It's not like we have established a nice USB format that could be used, and could perhaps use a raspberry pi-like system to just allow people to copy movies, files, etc into the device for display on their tv?
Heavens, we need to be sure DRM is built in there somewhere.:(
MOST people will pay a reasonable price for something they want.
Louis CK just made a standup comedy special himself. Paid for the production of a 1 hour commercial-quality standup video (about $250,000), and put it up on the internet asking $5 to download it. It did have that $5 paygate, to prevent the casual downloading freeloader, but it is totally drm-free, and available in HD.
The response has been so overwhelming that once he paid for production, he capped his own income from the exercise at $220,000. He paid his production people a bonus of $250,000 and still has money left over, so is donating all excess to a number of charities. He's *already* given them $280,000.
An extraordinary success powered by creativity and (significantly) a lack of greed on his part. Win win win.
Iran has stated that the eradication of the Israeli state is a policy objective.
To suggest that Israel is therefore a 'threat' to Iran is ludicrous.
"Recent US history is a track record of invasion and attack for reasons that turned out to be unjustified in the end. " Last time I checked there were 2 US 'invasions' in recent history. - Iraq: following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, Iraq's military was ejected and a ceasefire agreed, along with a no-fly zone. Subsequent to repeated violations of the ceasefire and no-fly zone, and UN resolutions authorizing action, the US invaded and toppled the Hussein regime. Regardless of public statements about yellowcake, nuclear program, WMDs, etc THIS was the legal basis for the US actions. As far as I can tell it has never been contested. - Afghanistan: The Taliban's dominance of the Afghan state and defense of declared terror organizations (particularly Osama Bin Laden) were declared as the basis for the invasion. The regime was toppled, and a democratic* regime was elected. *it's about as barely democratic as can be
If anything US policy has been too comprehensive, not simply defeating enemies but then insisting on rebuilding their societies. THAT's where US policy has failed.
Sure, comparing a murderer and a thief, and suggesting that the murderer is worse is "prejudice"? Really?
The US record isn't spotless, but to look at the US actions in the 20th-21st centuries, compared to (from wiki) "...Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949â"53.[38] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[39] the number of deaths range between 2 million[39][40] and 5 million.[41][42] In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[43] perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[44] were sent to "reform through labour" camps where many perished.[44] Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[45] which were often exceeded.[35] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[46]..." That's 4 years of Mao, and exceeds the worst possible actions of the US by at least two orders of magnitude over the entire CENTURY.
Moreover, if we talk about deaths resulting from inept policy, the Great Leap Forward (alone) is believed to have starved between 23-42 MILLION people.
And these were China's own people, who one would believe would at least be somewhat better treated than any subject/dominated/Finlandized peoples.
Please, enlighten me on how China would prove a far more benign imperial hegemon than the US has been over the past 60 years.
Average home value of the arrested OWS protestors in NY was $305k, 10% were north of $500k. Median monthly rent was $1850.
I'd say this data (which could be a lie, could be cherry picked, and is obviously host to all the source-validation issues that my original tinfoil hat post commented on) suggest that they are simply whiny rich kids looking for a cause to wave some trendy signs about.
Considering the average home value of the arrested protesters in New York is $300,000+ (10% were north of $500k), and median rent is $1850/mo, yes, then, that they are in fact the 1% is precisely what I'm suggesting.
Seriously, we're talking in the OP about a monitoring system that detects cheaters. It wouldn't be significantly more complex to have a monitor AND LOGGING system, as well as an RFID that comes with your handicap-certification, which recognizes "oh, handicap-needing vehicle is here!"
And yeah, for the people that use those spaces, it IS a crap shoot. If I drive up, and there are 20 empty handicap spaces, I have a pretty safe bet that they aren't all going to suddenly fill. But if 16 are full, I would be damn sure I get into and out of the space quickly if I dared use it at all.
The whole point is that someone who needs the space has one when they are there. Otherwise it's vacant, unused space that's usually the most premium, useful parking area in a lot. It's very primitive for us to accept that the only way to make sure the space is there is to totally ban non-handicap usage.
