How about abandoning the idea of attempting to compete with Microsoft in the US because of these idiotic regulatory problems, and instead push for FOSS to be standardized in other countries? Then push for US businesses to move their operations, bit by bit, to these other countries where they're free of this. Eventually, the US empire will collapse.
No, a better idea is to follow the 38 States proposal made in the 70s (but with a little updating since there's been some big demographic changes since then). The NYC metro area should indeed be a separate state, but this holds for every metro area. Basically, no metro area should ever cross a state line, whether it's NYC, Chicago/Milwaukee, Portland, or Louisville. After this, the state boundaries should be drawn to keep local cultures together and minimize political infighting.
This proposal is terrible for this exact reason: local cultures are being completely ignored.
The 38 States proposal made in the 70s was a much better thought-out idea which started by making sure metro areas were nowhere near state lines, and then grouping together regions based on local cultures. They attempted to make the resulting states fairly equal population-wise, but that wasn't the overriding goal as this dumb 50-state idea in TFA.
I prefer the 38 States proposal made back in the 70s. I think it does a much better job of grouping together people in the country based on their local culture, rather than focusing solely on population and watersheds. It could use a little updating to reflect the significant demographic changes in the last 40 years, but overall I think it's quite sound.
We need lots of states rather than 1 because having a single government, with ~500 legislators, controlling most of the continent, and attempting to make laws managing all the disparate places in this country, won't work. It's the exact same reason a corporation the size of Google or Microsoft or IBM doesn't have a board of directors making all the decisions for the entire country, and organizes the company into "divisions" or "business units", each with its own management. How old are you anyway? This is the kind of comment I'd expect out of a 10-year-old.
You do have a good point, though unintentional, with your comment about why we need 50 states. Why 50? Why not 38 states? More states means more administrative overhead. 1 is obviously stupid, however maybe 50 is too many; we could save a lot of administrative overhead by having fewer states, maybe 20 or 30 or 40 instead of 50. According to TFA, the reason they stuck with 50 is so they don't have to change the Constitution (namely the part about the Electoral College), but I think that's ridiculous; the Constitution is outdated, especially the Electoral College bit, and needs to be revised extensively. Personally, I think we should dump the whole President thing and switch to a Westminster Parliamentary system like the UK, Canada, Australia, and lots of other countries have. The President has way too much power, and we saw the problems with that in WWII in Germany, and the people focus too much on choosing the President and totally ignore all the other choices they need to make on the ballot, and we end up with a President at odds with the Congress and no progress made.
Finally, I think this new 50 states proposal is pretty bad, as it seems to totally ignore local culture, focusing instead only on population and watersheds. The only thing they got right was starting with metro areas, but the 38 States proposal from the 70s did that too, and focused on organizing states based on local cultures, so as to eliminate infighting, rather than slapping together different groups of people just to make the numbers work out, which will surely only result in infighting in the new states as these groups' cultures clash.
Personally, I'm hoping the country breaks apart, because that's the only way this place (or at least parts of it) will be nice places to live, rather than resembling modern-day Russia, another country that's a burned-out remnant of a failed empire.
The Republicans' refusal to raise taxes is the correct action; we don't need higher taxes, especially in a bad economy; we need (much) lower spending. Unfortunately, the Democrats (and Republicans) refuse to cut spending, namely for our ridiculously huge military. Obviously, the Democrats are too addicted to unending warfare, massive payments to defense contractors, and being able to murder people with drones to stop. The best outcome is for our horrible mismanagement to cause everything to collapse around us, so we can break apart into smaller countries and rebuild into prosperous countries without all this dependence on a giant military and empire-building. Otherwise, we're going to resemble the last days of the Roman Empire.
