What have you done for the advancement of humanity today? This week? This year? During your whole life? For most people, the answer will be "nothing".
I'll ask you to tell me what all of the people through history that spent their lives providing their own food, shelter and clothing contributed as well. For the vast majority of them, it was also "nothing" in the sense that you presented. The simple fact is that the average high school dropout knows more than the vast majority of the population of Earth did three hundred years ago. In the U.S. at least, most people have cars to drop off for oil changes, which gives them opportunities that virtually noone had even two hundred years ago. What does all of this mean?
It means that a lot more people, as a percentage of the whole population, dedicate themselves to advancement of humanity than ever did back when virtually everyone was a subsistence farmer.
Virg
P.S. Your.sig has a fault. There isn't one dead cat and one live cat, there's half a dead cat and half a live cat, according to the probabilities.
I've seen a lot of discussions about how a Segway and a bicycle compare, but yours is the most logical I can find, so I'll respond to you. The Segway isn't a substitute for a bicycle, which is part of the problem. But, that doesn't mean that a bicycle can substitute for it in all cases either. If you're having trouble picturing a place where it would be more useful than a bike, picture going to work in a big city, in a high rise. Ride your bike to the building. Then, ride it inside, through the lobby, among the crowd. Ride it into the elevator, and then out of it again, down the hall and to your office. My guess is that you'd be in a fistfight by the time you got done (even if you walked your bike through the crowd and into the elevator), but a Segway can move in a crowd at half a mile an hour and takes up not much more room than a person.
Sure, it's a limited market, but then that's been the problem. As others suggested, it would make a very reasonable replacement for a mobility scooter, if the person using it can stand on it. For those whose jobs require a lot of walking (postal delivery, mall cops, and the like) it can be a godsend. Sure, you can argue that they don't get enough exercise, but if I was doing that job and this device meant that I didn't get flat feet by the time I was forty I'd use it, and I'd get my exercise like every other office worker, at the gym. Moreover, a bicycle would be a poor choice for both of the jobs mentioned and no replacement at all for a mobility scooter.
As to being smug dickheads, the only real reason for that is that people who tend to have enough money to buy this sort of device also tend toward being elitist. If you want an example of bikers who can be smug dickheads, join a bike race or triathlon that has an entrance fee sometime, and you'll get plenty of snide comments about your "cheap" bike.
So, a researcher enters a foreign land. He obeys the strict letter of the law, but ignores the customs and rules of polite behavior.
He had been playing since the game came out in 2004. He knew the customs, he knew the rules. He played the game as designed. He was a hero who defeated villains in a PvP server. He played the game correctly, while everyone else wasn't.
See, he didn't "play the game correctly" by any real metric. Even if you want to insist that RP is the only way to play the game "correctly" (which is an absurd statement to begin with), he wasn't using comic book hero tactics. He would drag the villains to insta-kill spots and let the robots do the dirty work. Superman never dropped huge rocks on people even though he could. Batman never shot any villain in the back, even when it was the "most effective" way. He didn't play a hero, he played a griefer, by taking advantage of an in-game mechanism that wasn't designed to be used as a player-killer, and using it as such.
This is the thing with MMOs and really modern gamers. People lament that you can't actually role play in a computer RPG, but here's a guy doing that, and he's an outcast.
I'd like to see some evidence that that people he was griefing were the ones lamenting that fact.
Heros don't hang out and chat with villains. They fight.
Heroes don't cheat, either, nor let robots do their dirty work.
What we have here was people that didn't actually want to play the game. They just wanted to rack up (dubious) "achievements".
I see no reason to consider that "not playing the game" except in your very perverse notion of how this particular game should be played. I ran across this a lot in Everquest, where I got harassed for "wasting my time" doing tradeskills even though I enjoyed doing it, because people like you got a very narrow notion of what everyone else was supposed to be doing. Who are you to tell anyone that achievements aren't worth pursuing?
The prof did exactly right.
Every time he encountered a player capable of avoiding his insta-kill tactic, he ran away. He didn't care about a fair fight, he was only concerned with griefing. Even in the overnarrow confines of your idea of playing the game "correctly" he committed extremely not-heroic acts, so he did a deplorable job role-playing a hero.