You'd think by this time we could spend our efforts making better use of these spaces? Instead of a system that automatically watches and simply penalizes people who use these spots, how about a system that works on the opportunity-cost model? It would a) monitor these parking places b) if a valid handicap parking-user shows up and there are no spots available, anyone parked in them gets tagged and fined.
We've all been at shopping centers where there are dozens if not scores of empty handicap spots available, even during the crazy-busy shopping days at Christmas.
This would make these (generally unused) spots available for the sort of high-demand, short "I'm only going to be in there for 5 mins" things" BUT ALSO strongly penalize people who use them for anything more IF there is a valid handicap space user that needs it...
It's hard to be motivated about the unfairness of the system, when the people 'protesting' the unfairness are wearing $100 jeans, carrying $4000 laptops, and talking on $500 phones. I'm not saying there aren't injustices worth having a serious protest about - but these smug, indolent, wealthy children are worthless as spokespeople.*
On that level, it's kind of a reverse Marie Antoinette: the aristocracy is bitching because their cake costs too much.
*if one was a tinfoil-hatter, one might almost say it's Machiavellian-perfect. Having issues with underclass disgruntlement at the way you're twisting the system to benefit yourself and your ultra-rich friends? Simple, start a credible protest movement but fill it with the most obnoxious, hateable, repellent individuals . Then watch as the disgruntlement dissipates between the Hobson's Choice of the OWS or no leadership at all. Nicely played, nicely played.
You were clear and blunt, I shall also be. It's not xenophobia that makes me concerned about the Chinese program, it's simple geopolitical self-interest..
Nations conflict; that's human history. They conflict in many venues - on the ground, sea, and air militarily; in media culturally; in commerce economically - and the next venue will be space. I think that's almost inarguable.
There's a reason that the otherwise-economically-worthless islands in the Pacific were fought over so bitterly in WW2 - they were unsinkable aircraft carriers, allowing their owner control of the region that was durable and extremely painful/complicated/expensive to break.
In near-earth space, there are some important points of geography - low-earth orbit, geosychronous orbit, the Lagrange points, and the moon. Considering them militarily, all of these except the moon suffer from the significant handicap of all space operations: extreme vulnerability. On the moon there are precisely two points that have nearly permanent visibility to both the sun (for power) and earth (for communications). Two. Whoever gets there first and plants a base will enjoy a positional advantage FOREVER.
Certainly the US government is inept, inefficient, and a host of other negative adjectives. But the Pax Americana has laid relatively lightly for the bulk of the world; for a number of reasons I wouldn't expect a Chinese one to be quite as benign.
The 'government subsidy of roadways' - in the sense you mean, as a giant funding program wagered on by the federal government and justified by national defense - ended sometime in the 50s-60s. Subsequently highways have been paid for (or not...have you see the quality of our highway system?) by ongoing taxation and user fees specifically collected for the purpose. Calling it a 'subsidy' isn't even the right word, it would be like calling the police a 'government security subsidy'.
And on the contrary, the dairy industry would be pretty much the OPPOSITE of 'fucked' without government subsidies. What the utterly warped system of subsidies currently supports is a mockery of a free-market system, in which subsidies are directed preferentially at places that have the HIGHEST cost of production. Therefore you have dairy subsidies going to farmers in California with horrible grazing, highest production cost, and highest shipping costs, while dairy farms in MN and WI struggle to make ends meet. Without subsidies, you might actually have a dairy industry based on where it's naturally the cheapest to produce.
You may be right on the first two although I suspect you're pulling those 'facts' from your backside, too. If you simultaneously stopped the subsidies to oil and coal (likewise the protections, etc) I'd equally guess that - among rational people, I'm not talking about the people who think Fukashima was the end of the world - nuclear power would in fact be chosen preferentially over either of those. Vaccines would likewise rise in costs as the distributed load of the malpractice liability impacted them, sure. Then again, one might ask if that's not simply a subsidy meant to relieve the cost of having children from people that can't afford them in the first place?
