Humans have been living in concrete in NYC for over 100 years. They seem to enjoy it.
And they're quite good at sealing up cracks in concrete to! No bacteria needed, and no need for complicated feeding schemes. Just send the sealers to the next supermarket. (They even pay for the food themselves!)
I think you are a bit confused. The EU (United States of Europe) is ONE economy with ONE currency - the Euro.
Nope. Not even close. The Eurozone excludes important economies, such as the UK. So their poor state doesn't have anything to do with the Euro per se.
Now it's not surprising that an american would see the EU as a US style federation, but it's anything but. Far from it. All the member states retain their full freedom, the limits of which are only voluntarily agreed to by convention. Hence the Euro was as doomed as all previous European currency collaborations, when push came to shove, there wasn't sufficient power to actually punish the countries not holding up their end of the bargain.
Now traditionally, that was "fixed" by leaving the cooperation, hence it was thought that by actually agreeing on one currency, that would take that option away and make everybody keep in line. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the opposite. Instead we got all the old problems without the old solution available. Hence they're in worse shape than they were before...
That couldn't happen in a federation such as the US as the central bank has actual teeth. In the Eurozone, it doesn't. Hence the two economies are not comparable.
That's quite a load of bullocks. The Greek people, for instance, have always been one of the hardest working cultures on the continent. For you to simply claim it's because they are in trouble because they are lazy is really stunning.
Nice way of putting words in my mouth... But at least we now know that you consider yourself Greek, and hence the big mouth, and bad manners have been explained...;-)
No, I didn't ascribe the Greek/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese economic situation to laziness. As a matter of fact, I pointedly, didn't ascribe it to any one, multitude of, or particular cause. I just observed that these economies have never done well in modern times, for more than a short period of time at a stretch. And that's even when pumping in billions to try and get them on the right track. (Hell, this is even true within Italy, and hence the Lega Nord party's rhetoric to get rid of the "south," meaning southern Italy).
Of course, it goes without saying that however hard the Greeks work (or not), has no bearing whatsoever on the Spanish economy... You might as well blame their lack of economic success on too much sun. At least they have that in common.
Well, it's not just Germany. There's Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria etc. doing great, for example.
Now of course, economy is a complex beast, but compare the deficits in this table with the US 2014 deficit of 2.8% of GDP (which was a record low). You'll see that most EU countries are doing better or much better than the US even though the EU as a whole is doing slightly worse as some of the large southern economies are pulling the rest of us down.
So, as is always the case these days, news reporting skews the general picture to be (much) worse than it already is. That the southernes aren't doing to good is furthermore not exactly news... They've always done poorly, one way or another... (So why someone thought it would be a good idea to include them in the Euro I don't know.)
Note also today's news that even if Greece didn't pay back their loans, it wouldn't be a disaster, and could be handled quite nicely. Not that we don't care, it's a precedent we don't want set, but still. The worst is over. And if you're looking for economic stability, go to Northern Europe. South of the Alps is and has always been a crap shot. And stay out of the east if you don't know what you're doing...:-)
You would think unions would have learned the lesson by now, with all the jobs they have lost by destroying companies with non-union competition and putting ALL of the workers on the street. But it seems the union bosses are doing just as well as the corporate CEOs with their golden parachutes, so fuck all those prols, I guess. It's almost like the elites are cooperating to screw everyone else and only put on a show of "protecting the workers."
I don't know about american unions, but as I said in other posts, that's most definitely not true about northern European unions (let's call them "Germanic" for short). Not by a long shot. We have the highest standard of living indices known to man, lowest inequality, and well running economies (much better than the US), and some of the strongest unions on the planet. In fact, many big business leaders admit in private that it's the unions that make it easy to do business here. It levels the playing field when it comes to employees, everybody knows the rules, and you don't have to suffer strikes all the time, but can negotiate instead.
Ask yourself what your high school economics class was like. Were you ever taught there was any way but free market laissez faire economics? Heck, in my class they didn't even bother demonizing it, it just wasn't taught. Libertarianism was a fait accompli. The grandparent, like a lot of/.ers is fighting the same uphill battle. It's the same reason the right wing just won the UK. You take control of the basic discussion and thought processes. Hell, look what we're doing. We're not talking about our standard of living, we're talking about "Job Creators". They've framed the debate in such a way that we can't even start to talk about the real issues.
Even such well known leftist bastions as the IMF and OECD have finally come to the conclusion that income inequality hurts economic growth. Yes the almighty economic growth of the whole nation.