My experience this weekend/holiday doesn't ken with your comment. I drove for more than twenty hours over the course of four days, and encountered quite a few Priuses on the highway. We noticed them because we had been discussing hybrids so we were watching for them. Out of the dozens of them that we saw, I didn't encounter any that seemed to have any difficulty maintaining highway speeds. In fact, because I set my cruise control to 65 to save on gas, we got passed by quite a number of them (again, we noticed because we were joking about getting passed by Priuses while we were driving a gas-hungry minivan). I just didn't notice that the Prius had any problems with normal driving at all, and as I said, we were actually watching for them.
[Golly] guys! The bible is actually a [Player's Handbook]! Obviously Adam wrote the [Monster Manual] when he named all the animals, so that only leaves the [Dungeon Master's Guide], which is obviously metaphorically referred to as "the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
Adam and Eve weren't kicked out of the garden for eating fruit! they were kicked out because they were peeking at the [Dungeon Master]'s notes!
The problem here is corruption. The Ring corrupted everyone who touched it, except for Tom Bombadil. If Frodo had given the ring to one of the eagles, it would simply have done the same and then we'd have a eagle version of a Nazgul, and the Ring would be flown directly to Barad-Dur.
It would have been one volume, but the ending would have been a bit less pleasant.
I don't quite remember all the details of the timeline, but it seems that flying the eagles into Mordor would just have resulted in the eagles coming under attack by the Nazgul. By the time the eagles flew in and got Frodo and Sam, they'd already disposed of the Ring, thereby wiping out said Nazgul and clearing the flight path.
I know, it's fiction, but I always got the idea that it was the very fact that Frodo and Sam were off by themselves that made it possible for them to get there without the Ring having the opportunity to turn on them.
You've missed the point yourself. One's SSN is not required to do a credit check, so if they need it to do credit checks then they can use something else (name, address and a credit card is more than sufficient to run a credit check on someone). Therefore, it is precisely a privacy issue since I don't want my SSN stored in any database that isn't required by law.
>> Even if we assume that's legal true, they have the power to force compliance. If for example I tell an officer, "I decline to cooperate" he can pull out his gun and force me to answer. He can even drag me to jail."
But these actions change the interaction in a very specific and legal way. Right after you state that you decline to cooperate, then the legal aspect changes. The officer can force you to continue interacting, but by doing so has stepped away from voluntary interaction, which changes the rules. For example, if the officer pulls out his gun and "forces you to answer" then he's declared that you are now under arrest, which means you then have the right to remain silent. If he truly forces you under threat to answer anything, those statements will not be admissible in a court of law, and the officer would most likely face charges for doing this. Force can trump words in the moment, but in so doing the officer would be handing you a case dismissal, a huge settlement for abuse of force, and the satisfaction of watching him fired and probably arrested himself.
"Am I free to go?" is the legal phrase that forces the officer to recognize the change in level of interaction, which is why it's a good idea.
Ultra-stupid, you mean. By the time the power window motor would fail, the car will be full of water and you could just open the door to get out. Until the car is full of water (assuming there's water outside the window), you won't be opening it by any means other than breaking it.
Of course, it could also be that some people stop liking computer games as they get older. I personally find WoW to be entertaining, and I'd rather spend a few hours playing than watching television. I don't play video games like I did when I was a kid, but that's just because I have less free time and (much more importantly to this discussion) more diverse hobbies. That's a side effect of having access to my own income and transportation more than any idea that "time [got] much more valuable".
The failure of your analysis comes from assuming that "philosophy" is a direct synonym to "religion". They are not the same, so saying that "belief in no God" is equal to religion isn't accurate.
Atheism is a philosophy just like theism is a philosophy. In your parallel, atheists aren't about eradicating stamps, they're the ones who think that collecting stamps is a waste of effort.
The flip side of this idea is that I spent a few minutes of attention on this story, and it was mildly entertaining. I spend quite a bit more time on important issues, but that doesn't mean there's absolutely no room at all in my life for a bit of fluff on occasion. Even if it took an hour for me to debate this with some random loonies on MSNBC, that would still mean I spent less than one percent of my "news attention span" on it for this week.