The OP may call them subsidies, you may call them public policy, but declaring them 'good' is a broader question you haven't justified.
In the bulk of cases I can think of, rarely are government mandates the best way to deliver services or benefits to a community.
Caucuses are a legacy from the days when communications traveled at the speed of a messenger. It was necessary for a participatory democracy to collect in small groups to select delegates to go to a nominating convention in exactly the same sense that the people selected congressmen and the states selected electors to cast votes on their behalf.
Subsequently, it's been codified as probably the best compromise way that individuals can still have a voice in the political process.
By the way, I'd love to hear the description of a democratic system (applicable to a country of 300+ million) that DOESN'T value a better organized/paid for campaign over the better candidate. Every one I've ever heard of does, and most have far more vulnerabilities to 'gaming' than the caucus system.
Iowa and New Hampshire are commonly recognized as bellwether states, mythologized in American culture as representative of skeptically conservative (ie not swayed easily by whim, as opposed to Conservative) yet open minded middle-class farmers and classic New England Yankees. I doubt it's really true anymore but that's why they've been allowed to remain. Don't examine it too closely or you might catch a whiff of parochialism and more than a strong scent of racism too.
So...this is almost like saying that unless you can be ABSOLUTELY IRONCLAD SURE that your electronic voting system is secure, then paper ballots provide the best transparency, redundancy, and confirmatory trail of any solution?
Ironic that they're concerned enough about reliability and security to make this move for their primary, but nobody seems to care that much about the GENERAL election.
I see the exact same people dropping $200+/month for cable that they rarely watch. Their choice, certainly, but when I see them ALSO talking about using food stamps or getting AFDC checks, well, yeah, I get a little irate.
99.99% of the communications I deal with have no reason to be encrypted. I'd guess I'm fairly normal in that respect.
While it might be nice to encrypt sensitive things, I generally just don't send anything truly sensitive via email. Given how little I send is actually sensitive, that's easier than a) adding a small procedure to EVERY email I send for no real value, and b) end up failing because the bulk of people don't use it anyway.
Encryption/privacy obsessives are like the digital equivalent to the people obsessed that everything causes cancer: probably fundamentally right, but to follow their prescriptions would mean such a decrease in quality-of-life that most people disregard them hoping it'll ultimately never significantly matter. Oh, and tiresome.
Brave of you to post as AC. Afraid of black helicopters?
I'm going to guess that mortality and general statistical reporting reliability under Saddam was somewhat less clear than post-invasion. For all the people that 'disappeared' into Saddam's system, or the people that Saddam's police entombed in asphalt while their family watched - were they reported as "violent" deaths? Reported at all?
You want to talk hundreds of thousands of casualties? How about AlAnfal campaign against the Kurds, estimated to have killed about 100k.
Remember, this is a regime that didn't acknowlege Halabja even HAPPENED.
So Iraq Body Count claims 115,000 dead from the Iraq war. I've just quoted TWO instances of Saddam's brutality, and I've nearly reached that.
Ignorant Fool? I think if all you're talking about is bodies, you already have lost the argument. Talking about democracy and the ability of a people to choose their own path - even if it's got teething pains - well, that's not quantifiable, and I'm sure you'll dismiss it.
While I understand that in US business, the only way to a greater salary is climbing the ladder and that means management, the Peter Principle is nowhere more evident than in managers that were programmers.
First: you are moving from a programming environment where your 'product' is entirely the result of your work, to a management environment where your 'product' is other people's work, meaning an ENTIRELY different skill set. Think working with Waldoes would be challenging? Try accomplishing anything with waldoes that think for themselves, have fights with their spouses, and may or may not want to even be there.
Second, unless your firm is particularly enlightened, plan to have to constantly defend your management style. I'm of the belief (I think Scott Adams first said it) that managing programmers is much more like Beekeeping than anything else. It involves encouraging people to work in the direction that you want without pushing so hard you harm their enthusiasm or creativity.
