Politicians are not the source of the problem. They are the symptom. Jim DeMint resigned the Senate to become a lobbyist. If the Senate was all-powerful, why would he do that?
The problem is the over-corporatization of society. Or as Mitt Romney said "Corporations are People too" (I know he didn't mean it literally, but still).
This has lead to this incestuous revolving-door relationship between Government and Business.
Personally, I feel that Government is the only thing we have that is big enough to be able to compete against Business.
It can work, like how Teddy Roosevelt became the Trust Buster (Henry Clay Frick, the steel baron complained, "We bought the son of a bitch and then he didn't stay bought.")
We need Business, but we also need a referee strong enough to enforce the rules. And Government is the only thing we have that is.
You really think an AR-15 will protect you from the government?
You gun-rights libertarians are sooo cute when you're living in your fantasy world.
How about instead of arming yourselves (and sending more profits to the gun manufacturers) we talk about de-militarizing the police and cutting military budgets, along with ending assaults on our liberty like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror and breaking the culture of secrecy created by the Cold War.
Really? It will make the police *less* likely to kick in doors?
What planet do you live on?
If we look at what has actually happened, we see an increasing militarization of the police. They are much more likely to use overwhelming force in all situations (flash-bang grenades, large SWAT teams, etc.), because safest thing for them to do is ensure that the people inside have no time/ability to arm themselves.
Consider that the Constitution was the *second* attempt to unite the former colonies, since the Articles of Confederation was seen as being way out of balance, with the States having way too much power w.r.t. the Federal Government.
And remember that the Declaration of Independence was the rhetorical culmination of the battle that started when Parliament wanted the colonists to pay the costs of the French and Indian War, and the rich New England colonists refused.
If you are truly honest you would understand that when you look at the court that it is filled with activist judges who care very little if at all for the Constitution and are just looking to make law that reflects what they want.
Which Justices advertise themselves as "originalists" who the Constitution as a document chiseled in stone, where all interpretation of current law is based on the Founders' original intent, and then choose to throw that belief away when it's inconvenient?
Hint: It's not the "liberals" (not that the Court actually has any liberals, but that's another argument)
If you think it is just Scalia or just the Conservatives on the court that are evil you are either stupid or a liar
Please elaborate on what Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, or the other "liberals" have done that is "evil". Or do you always speak in Limbaugh-ian hyperbole?
Some possible solutions: Stop the wind turbines from spinning (or just slow them down) when the bats are most likely to be flying by it (usually at sunset/sunrise). Or not building turbines in locations that are heavily traveled by bats. There are other solutions being researched, such as emitting sounds that mimic the bats' own echo-location signals.
The tabloids will usually say "our unnamed source who is close to Demi says that Demi is pining for Ashton."
So the facts of the story are about the story *as told by the source*, not the story in and of itself. If the source was incorrect, the story was still accurate, because they were merely quoting the source. This makes the tabloids extremely difficult to sue successfully, because you have to prove that the tabloids knew the sources information was false.
I never said that blacks today don't have more opportunity now than 200 years ago. What I said was that the economics of the wage theft that occurred then is still evident in the relative wealth of blacks vs. whites.
You can always point out individuals that have done better (notice your examples made their money in the entertainment industry, so too Paul Robeson, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Lena Horne, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods).
But taken in the aggregate, whites have benefited from the wage theft that occurred throughout history. It's becoming more class-based (more whites are getting wages stolen because of laws like Right To Work and such) but race is still a big component of it.
Ever wonder why "Right To Work" laws were first passed in the South in the 1950's, at the beginning of the Civil Rights era?
While I don't believe that direct-payment "reparations" are the answer, to dismiss proponents with "shut up" is to ignore the history of black/white disparity.
Apparently you don't realize the massive advantage that accrued to whites as a whole due to slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of wage theft that blacks suffered through history.
The average white person receives gets significantly more wealth from his/her parents, and the reason for that is because their parents were able to pass down more wealth, and so on.