If it's being considered child porn, having sex would obviously be considered statutory rape...
This isn't necessarily true. If the age of consent where that person lives is under 18, they could legally have sex and at the same time, sexual photographs of them would be considered child porn.
Whenever you feel the need to say "The problem with Atheists..." you should stop there. Atheists, like any other group, are not a homogenous mass that all act and think exactly the same. Prejudice makes you look like an ass far more than militant atheists make atheists in general look bad.
There's one point you messed up here. No songs were "banned" from the radio. ClearChannel put out a list of songs that "may bother listeners" but there was no edict not to play them, and a good number of the songs on their list got airplay on ClearChannel stations, so there didn't seem to be issues with punishment for running them.
I agree that WoW is a very influential game and The Bard's Tale was a great game (although in my mind, Temple of Apshai, Ultima and/or Might & Magic would bump out that particular title), but they're not console games and the list is for console games exclusively.
This list is full of fail (how any console list can exclude all titles for the Atari 2600 is beyond my ken), but it's not because WoW isn't on it.
well, let me know when you convinced someone who is against it that being gay is okay while chatting with him/her on a game server.
The goal isn't to convince them that it's okay, it's to convince them not to harass someone over it. Being banned for harassing someone about being gay would certainly solve the problem. They'd learn that it's not acceptable to harass someone over it on a game server.
So the merchant is just supposed to take any card and swallow the cost of fraud?!?!
Essentially, yes. The cost of fraud hits is generally small enough compared to the loss of business for not accepting credit cards that most merchants will do exactly that.
Here's an idea, my next alcohol purchase will be with a CC, and I'll snitch them for asking my ID.
That won't work. They're not allowed to insist on ID to complete a transaction, but the law requires them to verify age to begin the transaction, so the card banks won't hold it against them. If the liquor store has gotten to the point of asking how you want to pay before checking ID they're already up the creek.
If you make zero right now, then you either don't want a job or you want a job but can't get one. If you don't want a job, then economic stimulus is irrelevant to you, since you're not supporting yourself on the economy. In other words, if you're supporting yourself without a job then you'd get a stimulus check on your means of support, and if you're not then the government is already paying your tab.
If you're in the second part, and want a job but can't get one, then the stimulus is designed to make it easier for employers to hire people, thereby making it easier for you to find work. That's how it's planned to work, anyway. Whether it does remains to be seen.
The focus on tax cuts by republicans is ridiculous Im all for tax cuts but we tried handing everyone a check last year and it did little to prevent this. People are saving money right now (those who can) if you give them more its not going to get spent.
I thought it was a useless idea when it happened, but it did work the way it was intended. By and large, people did spend those checks. That doesn't mean that I think the idea is any better now, but if the government mails out a bunch of checks most of it won't get saved. That's just how the U.S. people are.
The Democrats trying to use this as a do everything bill hiring more teachers, nurses, cops, and the like is *not* stimulus, its not a bad thing to do but every teacher you hire has an indefinite growing expense. Are you going to fire all these teachers when the package has run its course or have you just increased the ongoing expense of government?
The idea is that "everyman"'s wages will rebound by the time the stimulus money runs out so that the economy will be better able to support the increases. The idea has economic merit because the government will still be paying for an unemployed teacher by way of government assistance, so it's not entirely lost money. I have my doubts that it'll work as well as the yay-sayers but I also doubt that it'll be as useless as the naysayers are predicting.
The Tax cuts, if any, should be limited to people within 15% of the poverty line.
Nice thought, but people within fifteen percent of the poverty line don't pay much tax to begin with. Eliminating tax at this level wouldn't have enough effect to matter in the long run, and the social implications would far outweigh the benefit.
The Spending should only be for capital projects Build a birdge and there is a much smaller annual cost for maintenance when the package is done.