Of course, it's impossible that he was genuinely mortified at the heinous conduct of Hussein, right? While Iraq today is certainly not a happy place, it's a) a little harsh to expect that Hitchens could predict the post-conflict bungling of the Bush Admin, and b) at least in the present environment Iraqis have SOME chance to choose their future themselves.
It's one thing to live in an ossified but terrifyingly murderous dictatorship, as compared to the rough conditions of a nation suffering the transition to democracy. The difference, of course, being the impact on our (the West's) scruples. One is nice and quiet and inoffensive, with the murders, tortures, and brutalities kept neatly hidden away while the other plays out in lurid pictures above the fold on the daily paper.
My impression of Hitchens 2001 rightward lurch was that he was deeply offended at the disingenuousness and downright intellectual dishonesty of the Left like Chomsky, whose primary concern (it seemed) in the following months and years was to explain how the murderous actions of deliberate terrorists were solely the fault of the Humanist West (which Hitchens genuinely admired, for all our warts), and to then apologize.
Such intellectual gymnastics may comfort your political beliefs (I suspect they do) but Hitchens - whichever side of the political fence he was that day - never believed such self-gratifying theater passed for credible argument. I disagreed significantly with his positions on some thing, but he never accepted the illusory consolations of self-delusion nor of moral relativism.
Nothing I see in that article suggests that this is a new phenomenon...aside from the hyperbolic statements of the scientists.
The author is astonishingly remiss in not asking the obvious question: did this just start? It could be that such methane plumes have existed forever, we just never detected them. This is the EIGHTH such cruise/survey. They should be able to conclusively say "we checked this area in at least one or two previous instances and such seeps weren't observed", no?
It seems logical that there must have been plumes like this for a while, to prompt (and justify) such a large-scale survey.
Yet both the scientists and article author seem to gloss over the fact that "never seen before" != "never happened before".
Handsfree phones are equally a misdirection. Having my hand on a phone is not the issue, having my attention elsewhere is the problem.
I'd argue that the bulk of accidents are caused somehow by someone's attention being elsewhere than the road & car at a critical moment....radio, phone, passenger, etc.
The TSA does EXACTLY what it was meant to do: provide security theater, ensure the re-election of relevant politicians, demonstrate that we "don't profile", provide jobs for unemployables, expand the roster of government jobs, and consume vast piles of money to no good effect.
The only place in which it fails is that on a few occasions it's a little heavy-handed...not because that's bad, but because that disturbs the sheep.
I'm not sure what YOU thought it was for. I'm pretty certain I'm right.
Could it be perhaps that the store simply wanted a virtual human that they could pay for once, never have to pay residuals, and could be used eternally as their "face" without ever aging, getting pregnant, or changing ever?
Really, we live in pretty good times that this is the worst thing people have to complain about.
FWIW about a 0.12 second Google search finds hundreds if not thousands of girls who would look indistinguishably as perfect as the models shown. It clearly has nothing to do with "there's no human that looks that perfect".
"...China as a whole is more CO2-free than most of the developed countries...." That borders on apologia.
People reference absolute numbers because in the real world, that's what matters. If the factory next to your house is putting out 10,000 tons of CO2, it doesn't really matter whether 50 people work there or 1000.
When people start talking about 'per capita', you can be certain that in many cases they're trying to statistically finesse some point.
The Chinese individually are more CO2 free. China as a whole is most certainly NOT.
FWIW (and I'd guess you probably know) the fact is that most of China is rural and agrarian, if not to say desperately poor and at a Third-World level of existence. That the bulk of their population will, in the next decades, either a) be demanding an improved standard of living, or b) break out into civil war...is practically a certainty.
Slashdot Mirror
....it's using the lame HDMI.
It's not like we have established a nice USB format that could be used, and could perhaps use a raspberry pi-like system to just allow people to copy movies, files, etc into the device for display on their tv?
Heavens, we need to be sure DRM is built in there somewhere. :(
MOST people will pay a reasonable price for something they want.