When a class (or race) systematically have their entire wealth stolen, they cannot pass wealth they do not have on to their children. That disparity is not solved in a single generation.
Oh, and telling people to "shut up" because you disagree with them, how very Limbaugh-ian of you.
I remember getting a push poll call from the NRA after the 2000 election. They said they wanted to poll me after listening to a prerecorded message.
This message was a screed about how newly elected Senator Hillary Clinton was going to take away my guns, never mind the fact that George W Bush was just elected president (by a vote of 5-4, but never mind) and the R's also had control of both the House and Senate (Cheney being the tie-breaking vote), as if one minority Senator had these magic powers.
Perhaps they heard my mocking laughter during the message, because the call dropped after the message, so I never got to tell their pollster my opinion.
Correction: the big-Oh should be O(m*n^c), where c is a number that does not increase with the complexity of the input, though `n` and 'm' may.
Not quite.
Problems in the set P mean they are solvable in polynomial time O(mn^c), where n is the size of the input and m and c are constants. m and ndo not increase with the complexity of the input. They have a constant upper bound regardless of input size or complexity. If your m or n is increasing, you may be hiding an exponential term (c^n) within that function.
Two things: 1) Both left-wingers and right-wingers work incrementally. For examples: (Right-wing) the loosening of handgun laws (where many states now allow concealed carry) has been done gradually. (Left-wing) The program that provides kidney dialysis to all people started small in the early 70's but has grown in scope significantly since then. 2) Care to elaborate on the liberal bandwagon issues that your friends cannot think for themselves about? Surveys have consistently shown that right-wingers (especially Fox News Viewers) are more mis-informed about the issues than are left-wingers. And since the left tends to be much more fragmented, it's understandable that any one particular liberal might be uninformed about some issue that's near and dear to another set of liberals. Conservatives tend to be more unified, because it's much easier to argue for "No!" than to argue for "We must do [insert pet project here]".
It's not simply "this culture's unwillingness to churn out better engineers".
It's the fact that engineers and scientists are not rewarded for their work the same way that doctors (at least specialists), lawyers, and MBA's are.
How many lawyers have to worry that they will be considered "too old" when the hit 40?
How many MBA's see their career path end at a mid-level position when they are 30?
Society simply cannot expect the best and brightest to take the engineering/scientist route when there's no support for the engineering/scientist to be a complete, fulfilling career.
The big reason for this so-called "shortage" is that there is no real career path and no job security for computer programmers.
When you throw out a programmer when he's 35-40, and he can't find a job in the industry, what kind of incentive is there to spend 5 or more years of your life preparing for such a career?
So it might have been the first command line adventure game, but being the first doesn't make it important if it didn't included some technical breakthrough: AI, intuitive gameplay, impressive artwork that was not supposed to be posible for that system, original story or something like that. i.e. PoP introduced a new kind of animation fo the movements of the character looked realistic.
You are so wrong.
Zork was not the first text adventure, but the technical breakthough there was that it was able to pack lots verbose descriptions of places and events in a very small space (less than 48KB mem, 130KB floppy disks)). You forget the (lack of) power that home computers had in 1980.
AI: Zork's parser an incredible leap at the time. Previous adventures used commands like "USE SCREWDRIVER" unscrew a screw.
Zork did stuff like:
>> UNSCREW THE SCREW
Which screw, the Phillips screw or the standard screw?
>> STANDARD
>> You unscrew the standard screw. The control panel falls on your foot. Your scream of pain wakes up a grue, who decides to eat you.
ANd remember, artwork is more than graphics. Since the graphics on the computers of the time was either poor or non-existent, Zork made up for it with the verbosity of the descriptions.
In summary, here's a (likely incomplete) list of the technical breakthroughs of Zork: 1) A parser that could understand more that just two-word "Verb Direct-Object" commands (e.g. "GO HOUSE". Look at the old Scott Adams Adventures for more examples). 2) Paragraph-length (or more) descriptions of places and events, that allowed the player to become more immersed into the game. This all packed into the tiny computers of the late 70's. 3) Multi-platform. Zork ran on virtually every home computer from the Osborne to the Apple II. 4) Z-Interpreter. Zork was done as Z-code, ran though an interpreter. The same interpreter was used for several games. 5) Fun packaging. The manuals and other sundries that came with the game were interesting, and prized by collectors today.