I think, unless you either use a piano-like keyboard, or some rather advanced technology (like a chording keyboard connected to a computer with special music software), it'd be pretty much impossible to make a one-handed instrument that plays chords. Woodwinds are all single-note instruments; you can only play one note or tone at a time. Guitars are multi-note instruments, like pianos, and let you play many notes at once. So it makes perfect sense that you could adapt a monotone instrument to be played with one hand, likely by reducing the instrument's range, since you now have half as many fingers available to press valves or close holes, though you might be able to make better use of the thumb than is normally done with these instruments--the thumb is usually used to hold the instrument in place, which could be done with a mechanical arm or fixture instead. With a piano, each key is actuated by a finger, so you're limited by how wide your hand can span if you only have one hand. With a stringed instrument, it's probably impossible; you need one hand to fret notes, and another to pluck the correct strings, unless maybe you limit yourself to playing 6-string chords and rig up a foot pedal which activates a mechanical arm which strums the strings. But you can forget about precision picking of particular strings if you do this, but I guess you could play most country songs just fine that way.
I'll tell you what this guy needs to do: he needs to put his pinky finger (and maybe the ring finger too, if it's also causing problems) in a splint, the kind you get when you break your finger. Then retrain himself to type while having these fingers unusable. I've had to do it before when I sprained a finger; it wasn't hard at all to adapt to typing without the one finger.
In addition to that, he needs to switch to Dvorak, and maybe make his own altered version of Dvorak (the Wiki article notes that Piers Anthony does this himself). I'd recommend moving the S, L, and N and maybe R keys to the left side, to replace Q, J, K, and B (or maybe P or Y). Or, since the standard Dvorak keyboard does indeed favor right-handedness as has been pointed out here, he could remap all the keys so that left and right are swapped entirely. This would probably look like this: (number row stays the same) Tab L R C G F Y P . , ' / = \ Caps S N T H D I U E O A - Enter Shift Z V W M B X K J Q ; Shift
This way, he'd mainly only use the right hand for vowels and punctuation, plus the rare letters like Q and J, and the left hand would be used for all the most-used consonants.
Wrong. You're totally ignoring the network effects. It's not just the idiot student's problem, it's our problem too.
Yes, you cannot default on your student loans. However, there is no way to force someone to pay their loans back. So if someone defaults on their loan, the only way for the lender to get that money back is to sue the student, and get a judgment to collect the money. Suing costs money in court and attorney fees. Collecting costs money in hiring someone to track down the person's employer and then file more court papers to garnish their wages. If the person isn't working (they live at home), or is working for cash, then you're outta luck; you can't collect from them. If they're working at McDonald's, you probably still can't collect, because there's laws that limit how much you can garnish someone's paycheck to pay a debt (esp. if it's not for child support payments, but some other less-important debt). Now, when you throw in all the interest accrual, no, that burger-flipper will NOT be able to ever repay that $100k loan, and isn't going to try either.
The end result of all this is, at some point, you're going to hit a bump where tons of ex-students default on their student loans because they don't have decent jobs and can't repay the loans, and it's 2008 all over again, with banks crying to the government and getting bail-out checks, with the students still not able to get a job or allieviate this debt, so they can never get a decent job (what's the point? Their wages will be garnished so they won't make any more than flipping burgers, so they won't even try). So now we have a whole generation of NEETs who have a worthless "education" from some university that's watered down their standards as written about in the article here, and no one able to do high-value jobs, and either a bunch of financial institutions either out of business because of all these bad loans and the economy taking a giant hit because of these "too big to fail" banks going under, or trillions of dollars passed from the government to these lenders, for free, to prop them up just like we did in 2008, all financed by the taxpayer.
Finally, Universities aren't supposed to charge whatever people are willing to pay. They're government-managed (to a point) institutions, so they're not supposed to be working for a profit. We're not talking about Unversity of Phoenix here.
Ever try to steer a car equipped with power steering, when the engine is off?
Sure I have. It's easy, until you get down to about 5mph. If you're driving in a straight line (which is likely if you were racing along at 125mph), then you don't even need to steer much. This whole story reeks.