Louis CK just made a standup comedy special himself. Paid for the production of a 1 hour commercial-quality standup video (about $250,000), and put it up on the internet asking $5 to download it. It did have that $5 paygate, to prevent the casual downloading freeloader, but it is totally drm-free, and available in HD.
The response has been so overwhelming that once he paid for production, he capped his own income from the exercise at $220,000. He paid his production people a bonus of $250,000 and still has money left over, so is donating all excess to a number of charities. He's *already* given them $280,000.
An extraordinary success powered by creativity and (significantly) a lack of greed on his part. Win win win.
It's almost like we don't need the middlemen. Hm.
Iran has stated that the eradication of the Israeli state is a policy objective.
To suggest that Israel is therefore a 'threat' to Iran is ludicrous.
"Recent US history is a track record of invasion and attack for reasons that turned out to be unjustified in the end. "
Last time I checked there were 2 US 'invasions' in recent history.
- Iraq: following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, Iraq's military was ejected and a ceasefire agreed, along with a no-fly zone. Subsequent to repeated violations of the ceasefire and no-fly zone, and UN resolutions authorizing action, the US invaded and toppled the Hussein regime. Regardless of public statements about yellowcake, nuclear program, WMDs, etc THIS was the legal basis for the US actions. As far as I can tell it has never been contested.
- Afghanistan: The Taliban's dominance of the Afghan state and defense of declared terror organizations (particularly Osama Bin Laden) were declared as the basis for the invasion. The regime was toppled, and a democratic* regime was elected.
*it's about as barely democratic as can be
If anything US policy has been too comprehensive, not simply defeating enemies but then insisting on rebuilding their societies. THAT's where US policy has failed.
Ha ha ha.
Sure, comparing a murderer and a thief, and suggesting that the murderer is worse is "prejudice"?
Really?
The US record isn't spotless, but to look at the US actions in the 20th-21st centuries, compared to (from wiki)
"...Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949â"53.[38] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[39] the number of deaths range between 2 million[39][40] and 5 million.[41][42] In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[43] perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[44] were sent to "reform through labour" camps where many perished.[44] Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[45] which were often exceeded.[35] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[46]..."
That's 4 years of Mao, and exceeds the worst possible actions of the US by at least two orders of magnitude over the entire CENTURY.
Moreover, if we talk about deaths resulting from inept policy, the Great Leap Forward (alone) is believed to have starved between 23-42 MILLION people.
And these were China's own people, who one would believe would at least be somewhat better treated than any subject/dominated/Finlandized peoples.
Please, enlighten me on how China would prove a far more benign imperial hegemon than the US has been over the past 60 years.
http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/02/nyc-arrest-records-many-occupy-wall-street-protesters-live-in-luxury/
Average home value of the arrested OWS protestors in NY was $305k, 10% were north of $500k. Median monthly rent was $1850.
I'd say this data (which could be a lie, could be cherry picked, and is obviously host to all the source-validation issues that my original tinfoil hat post commented on) suggest that they are simply whiny rich kids looking for a cause to wave some trendy signs about.
"Did they get all of their money from their parents? Wouldn't that make them the 1% they're protesting?"
http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/02/nyc-arrest-records-many-occupy-wall-street-protesters-live-in-luxury/
Considering the average home value of the arrested protesters in New York is $300,000+ (10% were north of $500k), and median rent is $1850/mo, yes, then, that they are in fact the 1% is precisely what I'm suggesting.
And man will never fly?
Seriously, we're talking in the OP about a monitoring system that detects cheaters. It wouldn't be significantly more complex to have a monitor AND LOGGING system, as well as an RFID that comes with your handicap-certification, which recognizes "oh, handicap-needing vehicle is here!"
And yeah, for the people that use those spaces, it IS a crap shoot.
If I drive up, and there are 20 empty handicap spaces, I have a pretty safe bet that they aren't all going to suddenly fill. But if 16 are full, I would be damn sure I get into and out of the space quickly if I dared use it at all.