In Sweden we increased our financial inequality in the nineties due to our banking crisis. And even though we've had very good growth since then, the IMF believes we have lost a substantial amount due to the increase in income inequality. If we had kept our old system we would be much richer now as a country, and as a people.
How do you fix this? Easy, redistribution tax the rich, and let the money flow to the relatively poorer. Says the IMF and the OECD. Bloody communist bastards the lot of them... Yeah, right.
When's the last time you opened a product labeled "Made in one of those four countries"?
Probably not too long ago. Check out Volvo cars (built in Sweden) or Volvo trucks (built in Sweden, and Swedish owned). To just name two. There are many others.
Now of course, we've been non white for the last 30 years or so. Still going strong. If you lot would just stop starting wars all over, or at least take care of the refugees we wouldn't have to. The town of Sodertalje (home to Scania) took in more Iraq refugees than all of the US of A. Combined.
Then again, if you weren't so hot on wars, the Norwegians couldn't export their "Raufoss" rounds to you, so there's that...
Fact of the matter is that we have a very positive trade balance with you, even considering how small Sweden is. So a lot more shit gets done here, than over there... A lot more...
Nope. The unions in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and, to a lesser extent, Norway, for example, are much stronger than the unions in the countries you mentioned. As far as Europe is concerned the countries you mention are on the lower half when it comes to union strength. (Which is clear if you notice the antics they get up to. A strong union wouldn't have to behave like that.)
Even many staunch union supporters would agree that giving workers more power than employers is a bad idea.
Why? If the workers are supposed to just smile and take it when they get laid off, and get another job, why shouldn't the same be true of businesses? If the workers had more power and used it unwisely the company would just go bust, and the owner would have to get another job, which is how free market capitalism is supposed to work... How is that different?
In fact, with powerful unions comes a more responsible work force, not less. If everyone's job is at stake, then you have to tread carefully. Otherwise, how could we in northern Europe have large multinational companies when we have some of the strongest unions in the world? Our current PM was a former top union boss, and lo and behold, there wasn't any mass flight of Sandvikens and SAABs...
I had supported hardware, as it turned out, but then Linux did tend to support the most common commodity hardware at the time.
This is the main one. We bought out 386:s with the "best" hardware of the day, i.e. the stuff that was reported to work best with the MS-DOS games of the time and that didn't cost much. We were students and didn't have any money. Just the base system basically broke the bank.
All BSD systems of the era basically started with, "First make sure you have this technically the most beautiful hardware". When we cried "We don't have that, we have this", the answer was invariably "We don't care about you, we don't care about that piece of shit card/disk/whatever, we wouldn't write a driver even if you sent us the equipment".
Linux OTOH was inclusive. If someone/everybody used a piece of hardware, that hardware got supported quicker, since more people depended on it. Instead the kernel/drivers adapted to the flaws of the hardware, instead of turning up its nose at it.
So even if we could pirate several other Unix systems, AT&T lawsuits be damned, they wouldn't run anyway, and was hence out of the running before they even got started.
The legacy Unix system, was expensive due to the fact that it required high end hardware. NT would run on your consumer PC as well. So Unix systems did work better because of the whole architecture not just the OS.
Nope. It was just worse. When I was in telecoms we tried to build a "router" (big iron) on our own custom hardware, with full vendor support (as in source code if we wanted it), based on windows NT instead of Solaris. (And of course we built the hardware to suit the OS/application. Not the other way around).
Crashed and burned leaving not as much as a flake of soot behind. Couldn't be done. What the Redmond people told us turned out to be simply not true as in "didn't work the way it was documented to work". And nothing much else worked either.
So, building on VAX/VMS worked. Industrial strength. Building on Unix/Solaris (and a few others), worked as well. Also industrial strength. WIndows NT. Not even close.
Well, many of the US military combat postings are barred to women, but that is changing (slowly), so there is active work going on in putting more women in those specialities.
The pentagon's blanket rule against women in combat postings was only lifted in 2013, so you have to give it some time.
But those old courses were designed with the same objective of every other course, to attract students.
Uhh? I guess you are on the young side if you think that courses of old were designed with the objective of attracting students. Only thirty years ago let me tell you that courses and programs were designed with the expressed and implied intent that they were what you needed to know and what you thought of it be damned.
The "it has to be fun or else" came much later, with the millennials and gen-Y:ers. We gen X:ers we slogged through, and if we didn't like it, well, there's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out.