I think you need a little more appreciation for the state of home computing in 1980.
The right has been stacking the courts for the last 26 years (excluding a brief respite during the Clinton admin, but in that case, they simply refused to act on over 60 of Clinton's nominations).
Remember the "Unitary Executive" fights during the Roberts and Alito nomination hearings? Bush is saying with these signing statements that he is only subject to the laws he wants to be, and can run the country how he sees fit (the MBA at work here). This is the "Unitary Executive". I believe that Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would support the legality of these signing statements. Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer would not. Kennedy and Roberts? Don't know.
In short: at the present, most legal scholars believe the signing statements are not legally binding. But the right is working very hard to ensure that they will be.
We see yet again another example of the so-called "non-biased" media equating a pedophile (Foley) and a racist (Allen), both Republicans, with a former president upset about being misrepresented in a movie purporting to be based on real events, when it was based on what the right-wing wanted you to believe were the real events.
In this case, the Clinton scandal was really the Clinton-haters lying (yet again). But that's beside the point.
What this is is the typical example of balance
1. Show a major Republican gaffe 2. Show a minor Democratic gaffe 3. Claim that both parties are guilty, so neither has the moral high ground. 4. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I stayed because I was hoping that *somebody* would be funny at some point during the show. I was wrong.
And I did leave temporarily when Andy Dick started his riff on Kirk/Spock stories. And while mentioning the masturbating to Farrah's poster was funny the first time, by the sixth time not so much. And that was the *other* thing. They were supposed to be roasting *Shatner*, not each other. I couldn't have cared less about that woman comedian, yet they seemed to all have an insult for her.
There were a few funny bits. The comedian (can't recall his name) who essentially invented the Shatner dramatic pause impersonation should have been on much longer (his routine was definitely cut). Betty White was OK but not great. Fred Willard the same. The others, especialy the drunk from Stern's show and Andy Dick, needed to be put out of my misery.
And while there were other types of jokes (Shatner's singing montage was the best), the gay jokes just totally overwhelmed everything else. Sadly, that's the lasting impression I have from the show, that it *was* 2 hours of gay jokes.
I think they failed to realize that the audience for this show would be quite different from most of their roasts (the influx of trekkies of many ages), and assumed the type of jokes that work for the people who watch Jackass, Crank Yankers, and Mind of Mencia would also work for this audience.
And every review I'm seen of it from Star Trek centric POV's thought it was terrible.
Perhaps if you enjoy 2 hours of homosexual jokes from C-list comedians.
At what the heck was Farrah Fawcett doing there? I checked IMDB. She had never worked with Shatner before.
I think a lot of the reaction clips (the laughs from the audience and the roasters/roastee) were cut in from other times in the show, because so much of it was so unfunny. They certainly seemed uneven to me.
Shatner should have taken Nimoy's advice -- Don't do it.
"Leeching off of the city dwellers" means that the extra infrastructure costs of urban sprawl are typically shared across the entire population (in the form of income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, higher insurance rates, and higher utility costs), rather than assigned directly to the people that choose to "get away from it all" and live out in the sprawl.
Essentially, the "sprawlers" are subsidized by the people who stay in the cities or existing suburbs.
The sad fact is that urban sprawl is unsustainable. Not only are we covering up prime farmland with McMansions, but the energy cost is unsustainable, especially considering the dual problems of Peak Oil and Global Warming.
Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" would be an excellent first step in your education.
Slashdot Mirror
Politicians are not the source of the problem. They are the symptom. Jim DeMint resigned the Senate to become a lobbyist. If the Senate was all-powerful, why would he do that?
The problem is the over-corporatization of society. Or as Mitt Romney said "Corporations are People too" (I know he didn't mean it literally, but still).