The whole point is that someone who needs the space has one when they are there. Otherwise it's vacant, unused space that's usually the most premium, useful parking area in a lot. It's very primitive for us to accept that the only way to make sure the space is there is to totally ban non-handicap usage.
You'd think by this time we could spend our efforts making better use of these spaces? Instead of a system that automatically watches and simply penalizes people who use these spots, how about a system that works on the opportunity-cost model? It would
a) monitor these parking places
b) if a valid handicap parking-user shows up and there are no spots available, anyone parked in them gets tagged and fined.
We've all been at shopping centers where there are dozens if not scores of empty handicap spots available, even during the crazy-busy shopping days at Christmas.
This would make these (generally unused) spots available for the sort of high-demand, short "I'm only going to be in there for 5 mins" things" BUT ALSO strongly penalize people who use them for anything more IF there is a valid handicap space user that needs it...
It's hard to be motivated about the unfairness of the system, when the people 'protesting' the unfairness are wearing $100 jeans, carrying $4000 laptops, and talking on $500 phones. I'm not saying there aren't injustices worth having a serious protest about - but these smug, indolent, wealthy children are worthless as spokespeople.*
On that level, it's kind of a reverse Marie Antoinette: the aristocracy is bitching because their cake costs too much.
*if one was a tinfoil-hatter, one might almost say it's Machiavellian-perfect. Having issues with underclass disgruntlement at the way you're twisting the system to benefit yourself and your ultra-rich friends? Simple, start a credible protest movement but fill it with the most obnoxious, hateable, repellent individuals . Then watch as the disgruntlement dissipates between the Hobson's Choice of the OWS or no leadership at all. Nicely played, nicely played.
You were clear and blunt, I shall also be. It's not xenophobia that makes me concerned about the Chinese program, it's simple geopolitical self-interest..
Nations conflict; that's human history. They conflict in many venues - on the ground, sea, and air militarily; in media culturally; in commerce economically - and the next venue will be space. I think that's almost inarguable.
There's a reason that the otherwise-economically-worthless islands in the Pacific were fought over so bitterly in WW2 - they were unsinkable aircraft carriers, allowing their owner control of the region that was durable and extremely painful/complicated/expensive to break.
In near-earth space, there are some important points of geography - low-earth orbit, geosychronous orbit, the Lagrange points, and the moon. Considering them militarily, all of these except the moon suffer from the significant handicap of all space operations: extreme vulnerability. On the moon there are precisely two points that have nearly permanent visibility to both the sun (for power) and earth (for communications). Two. Whoever gets there first and plants a base will enjoy a positional advantage FOREVER.
Certainly the US government is inept, inefficient, and a host of other negative adjectives. But the Pax Americana has laid relatively lightly for the bulk of the world; for a number of reasons I wouldn't expect a Chinese one to be quite as benign.
The 'government subsidy of roadways' - in the sense you mean, as a giant funding program wagered on by the federal government and justified by national defense - ended sometime in the 50s-60s. Subsequently highways have been paid for (or not...have you see the quality of our highway system?) by ongoing taxation and user fees specifically collected for the purpose. Calling it a 'subsidy' isn't even the right word, it would be like calling the police a 'government security subsidy'.
And on the contrary, the dairy industry would be pretty much the OPPOSITE of 'fucked' without government subsidies. What the utterly warped system of subsidies currently supports is a mockery of a free-market system, in which subsidies are directed preferentially at places that have the HIGHEST cost of production. Therefore you have dairy subsidies going to farmers in California with horrible grazing, highest production cost, and highest shipping costs, while dairy farms in MN and WI struggle to make ends meet. Without subsidies, you might actually have a dairy industry based on where it's naturally the cheapest to produce.
You may be right on the first two although I suspect you're pulling those 'facts' from your backside, too. If you simultaneously stopped the subsidies to oil and coal (likewise the protections, etc) I'd equally guess that - among rational people, I'm not talking about the people who think Fukashima was the end of the world - nuclear power would in fact be chosen preferentially over either of those.