In my experience, there's plenty of articles posted there in the tech sections, plus it's much, much, much better laid out (e.g., there's a separate "Linux" subreddit at/r/Linux where you can read Linux-specific articles, there's a separate "science" subreddit, a separate "technology" subreddit, there's probably Windows and Apple ones too if you're into that, etc. Unlike Slashdot where everything is mushed together in one, plus stupid slashvertisements like this dumb EMC article here). The "lack" is that there isn't nearly as much posting activity in the comments. However, there also seem to be far, far fewer trolls, so it balances out somewhat. It probably helps that Reddit doesn't have the idiotic Slashdot moderation system where only certain people get mod points sometimes, and then aren't allowed to post in the same discussion that they use their mod points in; of course, this does make it more of a popularity contest (unpopular posts get modded way down), but that's still better than the broken system that Slashdot has, as obvious trolls and shills will get modded down to negative points.
Check out Reddit. The site works much better than Slashdot (especially the moderation system), the only problem is that the tech forums aren't as active.
The editing consists of clicking a button and saying "what the fuck, here goes" with minimal "editing" of any kind.
You're massively exaggerating the amount of work done by Slashdot editors. At best, they click a button and if they're feeling bery generous, utter "here goes". There sure is hell isn't any editing at all done, definitely nothing that qualifies as "minimal".
Maybe, but remember, the English language is defined by its usage. So if they use it that way long enough and often enough, it becomes correct usage. Your "surveilled" word is a good example of this.
Sorry, no. Police are not civilians; that's why the police call non-police citizens "civilians". Obviously, they wouldn't use that term if police were also civilians.
Police (in the USA) are a paramilitary force. That means they're neither full military, nor civilian. For parallels, read up on the Brownshirts and the SS.
So what? So they gather a bunch of info from your email, to show you targeted ads, but then you're not actually using their webmail interface, so you never see the targeted ads. What's the problem? So maybe they make some money from advertisers for ads you're never shown. So what? How does that affect you?
How is Google "Evil with a capital E"? They've done a bunch of things I'm not wild about (Google+, pushing people to use real names on YouTube, that horrible UI redesign on GMail), but I just don't see them doing things to force people to use their services, unlike MS which has a long history of destroying competitors and abusing the patent system.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see how Google is being evil. Sure, they don't really respect privacy. That doesn't make them evil, it's just annoying, and makes me want to use their services less (e.g., I don't want to write reviews for local businesses if I have to sign them with my real name; I don't need them trying to sue me for libel). But there's a key difference between MS and Google: Google isn't a monopoly. There's alternatives for all of Google's services: Bing Search, DuckDuckGo, Bing Maps, Mapquest, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc., whereas with MS it's been pretty hard to not use their PC OS if you wanted to have a PC and use any third-party software (this has changed some with the rise of Apple). Also, MS has a long history of horribly anti-competitive behavior, attempting to destroy every competitor to force everyone to use their OS ("DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run"), abusing the patent system, etc. I haven't seen much of that from Google.
If you don't like being served automated ads based on keywords in your emails, it's simple, don't use Gmail. It's not like there aren't literally thousands of alternatives for email. If you don't like Google+, don't use it (I don't).
When I think of an "illegal hotel", I don't think of a drop house for illegal immigrants, I think of someone renting out a room in their house as a pseudo-bed-and-breakfast for travelers, without getting the proper permit or paying the (probably ridiculous) taxes and fees needed to set up that business.
Is this new enforcement action going after the truly dangerous situations (28 people in one apartment), or the people trying to make a little extra money by renting out a room?
I thought the "Windows Tax" wasn't really an issue though: people have complained many times before how Dell would offer a PC with Windows and Linux, and the Linux version would cost more, and it turned out the reason was that, even though the Windows license added to the cost, it was more than made up for by the kickbacks they got from all the crapware pre-loaded. Effectively, the crapware helped subsidized the computer. So if you're just going to wipe the HD and install Linux, a computer subsidized by crapware can be a pretty good deal.
Slashdot Mirror
How about abandoning the idea of attempting to compete with Microsoft in the US because of these idiotic regulatory problems, and instead push for FOSS to be standardized in other countries? Then push for US businesses to move their operations, bit by bit, to these other countries where they're free of this. Eventually, the US empire will collapse.