The New Deal was all about this sort of thing. The problem is that there's not enough of this sort of stuff to restimulate the economy that we have today. Any economic stimulus that has any hope of working will need to be broader than building infrastructure, because unlike the '30s the country isn't made up primarily of craftsmen any more. If my government gave out a bunch of money to build a bridge in my hometown, it wouldn't help much because it's mostly not the bridge builders who are out of work. In fact, if I lost my job I couldn't even take up work on a bridge or other civic project because I'm not qualified, so it would be useless to me, and I'm far from alone in that regard. Gone are the days when Joe Average can get a government job.
The Republicans are doing nothing but fighting for ground to piss on, and Obama and the Congressional Dems are doing nothing but using FUD to push though a package with some stimulus and mostly wasteful open ended government spending.
Other than switching out party and president names, it's been that way for almost fifty years. It's going to take the American public voting in people other than politicians to change this, and to be frank I don't see that happening any time soon. I'd love to see the Independents run a campaign with a picture of an elephant and donkey and the slogan "When are you people going to learn?".
For a program I could see having a deck of unnumbered cards (and I did see some, and in fact the stories of fumbled programs were numerous), but anyone who would make an OS without numbering the cards deserved whatever he got. The biggest problem with dropping the cards was damage to the cards, losing them under machinery or crud from the floor that would get into the reader.
IT's simple enough to find a motherboard that won't fail POST when it encounters a dead CMOS battery. Just remove the battery from each machine that you're considering, and only choose one that can POST without the battery. Then include a printed sheet with instructions on manually setting up the BIOS, and you're good to go.
A Faraday cage will protect magnetic media from outside influences. It won't keep the media from degrading but it will prevent any inconvenient wars from doing too much harm.
First, it would have to be the user breaking the EULA. The bot can't break it because it never "clicked" OK.
Oops, you've got a logic fault here. If the bot can't "click the EULA" then the bot has no right to access the content. The EULA is a positive entity. Unless you accept it, no license to access is created. Therefore, either the user authorizes the bot, in which case the bot becomes an extension of the user, or the bot is violating copyright simply by accessing the content.
On the basis of this, using MMOGlider is a violation of the EULA by the user. That invalidates your first point.
Slashdot Mirror
What have you done for the advancement of humanity today? This week? This year? During your whole life? For most people, the answer will be "nothing".
.sig has a fault. There isn't one dead cat and one live cat, there's half a dead cat and half a live cat, according to the probabilities.
I'll ask you to tell me what all of the people through history that spent their lives providing their own food, shelter and clothing contributed as well. For the vast majority of them, it was also "nothing" in the sense that you presented. The simple fact is that the average high school dropout knows more than the vast majority of the population of Earth did three hundred years ago. In the U.S. at least, most people have cars to drop off for oil changes, which gives them opportunities that virtually noone had even two hundred years ago. What does all of this mean?
It means that a lot more people, as a percentage of the whole population, dedicate themselves to advancement of humanity than ever did back when virtually everyone was a subsistence farmer.
Virg
P.S. Your
I've seen a lot of discussions about how a Segway and a bicycle compare, but yours is the most logical I can find, so I'll respond to you. The Segway isn't a substitute for a bicycle, which is part of the problem. But, that doesn't mean that a bicycle can substitute for it in all cases either. If you're having trouble picturing a place where it would be more useful than a bike, picture going to work in a big city, in a high rise. Ride your bike to the building. Then, ride it inside, through the lobby, among the crowd. Ride it into the elevator, and then out of it again, down the hall and to your office. My guess is that you'd be in a fistfight by the time you got done (even if you walked your bike through the crowd and into the elevator), but a Segway can move in a crowd at half a mile an hour and takes up not much more room than a person.
Sure, it's a limited market, but then that's been the problem. As others suggested, it would make a very reasonable replacement for a mobility scooter, if the person using it can stand on it. For those whose jobs require a lot of walking (postal delivery, mall cops, and the like) it can be a godsend. Sure, you can argue that they don't get enough exercise, but if I was doing that job and this device meant that I didn't get flat feet by the time I was forty I'd use it, and I'd get my exercise like every other office worker, at the gym. Moreover, a bicycle would be a poor choice for both of the jobs mentioned and no replacement at all for a mobility scooter.