Vaccines would likewise rise in costs as the distributed load of the malpractice liability impacted them, sure. Then again, one might ask if that's not simply a subsidy meant to relieve the cost of having children from people that can't afford them in the first place?
The OP may call them subsidies, you may call them public policy, but declaring them 'good' is a broader question you haven't justified.
In the bulk of cases I can think of, rarely are government mandates the best way to deliver services or benefits to a community.
Caucuses are a legacy from the days when communications traveled at the speed of a messenger. It was necessary for a participatory democracy to collect in small groups to select delegates to go to a nominating convention in exactly the same sense that the people selected congressmen and the states selected electors to cast votes on their behalf.
Subsequently, it's been codified as probably the best compromise way that individuals can still have a voice in the political process.
By the way, I'd love to hear the description of a democratic system (applicable to a country of 300+ million) that DOESN'T value a better organized/paid for campaign over the better candidate. Every one I've ever heard of does, and most have far more vulnerabilities to 'gaming' than the caucus system.
Iowa and New Hampshire are commonly recognized as bellwether states, mythologized in American culture as representative of skeptically conservative (ie not swayed easily by whim, as opposed to Conservative) yet open minded middle-class farmers and classic New England Yankees. I doubt it's really true anymore but that's why they've been allowed to remain. Don't examine it too closely or you might catch a whiff of parochialism and more than a strong scent of racism too.
So...this is almost like saying that unless you can be ABSOLUTELY IRONCLAD SURE that your electronic voting system is secure, then paper ballots provide the best transparency, redundancy, and confirmatory trail of any solution?
Ironic that they're concerned enough about reliability and security to make this move for their primary, but nobody seems to care that much about the GENERAL election.
Stupid people are stupid.
I see the exact same people dropping $200+/month for cable that they rarely watch. Their choice, certainly, but when I see them ALSO talking about using food stamps or getting AFDC checks, well, yeah, I get a little irate.
99.99% of the communications I deal with have no reason to be encrypted.
I'd guess I'm fairly normal in that respect.
While it might be nice to encrypt sensitive things, I generally just don't send anything truly sensitive via email. Given how little I send is actually sensitive, that's easier than
a) adding a small procedure to EVERY email I send for no real value, and
b) end up failing because the bulk of people don't use it anyway.
Encryption/privacy obsessives are like the digital equivalent to the people obsessed that everything causes cancer: probably fundamentally right, but to follow their prescriptions would mean such a decrease in quality-of-life that most people disregard them hoping it'll ultimately never significantly matter. Oh, and tiresome.
Brave of you to post as AC. Afraid of black helicopters?
I'm going to guess that mortality and general statistical reporting reliability under Saddam was somewhat less clear than post-invasion. For all the people that 'disappeared' into Saddam's system, or the people that Saddam's police entombed in asphalt while their family watched - were they reported as "violent" deaths? Reported at all?
You want to talk hundreds of thousands of casualties? How about AlAnfal campaign against the Kurds, estimated to have killed about 100k.
Remember, this is a regime that didn't acknowlege Halabja even HAPPENED.
So Iraq Body Count claims 115,000 dead from the Iraq war.
I've just quoted TWO instances of Saddam's brutality, and I've nearly reached that.
Ignorant Fool? I think if all you're talking about is bodies, you already have lost the argument. Talking about democracy and the ability of a people to choose their own path - even if it's got teething pains - well, that's not quantifiable, and I'm sure you'll dismiss it.
While I understand that in US business, the only way to a greater salary is climbing the ladder and that means management, the Peter Principle is nowhere more evident than in managers that were programmers.
First: you are moving from a programming environment where your 'product' is entirely the result of your work, to a management environment where your 'product' is other people's work, meaning an ENTIRELY different skill set. Think working with Waldoes would be challenging? Try accomplishing anything with waldoes that think for themselves, have fights with their spouses, and may or may not want to even be there.
Second, unless your firm is particularly enlightened, plan to have to constantly defend your management style. I'm of the belief (I think Scott Adams first said it) that managing programmers is much more like Beekeeping than anything else. It involves encouraging people to work in the direction that you want without pushing so hard you harm their enthusiasm or creativity.