This has lead to this incestuous revolving-door relationship between Government and Business.
Personally, I feel that Government is the only thing we have that is big enough to be able to compete against Business.
It can work, like how Teddy Roosevelt became the Trust Buster (Henry Clay Frick, the steel baron complained, "We bought the son of a bitch and then he didn't stay bought.")
We need Business, but we also need a referee strong enough to enforce the rules. And Government is the only thing we have that is.
You really think an AR-15 will protect you from the government?
You gun-rights libertarians are sooo cute when you're living in your fantasy world.
How about instead of arming yourselves (and sending more profits to the gun manufacturers) we talk about de-militarizing the police and cutting military budgets, along with ending assaults on our liberty like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror and breaking the culture of secrecy created by the Cold War.
Really? It will make the police *less* likely to kick in doors?
What planet do you live on?
If we look at what has actually happened, we see an increasing militarization of the police. They are much more likely to use overwhelming force in all situations (flash-bang grenades, large SWAT teams, etc.), because safest thing for them to do is ensure that the people inside have no time/ability to arm themselves.
Ever watched "Cops"?
Some of them, yes.
Consider that the Constitution was the *second* attempt to unite the former colonies, since the Articles of Confederation was seen as being way out of balance, with the States having way too much power w.r.t. the Federal Government.
And remember that the Declaration of Independence was the rhetorical culmination of the battle that started when Parliament wanted the colonists to pay the costs of the French and Indian War, and the rich New England colonists refused.
Which Justices advertise themselves as "originalists" who the Constitution as a document chiseled in stone, where all interpretation of current law is based on the Founders' original intent, and then choose to throw that belief away when it's inconvenient? Hint: It's not the "liberals" (not that the Court actually has any liberals, but that's another argument)
Please elaborate on what Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, or the other "liberals" have done that is "evil". Or do you always speak in Limbaugh-ian hyperbole?
Some possible solutions: Stop the wind turbines from spinning (or just slow them down) when the bats are most likely to be flying by it (usually at sunset/sunrise). Or not building turbines in locations that are heavily traveled by bats. There are other solutions being researched, such as emitting sounds that mimic the bats' own echo-location signals.
The problem is both bats running into the fins and that the bats' lungs cannot handle the pressure gradient produced by the moving blades. see http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/fixing-wind-powers-bat-problem
But this problem seems solvable, and in my opinion doesn't diminish the need for building more wind turbines.
Not quite.
The tabloids will usually say "our unnamed source who is close to Demi says that Demi is pining for Ashton."
So the facts of the story are about the story *as told by the source*, not the story in and of itself. If the source was incorrect, the story was still accurate, because they were merely quoting the source. This makes the tabloids extremely difficult to sue successfully, because you have to prove that the tabloids knew the sources information was false.
How dare the Evil Government abridge my Rights to Disable said other Persons keyless entry systems!
This was Obviously not the Intent of the Founders when they Wrote the Constitution!
WOLVERINES!
I never said that blacks today don't have more opportunity now than 200 years ago. What I said was that the economics of the wage theft that occurred then is still evident in the relative wealth of blacks vs. whites.
You can always point out individuals that have done better (notice your examples made their money in the entertainment industry, so too Paul Robeson, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Lena Horne, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods).
But taken in the aggregate, whites have benefited from the wage theft that occurred throughout history. It's becoming more class-based (more whites are getting wages stolen because of laws like Right To Work and such) but race is still a big component of it.
Ever wonder why "Right To Work" laws were first passed in the South in the 1950's, at the beginning of the Civil Rights era?
While I don't believe that direct-payment "reparations" are the answer, to dismiss proponents with "shut up" is to ignore the history of black/white disparity.
Apparently you don't realize the massive advantage that accrued to whites as a whole due to slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of wage theft that blacks suffered through history.
The average white person receives gets significantly more wealth from his/her parents, and the reason for that is because their parents were able to pass down more wealth, and so on.