As to being smug dickheads, the only real reason for that is that people who tend to have enough money to buy this sort of device also tend toward being elitist. If you want an example of bikers who can be smug dickheads, join a bike race or triathlon that has an entrance fee sometime, and you'll get plenty of snide comments about your "cheap" bike.
Virg
He had been playing since the game came out in 2004. He knew the customs, he knew the rules. He played the game as designed. He was a hero who defeated villains in a PvP server. He played the game correctly, while everyone else wasn't.
See, he didn't "play the game correctly" by any real metric. Even if you want to insist that RP is the only way to play the game "correctly" (which is an absurd statement to begin with), he wasn't using comic book hero tactics. He would drag the villains to insta-kill spots and let the robots do the dirty work. Superman never dropped huge rocks on people even though he could. Batman never shot any villain in the back, even when it was the "most effective" way. He didn't play a hero, he played a griefer, by taking advantage of an in-game mechanism that wasn't designed to be used as a player-killer, and using it as such.
This is the thing with MMOs and really modern gamers. People lament that you can't actually role play in a computer RPG, but here's a guy doing that, and he's an outcast.
I'd like to see some evidence that that people he was griefing were the ones lamenting that fact.
Heros don't hang out and chat with villains. They fight.
Heroes don't cheat, either, nor let robots do their dirty work.
What we have here was people that didn't actually want to play the game. They just wanted to rack up (dubious) "achievements".
I see no reason to consider that "not playing the game" except in your very perverse notion of how this particular game should be played. I ran across this a lot in Everquest, where I got harassed for "wasting my time" doing tradeskills even though I enjoyed doing it, because people like you got a very narrow notion of what everyone else was supposed to be doing. Who are you to tell anyone that achievements aren't worth pursuing?
The prof did exactly right.
Every time he encountered a player capable of avoiding his insta-kill tactic, he ran away. He didn't care about a fair fight, he was only concerned with griefing. Even in the overnarrow confines of your idea of playing the game "correctly" he committed extremely not-heroic acts, so he did a deplorable job role-playing a hero.
Virg
My experience this weekend/holiday doesn't ken with your comment. I drove for more than twenty hours over the course of four days, and encountered quite a few Priuses on the highway. We noticed them because we had been discussing hybrids so we were watching for them. Out of the dozens of them that we saw, I didn't encounter any that seemed to have any difficulty maintaining highway speeds. In fact, because I set my cruise control to 65 to save on gas, we got passed by quite a number of them (again, we noticed because we were joking about getting passed by Priuses while we were driving a gas-hungry minivan). I just didn't notice that the Prius had any problems with normal driving at all, and as I said, we were actually watching for them.
Virg
It's a D&D thing. I'll translate:
[Golly] guys! The bible is actually a [Player's Handbook]! Obviously Adam wrote the [Monster Manual] when he named all the animals, so that only leaves the [Dungeon Master's Guide], which is obviously metaphorically referred to as "the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Adam and Eve weren't kicked out of the garden for eating fruit! they were kicked out because they were peeking at the [Dungeon Master]'s notes!
There, is that better?
Virg
The problem here is corruption. The Ring corrupted everyone who touched it, except for Tom Bombadil. If Frodo had given the ring to one of the eagles, it would simply have done the same and then we'd have a eagle version of a Nazgul, and the Ring would be flown directly to Barad-Dur.
It would have been one volume, but the ending would have been a bit less pleasant.
Virg
I don't quite remember all the details of the timeline, but it seems that flying the eagles into Mordor would just have resulted in the eagles coming under attack by the Nazgul. By the time the eagles flew in and got Frodo and Sam, they'd already disposed of the Ring, thereby wiping out said Nazgul and clearing the flight path.
I know, it's fiction, but I always got the idea that it was the very fact that Frodo and Sam were off by themselves that made it possible for them to get there without the Ring having the opportunity to turn on them.
Virg
You've missed the point yourself. One's SSN is not required to do a credit check, so if they need it to do credit checks then they can use something else (name, address and a credit card is more than sufficient to run a credit check on someone). Therefore, it is precisely a privacy issue since I don't want my SSN stored in any database that isn't required by law.