No, a better idea is to follow the 38 States proposal made in the 70s (but with a little updating since there's been some big demographic changes since then). The NYC metro area should indeed be a separate state, but this holds for every metro area. Basically, no metro area should ever cross a state line, whether it's NYC, Chicago/Milwaukee, Portland, or Louisville. After this, the state boundaries should be drawn to keep local cultures together and minimize political infighting.
This proposal is terrible for this exact reason: local cultures are being completely ignored.
The 38 States proposal made in the 70s was a much better thought-out idea which started by making sure metro areas were nowhere near state lines, and then grouping together regions based on local cultures. They attempted to make the resulting states fairly equal population-wise, but that wasn't the overriding goal as this dumb 50-state idea in TFA.
I prefer the 38 States proposal made back in the 70s. I think it does a much better job of grouping together people in the country based on their local culture, rather than focusing solely on population and watersheds. It could use a little updating to reflect the significant demographic changes in the last 40 years, but overall I think it's quite sound.
We need lots of states rather than 1 because having a single government, with ~500 legislators, controlling most of the continent, and attempting to make laws managing all the disparate places in this country, won't work. It's the exact same reason a corporation the size of Google or Microsoft or IBM doesn't have a board of directors making all the decisions for the entire country, and organizes the company into "divisions" or "business units", each with its own management. How old are you anyway? This is the kind of comment I'd expect out of a 10-year-old.
You do have a good point, though unintentional, with your comment about why we need 50 states. Why 50? Why not 38 states? More states means more administrative overhead. 1 is obviously stupid, however maybe 50 is too many; we could save a lot of administrative overhead by having fewer states, maybe 20 or 30 or 40 instead of 50. According to TFA, the reason they stuck with 50 is so they don't have to change the Constitution (namely the part about the Electoral College), but I think that's ridiculous; the Constitution is outdated, especially the Electoral College bit, and needs to be revised extensively. Personally, I think we should dump the whole President thing and switch to a Westminster Parliamentary system like the UK, Canada, Australia, and lots of other countries have. The President has way too much power, and we saw the problems with that in WWII in Germany, and the people focus too much on choosing the President and totally ignore all the other choices they need to make on the ballot, and we end up with a President at odds with the Congress and no progress made.
Finally, I think this new 50 states proposal is pretty bad, as it seems to totally ignore local culture, focusing instead only on population and watersheds. The only thing they got right was starting with metro areas, but the 38 States proposal from the 70s did that too, and focused on organizing states based on local cultures, so as to eliminate infighting, rather than slapping together different groups of people just to make the numbers work out, which will surely only result in infighting in the new states as these groups' cultures clash.
Personally, I'm hoping the country breaks apart, because that's the only way this place (or at least parts of it) will be nice places to live, rather than resembling modern-day Russia, another country that's a burned-out remnant of a failed empire.
The Republicans' refusal to raise taxes is the correct action; we don't need higher taxes, especially in a bad economy; we need (much) lower spending. Unfortunately, the Democrats (and Republicans) refuse to cut spending, namely for our ridiculously huge military. Obviously, the Democrats are too addicted to unending warfare, massive payments to defense contractors, and being able to murder people with drones to stop. The best outcome is for our horrible mismanagement to cause everything to collapse around us, so we can break apart into smaller countries and rebuild into prosperous countries without all this dependence on a giant military and empire-building. Otherwise, we're going to resemble the last days of the Roman Empire.
I think, unless you either use a piano-like keyboard, or some rather advanced technology (like a chording keyboard connected to a computer with special music software), it'd be pretty much impossible to make a one-handed instrument that plays chords. Woodwinds are all single-note instruments; you can only play one note or tone at a time. Guitars are multi-note instruments, like pianos, and let you play many notes at once. So it makes perfect sense that you could adapt a monotone instrument to be played with one hand, likely by reducing the instrument's range, since you now have half as many fingers available to press valves or close holes, though you might be able to make better use of the thumb than is normally done with these instruments--the thumb is usually used to hold the instrument in place, which could be done with a mechanical arm or fixture instead. With a piano, each key is actuated by a finger, so you're limited by how wide your hand can span if you only have one hand. With a stringed instrument, it's probably impossible; you need one hand to fret notes, and another to pluck the correct strings, unless maybe you limit yourself to playing 6-string chords and rig up a foot pedal which activates a mechanical arm which strums the strings. But you can forget about precision picking of particular strings if you do this, but I guess you could play most country songs just fine that way.