When a class (or race) systematically have their entire wealth stolen, they cannot pass wealth they do not have on to their children. That disparity is not solved in a single generation.
Oh, and telling people to "shut up" because you disagree with them, how very Limbaugh-ian of you.
I remember getting a push poll call from the NRA after the 2000 election. They said they wanted to poll me after listening to a prerecorded message.
This message was a screed about how newly elected Senator Hillary Clinton was going to take away my guns, never mind the fact that George W Bush was just elected president (by a vote of 5-4, but never mind) and the R's also had control of both the House and Senate (Cheney being the tie-breaking vote), as if one minority Senator had these magic powers.
Perhaps they heard my mocking laughter during the message, because the call dropped after the message, so I never got to tell their pollster my opinion.
Not quite. Problems in the set P mean they are solvable in polynomial time O(mn^c), where n is the size of the input and m and c are constants. m and n do not increase with the complexity of the input. They have a constant upper bound regardless of input size or complexity. If your m or n is increasing, you may be hiding an exponential term (c^n) within that function.
Two things:
1) Both left-wingers and right-wingers work incrementally. For examples: (Right-wing) the loosening of handgun laws (where many states now allow concealed carry) has been done gradually. (Left-wing) The program that provides kidney dialysis to all people started small in the early 70's but has grown in scope significantly since then.
2) Care to elaborate on the liberal bandwagon issues that your friends cannot think for themselves about? Surveys have consistently shown that right-wingers (especially Fox News Viewers) are more mis-informed about the issues than are left-wingers. And since the left tends to be much more fragmented, it's understandable that any one particular liberal might be uninformed about some issue that's near and dear to another set of liberals. Conservatives tend to be more unified, because it's much easier to argue for "No!" than to argue for "We must do [insert pet project here]".
2d6
or an 8x8 square board, though 21x21 has had a lot of impact, too.
It's not simply "this culture's unwillingness to churn out better engineers".
It's the fact that engineers and scientists are not rewarded for their work the same way that doctors (at least specialists), lawyers, and MBA's are.
How many lawyers have to worry that they will be considered "too old" when the hit 40?
How many MBA's see their career path end at a mid-level position when they are 30?
Society simply cannot expect the best and brightest to take the engineering/scientist route when there's no support for the engineering/scientist to be a complete, fulfilling career.
The big reason for this so-called "shortage" is that there is no real career path and no job security for computer programmers.
When you throw out a programmer when he's 35-40, and he can't find a job in the industry, what kind of incentive is there to spend 5 or more years of your life preparing for such a career?
So it might have been the first command line adventure game, but being the first doesn't make it important if it didn't included some technical breakthrough: AI, intuitive gameplay, impressive artwork that was not supposed to be posible for that system, original story or something like that. i.e. PoP introduced a new kind of animation fo the movements of the character looked realistic.
You are so wrong.
Zork was not the first text adventure, but the technical breakthough there was that it was able to pack lots verbose descriptions of places and events in a very small space (less than 48KB mem, 130KB floppy disks)). You forget the (lack of) power that home computers had in 1980.
AI: Zork's parser an incredible leap at the time. Previous adventures used commands like "USE SCREWDRIVER" unscrew a screw.
Zork did stuff like:
>> UNSCREW THE SCREW
Which screw, the Phillips screw or the standard screw?
>> STANDARD
>> You unscrew the standard screw. The control panel falls on your foot. Your scream of pain wakes up a grue, who decides to eat you.
ANd remember, artwork is more than graphics. Since the graphics on the computers of the time was either poor or non-existent, Zork made up for it with the verbosity of the descriptions.
In summary, here's a (likely incomplete) list of the technical breakthroughs of Zork:
1) A parser that could understand more that just two-word "Verb Direct-Object" commands (e.g. "GO HOUSE". Look at the old Scott Adams Adventures for more examples).
2) Paragraph-length (or more) descriptions of places and events, that allowed the player to become more immersed into the game. This all packed into the tiny computers of the late 70's.