Virg
>> Even if we assume that's legal true, they have the power to force compliance. If for example I tell an officer, "I decline to cooperate" he can pull out his gun and force me to answer. He can even drag me to jail."
But these actions change the interaction in a very specific and legal way. Right after you state that you decline to cooperate, then the legal aspect changes. The officer can force you to continue interacting, but by doing so has stepped away from voluntary interaction, which changes the rules. For example, if the officer pulls out his gun and "forces you to answer" then he's declared that you are now under arrest, which means you then have the right to remain silent. If he truly forces you under threat to answer anything, those statements will not be admissible in a court of law, and the officer would most likely face charges for doing this. Force can trump words in the moment, but in so doing the officer would be handing you a case dismissal, a huge settlement for abuse of force, and the satisfaction of watching him fired and probably arrested himself.
"Am I free to go?" is the legal phrase that forces the officer to recognize the change in level of interaction, which is why it's a good idea.
Virg
Ultra-stupid, you mean. By the time the power window motor would fail, the car will be full of water and you could just open the door to get out. Until the car is full of water (assuming there's water outside the window), you won't be opening it by any means other than breaking it.
Virg
Of course, it could also be that some people stop liking computer games as they get older. I personally find WoW to be entertaining, and I'd rather spend a few hours playing than watching television. I don't play video games like I did when I was a kid, but that's just because I have less free time and (much more importantly to this discussion) more diverse hobbies. That's a side effect of having access to my own income and transportation more than any idea that "time [got] much more valuable".
Virg
The failure of your analysis comes from assuming that "philosophy" is a direct synonym to "religion". They are not the same, so saying that "belief in no God" is equal to religion isn't accurate.
Atheism is a philosophy just like theism is a philosophy. In your parallel, atheists aren't about eradicating stamps, they're the ones who think that collecting stamps is a waste of effort.
Virg
The flip side of this idea is that I spent a few minutes of attention on this story, and it was mildly entertaining. I spend quite a bit more time on important issues, but that doesn't mean there's absolutely no room at all in my life for a bit of fluff on occasion. Even if it took an hour for me to debate this with some random loonies on MSNBC, that would still mean I spent less than one percent of my "news attention span" on it for this week.
Virg
If it's being considered child porn, having sex would obviously be considered statutory rape...
This isn't necessarily true. If the age of consent where that person lives is under 18, they could legally have sex and at the same time, sexual photographs of them would be considered child porn.
Virg
Whenever you feel the need to say "The problem with Atheists..." you should stop there. Atheists, like any other group, are not a homogenous mass that all act and think exactly the same. Prejudice makes you look like an ass far more than militant atheists make atheists in general look bad.
Virg
There's one point you messed up here. No songs were "banned" from the radio. ClearChannel put out a list of songs that "may bother listeners" but there was no edict not to play them, and a good number of the songs on their list got airplay on ClearChannel stations, so there didn't seem to be issues with punishment for running them.
Virg
I agree that WoW is a very influential game and The Bard's Tale was a great game (although in my mind, Temple of Apshai, Ultima and/or Might & Magic would bump out that particular title), but they're not console games and the list is for console games exclusively.
This list is full of fail (how any console list can exclude all titles for the Atari 2600 is beyond my ken), but it's not because WoW isn't on it.
Virg
well, let me know when you convinced someone who is against it that being gay is okay while chatting with him/her on a game server.
The goal isn't to convince them that it's okay, it's to convince them not to harass someone over it. Being banned for harassing someone about being gay would certainly solve the problem. They'd learn that it's not acceptable to harass someone over it on a game server.
Virg
So the merchant is just supposed to take any card and swallow the cost of fraud?!?!
Essentially, yes. The cost of fraud hits is generally small enough compared to the loss of business for not accepting credit cards that most merchants will do exactly that.
Here's an idea, my next alcohol purchase will be with a CC, and I'll snitch them for asking my ID.
That won't work. They're not allowed to insist on ID to complete a transaction, but the law requires them to verify age to begin the transaction, so the card banks won't hold it against them. If the liquor store has gotten to the point of asking how you want to pay before checking ID they're already up the creek.