I'll tell you what this guy needs to do: he needs to put his pinky finger (and maybe the ring finger too, if it's also causing problems) in a splint, the kind you get when you break your finger. Then retrain himself to type while having these fingers unusable. I've had to do it before when I sprained a finger; it wasn't hard at all to adapt to typing without the one finger.
In addition to that, he needs to switch to Dvorak, and maybe make his own altered version of Dvorak (the Wiki article notes that Piers Anthony does this himself). I'd recommend moving the S, L, and N and maybe R keys to the left side, to replace Q, J, K, and B (or maybe P or Y). Or, since the standard Dvorak keyboard does indeed favor right-handedness as has been pointed out here, he could remap all the keys so that left and right are swapped entirely. This would probably look like this:
(number row stays the same)
Tab L R C G F Y P . , ' / = \
Caps S N T H D I U E O A - Enter
Shift Z V W M B X K J Q ; Shift
This way, he'd mainly only use the right hand for vowels and punctuation, plus the rare letters like Q and J, and the left hand would be used for all the most-used consonants.
Wrong. You're totally ignoring the network effects. It's not just the idiot student's problem, it's our problem too.
Yes, you cannot default on your student loans. However, there is no way to force someone to pay their loans back. So if someone defaults on their loan, the only way for the lender to get that money back is to sue the student, and get a judgment to collect the money. Suing costs money in court and attorney fees. Collecting costs money in hiring someone to track down the person's employer and then file more court papers to garnish their wages. If the person isn't working (they live at home), or is working for cash, then you're outta luck; you can't collect from them. If they're working at McDonald's, you probably still can't collect, because there's laws that limit how much you can garnish someone's paycheck to pay a debt (esp. if it's not for child support payments, but some other less-important debt). Now, when you throw in all the interest accrual, no, that burger-flipper will NOT be able to ever repay that $100k loan, and isn't going to try either.
The end result of all this is, at some point, you're going to hit a bump where tons of ex-students default on their student loans because they don't have decent jobs and can't repay the loans, and it's 2008 all over again, with banks crying to the government and getting bail-out checks, with the students still not able to get a job or allieviate this debt, so they can never get a decent job (what's the point? Their wages will be garnished so they won't make any more than flipping burgers, so they won't even try). So now we have a whole generation of NEETs who have a worthless "education" from some university that's watered down their standards as written about in the article here, and no one able to do high-value jobs, and either a bunch of financial institutions either out of business because of all these bad loans and the economy taking a giant hit because of these "too big to fail" banks going under, or trillions of dollars passed from the government to these lenders, for free, to prop them up just like we did in 2008, all financed by the taxpayer.
Finally, Universities aren't supposed to charge whatever people are willing to pay. They're government-managed (to a point) institutions, so they're not supposed to be working for a profit. We're not talking about Unversity of Phoenix here.
There isn't a mechanical means by which you can push the brake and somehow accelerate the car - unless you're hitting the accelrator.
Or unless this was some fucked-up drive-by-wire (or rather, brake-by-wire) system.
Ever try to steer a car equipped with power steering, when the engine is off?
Sure I have. It's easy, until you get down to about 5mph. If you're driving in a straight line (which is likely if you were racing along at 125mph), then you don't even need to steer much. This whole story reeks.