3) Multi-platform. Zork ran on virtually every home computer from the Osborne to the Apple II.
4) Z-Interpreter. Zork was done as Z-code, ran though an interpreter. The same interpreter was used for several games.
5) Fun packaging. The manuals and other sundries that came with the game were interesting, and prized by collectors today.
I think you need a little more appreciation for the state of home computing in 1980.
The right has been stacking the courts for the last 26 years (excluding a brief respite during the Clinton admin, but in that case, they simply refused to act on over 60 of Clinton's nominations).
Remember the "Unitary Executive" fights during the Roberts and Alito nomination hearings? Bush is saying with these signing statements that he is only subject to the laws he wants to be, and can run the country how he sees fit (the MBA at work here). This is the "Unitary Executive". I believe that Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would support the legality of these signing statements. Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer would not. Kennedy and Roberts? Don't know.
In short: at the present, most legal scholars believe the signing statements are not legally binding. But the right is working very hard to ensure that they will be.
when will you be leaving Middle School?
Don't you mean a falafel?
We see yet again another example of the so-called "non-biased" media equating a pedophile (Foley) and a racist (Allen), both Republicans, with a former president upset about being misrepresented in a movie purporting to be based on real events, when it was based on what the right-wing wanted you to believe were the real events.
In this case, the Clinton scandal was really the Clinton-haters lying (yet again). But that's beside the point.
What this is is the typical example of balance
1. Show a major Republican gaffe
2. Show a minor Democratic gaffe
3. Claim that both parties are guilty, so neither has the moral high ground.
4. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I stayed because I was hoping that *somebody* would be funny at some point during the show. I was wrong.
And I did leave temporarily when Andy Dick started his riff on Kirk/Spock stories. And while mentioning the masturbating to Farrah's poster was funny the first time, by the sixth time not so much. And that was the *other* thing. They were supposed to be roasting *Shatner*, not each other. I couldn't have cared less about that woman comedian, yet they seemed to all have an insult for her.
There were a few funny bits. The comedian (can't recall his name) who essentially invented the Shatner dramatic pause impersonation should have been on much longer (his routine was definitely cut). Betty White was OK but not great. Fred Willard the same. The others, especialy the drunk from Stern's show and Andy Dick, needed to be put out of my misery.
And while there were other types of jokes (Shatner's singing montage was the best), the gay jokes just totally overwhelmed everything else. Sadly, that's the lasting impression I have from the show, that it *was* 2 hours of gay jokes.
I think they failed to realize that the audience for this show would be quite different from most of their roasts (the influx of trekkies of many ages), and assumed the type of jokes that work for the people who watch Jackass, Crank Yankers, and Mind of Mencia would also work for this audience.
And every review I'm seen of it from Star Trek centric POV's thought it was terrible.
Hilarious?
Perhaps if you enjoy 2 hours of homosexual jokes from C-list comedians.
At what the heck was Farrah Fawcett doing there? I checked IMDB. She had never worked with Shatner before.
I think a lot of the reaction clips (the laughs from the audience and the roasters/roastee) were cut in from other times in the show, because so much of it was so unfunny. They certainly seemed uneven to me.
Shatner should have taken Nimoy's advice -- Don't do it.
In the lifetime of civilizations, 50 years is nothing.
The Greenland colony lasted for 500 years, then was abandoned.
Humans in general have difficulty comprehending time-scales longer than a human lifetime.
"Leeching off of the city dwellers" means that the extra infrastructure costs of urban sprawl are typically shared across the entire population (in the form of income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, higher insurance rates, and higher utility costs), rather than assigned directly to the people that choose to "get away from it all" and live out in the sprawl.
Essentially, the "sprawlers" are subsidized by the people who stay in the cities or existing suburbs.
The sad fact is that urban sprawl is unsustainable. Not only are we covering up prime farmland with McMansions, but the energy cost is unsustainable, especially considering the dual problems of Peak Oil and Global Warming.
Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" would be an excellent first step in your education.