Virg
If you make zero right now, then you either don't want a job or you want a job but can't get one. If you don't want a job, then economic stimulus is irrelevant to you, since you're not supporting yourself on the economy. In other words, if you're supporting yourself without a job then you'd get a stimulus check on your means of support, and if you're not then the government is already paying your tab.
If you're in the second part, and want a job but can't get one, then the stimulus is designed to make it easier for employers to hire people, thereby making it easier for you to find work. That's how it's planned to work, anyway. Whether it does remains to be seen.
Virg
The focus on tax cuts by republicans is ridiculous Im all for tax cuts but we tried handing everyone a check last year and it did little to prevent this. People are saving money right now (those who can) if you give them more its not going to get spent.
I thought it was a useless idea when it happened, but it did work the way it was intended. By and large, people did spend those checks. That doesn't mean that I think the idea is any better now, but if the government mails out a bunch of checks most of it won't get saved. That's just how the U.S. people are.
The Democrats trying to use this as a do everything bill hiring more teachers, nurses, cops, and the like is *not* stimulus, its not a bad thing to do but every teacher you hire has an indefinite growing expense. Are you going to fire all these teachers when the package has run its course or have you just increased the ongoing expense of government?
The idea is that "everyman"'s wages will rebound by the time the stimulus money runs out so that the economy will be better able to support the increases. The idea has economic merit because the government will still be paying for an unemployed teacher by way of government assistance, so it's not entirely lost money. I have my doubts that it'll work as well as the yay-sayers but I also doubt that it'll be as useless as the naysayers are predicting.
The Tax cuts, if any, should be limited to people within 15% of the poverty line.
Nice thought, but people within fifteen percent of the poverty line don't pay much tax to begin with. Eliminating tax at this level wouldn't have enough effect to matter in the long run, and the social implications would far outweigh the benefit.
The Spending should only be for capital projects Build a birdge and there is a much smaller annual cost for maintenance when the package is done.
The New Deal was all about this sort of thing. The problem is that there's not enough of this sort of stuff to restimulate the economy that we have today. Any economic stimulus that has any hope of working will need to be broader than building infrastructure, because unlike the '30s the country isn't made up primarily of craftsmen any more. If my government gave out a bunch of money to build a bridge in my hometown, it wouldn't help much because it's mostly not the bridge builders who are out of work. In fact, if I lost my job I couldn't even take up work on a bridge or other civic project because I'm not qualified, so it would be useless to me, and I'm far from alone in that regard. Gone are the days when Joe Average can get a government job.
The Republicans are doing nothing but fighting for ground to piss on, and Obama and the Congressional Dems are doing nothing but using FUD to push though a package with some stimulus and mostly wasteful open ended government spending.
Other than switching out party and president names, it's been that way for almost fifty years. It's going to take the American public voting in people other than politicians to change this, and to be frank I don't see that happening any time soon. I'd love to see the Independents run a campaign with a picture of an elephant and donkey and the slogan "When are you people going to learn?".
Virg
For a program I could see having a deck of unnumbered cards (and I did see some, and in fact the stories of fumbled programs were numerous), but anyone who would make an OS without numbering the cards deserved whatever he got. The biggest problem with dropping the cards was damage to the cards, losing them under machinery or crud from the floor that would get into the reader.
Virg
IT's simple enough to find a motherboard that won't fail POST when it encounters a dead CMOS battery. Just remove the battery from each machine that you're considering, and only choose one that can POST without the battery. Then include a printed sheet with instructions on manually setting up the BIOS, and you're good to go.
Virg
A Faraday cage will protect magnetic media from outside influences. It won't keep the media from degrading but it will prevent any inconvenient wars from doing too much harm.
Virg
First, it would have to be the user breaking the EULA. The bot can't break it because it never "clicked" OK.
Oops, you've got a logic fault here. If the bot can't "click the EULA" then the bot has no right to access the content. The EULA is a positive entity. Unless you accept it, no license to access is created. Therefore, either the user authorizes the bot, in which case the bot becomes an extension of the user, or the bot is violating copyright simply by accessing the content.
On the basis of this, using MMOGlider is a violation of the EULA by the user. That invalidates your first point.
Virg