Germany says no. Whose law is Ebay supposed to follow? If Ebay has ebay.co.us and ebay.co.de, they can follow different laws in each site. (Those domains can direct to a server farm in the US even, but the .co.de-facing version would have to follow .de laws.) Instead, today, we have things like France trying to force its laws on American companies on their "global" .com sites.
If you want a globalized internet without country codes, then you need to get rid of all countries first, and set up a single planetary government. Until that day comes (which won't be anytime soon), we should keep the internet's TLDs segregated by country, so each country has sovereignty over its TLD. Obviously, this doesn't mean someone in the US can't go visit the .co.de site of some company if they want, but it'll be completely obvious that they're now "virtually" in another country, and the site is going to follow the laws of that country, rather than their home country.
Other than 40 years of Star Trek finding civilizations everywhere, do we have anything scientific to base our estimates on?
Star Trek actually didn't postulate the existence of tons of different civilizations evolving independently; there was a TOS episode where they introduced the idea of some early civilization which seeded the galaxy (or at least this part of it), explaining why there were so many worlds with humanoid lifeforms.
How would a Dyson sphere be detected? If it's partially or completely blocking its host star, we wouldn't see it. We only see other planets because of the way they dim light from their host stars.
This is just another example of people in the industry being out of touch with reality. Maybe if they would spend more time out of their cube watching how real people perform their work,
Where are these "cubes" (short for "cubicle") you speak of? I haven't seen a cubicle in over a decade now. Every workplace has moved to "open-plan work areas". Sometimes they still call them "cubes", but if you can see over the wall while seated, it's not a cubicle, it's open-plan.
You complain about "people in the industry"; I contend that industry was much better back when engineers actually sat in cubicles, or better yet, offices.
The comment from "ExecutorElassus" above. He advocates making immigrants work "awful, backbreaking work that pays bullshit", and threatens that the US economy will collapse if we don't exploit these people this way. Did you somehow miss this?
Lots of cars these days have highly-raked windshields. Optical distortion and rollover protection don't seem to be a problem for them.
Please see my other post in this thread.
It's weird how liberals on one hand argue for high minimum wages and unions, and then on the other hand openly advocate labor exploitation. I'm starting to think liberals are the real racists.
The absurd permission demands from simple, crappy applications is why I'd love to see a real alternative to Android that doesn't cost Apple prices.
It seems like Cyanogenmod is probably the best alternative available right now.
Here's a picture of an actual prototype SkyTran car. You're probably right; those first pictures were just early artistic concepts. Here's another. They're building this system now in Tel Aviv.
As for all your stuff about cars, do you have any examples of cars which are decent aerodynamically, and not just infeasible prototypes and concepts?
We just need to go back to Anglo-Saxon Old English.
Honestly, I'll be happy if we can just get people's style preferences to shift away from naturally high-drag forms like those ridiculous oversized front-end things where you can barely see over the hood.
Part of the reason cars still look like this is for crash protection. Even mid-engine cars like Ferraris, as well as Teslas which have the motor in the back and batteries on the bottom, have long hoods, for crash protection. If you stick the passengers at the front of the car, you'll have no crumple zone and therefore no survivability in the event of a frontal crash.
If you want to see a vehicle with REAL aerodynamics, check out SkyTran PRT. Since these vehicles are designed for maximal efficiency, and don't have to worry much about crashes since they're on rails, the people pods are designed for optimal aerodynamics.