In my experience, there's plenty of articles posted there in the tech sections, plus it's much, much, much better laid out (e.g., there's a separate "Linux" subreddit at /r/Linux where you can read Linux-specific articles, there's a separate "science" subreddit, a separate "technology" subreddit, there's probably Windows and Apple ones too if you're into that, etc. Unlike Slashdot where everything is mushed together in one, plus stupid slashvertisements like this dumb EMC article here). The "lack" is that there isn't nearly as much posting activity in the comments. However, there also seem to be far, far fewer trolls, so it balances out somewhat. It probably helps that Reddit doesn't have the idiotic Slashdot moderation system where only certain people get mod points sometimes, and then aren't allowed to post in the same discussion that they use their mod points in; of course, this does make it more of a popularity contest (unpopular posts get modded way down), but that's still better than the broken system that Slashdot has, as obvious trolls and shills will get modded down to negative points.
Check out Reddit. The site works much better than Slashdot (especially the moderation system), the only problem is that the tech forums aren't as active.
You don't need another Slashdot, just go over to Reddit. Everything works better over there.
Only "Enterprise" companies are stupid enough to buy their overpriced shit.
Master chefs for fancy restaurants don't turn all that much. They order around a bunch of other chefs, who do the grunt work in the kitchen.
The editing consists of clicking a button and saying "what the fuck, here goes" with minimal "editing" of any kind.
You're massively exaggerating the amount of work done by Slashdot editors. At best, they click a button and if they're feeling bery generous, utter "here goes". There sure is hell isn't any editing at all done, definitely nothing that qualifies as "minimal".
Maybe, but remember, the English language is defined by its usage. So if they use it that way long enough and often enough, it becomes correct usage. Your "surveilled" word is a good example of this.
Sorry, no. Police are not civilians; that's why the police call non-police citizens "civilians". Obviously, they wouldn't use that term if police were also civilians.
Police (in the USA) are a paramilitary force. That means they're neither full military, nor civilian. For parallels, read up on the Brownshirts and the SS.
So what? So they gather a bunch of info from your email, to show you targeted ads, but then you're not actually using their webmail interface, so you never see the targeted ads. What's the problem? So maybe they make some money from advertisers for ads you're never shown. So what? How does that affect you?
How is Google "Evil with a capital E"? They've done a bunch of things I'm not wild about (Google+, pushing people to use real names on YouTube, that horrible UI redesign on GMail), but I just don't see them doing things to force people to use their services, unlike MS which has a long history of destroying competitors and abusing the patent system.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see how Google is being evil. Sure, they don't really respect privacy. That doesn't make them evil, it's just annoying, and makes me want to use their services less (e.g., I don't want to write reviews for local businesses if I have to sign them with my real name; I don't need them trying to sue me for libel). But there's a key difference between MS and Google: Google isn't a monopoly. There's alternatives for all of Google's services: Bing Search, DuckDuckGo, Bing Maps, Mapquest, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc., whereas with MS it's been pretty hard to not use their PC OS if you wanted to have a PC and use any third-party software (this has changed some with the rise of Apple). Also, MS has a long history of horribly anti-competitive behavior, attempting to destroy every competitor to force everyone to use their OS ("DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run"), abusing the patent system, etc. I haven't seen much of that from Google.
If you don't like being served automated ads based on keywords in your emails, it's simple, don't use Gmail. It's not like there aren't literally thousands of alternatives for email. If you don't like Google+, don't use it (I don't).
When I think of an "illegal hotel", I don't think of a drop house for illegal immigrants, I think of someone renting out a room in their house as a pseudo-bed-and-breakfast for travelers, without getting the proper permit or paying the (probably ridiculous) taxes and fees needed to set up that business.
Is this new enforcement action going after the truly dangerous situations (28 people in one apartment), or the people trying to make a little extra money by renting out a room?
Sorry, no. Gnome3 wasn't crapware that was ported to Linux from the Windows world, it's crapware made just for Linux.
I thought the "Windows Tax" wasn't really an issue though: people have complained many times before how Dell would offer a PC with Windows and Linux, and the Linux version would cost more, and it turned out the reason was that, even though the Windows license added to the cost, it was more than made up for by the kickbacks they got from all the crapware pre-loaded. Effectively, the crapware helped subsidized the computer. So if you're just going to wipe the HD and install Linux, a computer subsidized by crapware can be a pretty good deal.