Of course, it's impossible that he was genuinely mortified at the heinous conduct of Hussein, right? While Iraq today is certainly not a happy place, it's a) a little harsh to expect that Hitchens could predict the post-conflict bungling of the Bush Admin, and b) at least in the present environment Iraqis have SOME chance to choose their future themselves.
It's one thing to live in an ossified but terrifyingly murderous dictatorship, as compared to the rough conditions of a nation suffering the transition to democracy. The difference, of course, being the impact on our (the West's) scruples. One is nice and quiet and inoffensive, with the murders, tortures, and brutalities kept neatly hidden away while the other plays out in lurid pictures above the fold on the daily paper.
My impression of Hitchens 2001 rightward lurch was that he was deeply offended at the disingenuousness and downright intellectual dishonesty of the Left like Chomsky, whose primary concern (it seemed) in the following months and years was to explain how the murderous actions of deliberate terrorists were solely the fault of the Humanist West (which Hitchens genuinely admired, for all our warts), and to then apologize.
Such intellectual gymnastics may comfort your political beliefs (I suspect they do) but Hitchens - whichever side of the political fence he was that day - never believed such self-gratifying theater passed for credible argument. I disagreed significantly with his positions on some thing, but he never accepted the illusory consolations of self-delusion nor of moral relativism.
Nothing I see in that article suggests that this is a new phenomenon...aside from the hyperbolic statements of the scientists.
The author is astonishingly remiss in not asking the obvious question: did this just start? It could be that such methane plumes have existed forever, we just never detected them. This is the EIGHTH such cruise/survey. They should be able to conclusively say "we checked this area in at least one or two previous instances and such seeps weren't observed", no?
It seems logical that there must have been plumes like this for a while, to prompt (and justify) such a large-scale survey.
Yet both the scientists and article author seem to gloss over the fact that "never seen before" != "never happened before".
Handsfree phones are equally a misdirection.
Having my hand on a phone is not the issue, having my attention elsewhere is the problem.
I'd argue that the bulk of accidents are caused somehow by someone's attention being elsewhere than the road & car at a critical moment....radio, phone, passenger, etc.
Did we forget to mention that all of our drones are made out of a special pig-lard-based plastic resin?
Sorry about your souls, all you devouts that touched it.
I think you're entirely wrong.
The TSA does EXACTLY what it was meant to do: provide security theater, ensure the re-election of relevant politicians, demonstrate that we "don't profile", provide jobs for unemployables, expand the roster of government jobs, and consume vast piles of money to no good effect.
The only place in which it fails is that on a few occasions it's a little heavy-handed...not because that's bad, but because that disturbs the sheep.
I'm not sure what YOU thought it was for. I'm pretty certain I'm right.
Could it be perhaps that the store simply wanted a virtual human that they could pay for once, never have to pay residuals, and could be used eternally as their "face" without ever aging, getting pregnant, or changing ever?
Really, we live in pretty good times that this is the worst thing people have to complain about.
FWIW about a 0.12 second Google search finds hundreds if not thousands of girls who would look indistinguishably as perfect as the models shown. It clearly has nothing to do with "there's no human that looks that perfect".
"But you didn't piss off the 1% that matter so everything is golden."
Fixed that for you.
"...China as a whole is more CO2-free than most of the developed countries...."
That borders on apologia.
People reference absolute numbers because in the real world, that's what matters. If the factory next to your house is putting out 10,000 tons of CO2, it doesn't really matter whether 50 people work there or 1000.
When people start talking about 'per capita', you can be certain that in many cases they're trying to statistically finesse some point.
The Chinese individually are more CO2 free.
China as a whole is most certainly NOT.
FWIW (and I'd guess you probably know) the fact is that most of China is rural and agrarian, if not to say desperately poor and at a Third-World level of existence. That the bulk of their population will, in the next decades, either a) be demanding an improved standard of living, or b) break out into civil war...is practically a certainty.