This approach to teaching of course had drawbacks, I'm not saying it didn't. But it also had some advantages, that have fallen by the wayside in the last two decades, that's not something that should be forgotten either.
I dunno, but I guarantee you that in my college years had we had "Engineering solutions to kill people from orbit", I'd have signed up for that shit in a heartbeat.
Well, we almost had. I remember our main engineering mechanics text being written by a retired admiral in the US coast guard. Many if not most of the problems in the book was of the type "A ship moves forward at ten knots and fires a shell in a 35 deg angle off the bow... etc. etc.
And I do remember the girls complaining that there was too much "rockets and guns", and the boys countering that there wasn't enough.:-)
Varicella immunization, as you point out, wanes after a decade or so (as does tetanus, diphtheria and especially pertussis) and chicken pox is a largely benign illness (although complications do occur). The pediatric community has decided that a nuanced approach to this won't work so it's "everybody gets everything all of the time
That's an interesting difference between countries. In Sweden we don't have much of an anti-vaccer movement, though the mishandling of the bird flu didn't help, so let's say "not yet" at least. However, while we vaccinate children on schedule for most of the above, Varicella is not on the general schedule yet.
The schedule here is, wait and see if you get it, and if you haven't had it by your late teens, then we'll talk immunization. So we're still holding chicken pox play parties, to expose our children at as young an age as is practical (it usually is worse the older you are).
The profession says themselves that given the severity of the disease, you could perhaps make an argument for vaccination on economic grounds; having people stay home from work (on the governments dime) to care for sick children has a non-neglible cost, but from a pure medical perspective they don't feel it's justified, and hence it stays of the recommended list. For now at least.
The view that industrial revolution destroyed cheap labor intensive jobs while creating more value added higher paying jobs and more high paying jobs were created than destroyed is a very Euro-centric view.
That's all true, and it's even worse than that. It's not even true from a European perspective. We sent 20% of our population to the US as a direct result of the mechanisation of agriculture. That's two people out of every ten that didn't get those higher paying jobs in Europe as there was "unused" lands across the ocean to take advantage of.
That's not true any more. The US in particular and the rest of the world in general is already taken. The next 20% in Europe are going unemployed at this time, and the next 20% after those will as well.
Earlier boxes had turbo buttons because they could shift back into a nominally PC/PC/XT compatible 4.77mhz (in the case of 8088/8086 boxes) or PC/AT compatible 6 or 8mhz (in the case of 286/386 boxes). It actually had a good reason - many early games were highly dependent on the system's clock speed.
Yes. I remember playing a flight simulator game on my 386 that did assume that you were on a PC/AT for timing. As the game didn't have a "fast forward" mode to cut down on the long flights to/from missions/target the turbo button actually came in handy. However, since that meant that everything went faster you had to be really light on the stick in "turbo" mode or you would end up in a smoking hole in the ground.
In my minds eye the game play was military simulatior grade and graphics was near picture perfect, but neither was probably pretty far from both. I doubt graphics was even 640x480, though it might just have eked over that resolution...:-)
One thing I can't for the life of me understand is why the manufacturers don't install an Eberspaecher or similar good old fashioned fuel burning heater for those of us in colder climates.
The fuel consumption is a deciliter per hour or so, so a 5-10 litre tank (2-3 gal) should be plenty, and you could fuel it with bio diesel or similar if you're CO2 averse. It's well known technology that's already available and popular e.g. here in Sweden, so it should be a no-brainer that you don't use precious battery power to make heat in a car.
Indeed. I think these people are so in love with their own genius that they have overlooked that their tool is probably going to do a lot more harm than good. After several decades of research into software reliability and security it is clear that it is not a question of the tools used, although that flawed idea is strong in some academic and industrial quarters. What these people are basically saying is that if you have just the right kind of hammer, then you cannot hurt yourself with it anymore. Of course, that would be a Styrofoam hammer (or similar) that is also completely unfit for its primary purpose. The same is true for programming languages.
Well, having done (some very small part of) that research I think you're over egging your argument. While its true that tool users make the difference, and it's a poor carpenter etc. etc. the fact of the matter is that some tools are more likely to be used correctly in certain situations than others. If you look at the human factors work in e.g. aviation, esp. military aviation, then that becomes apparent. Much thought, research and experience goes into designing the cockpit interface for a fighter pilot, for example, and for good reason. The workload is already overwhelming and one mistake can kill you so anything that makes that mistake less likely is sought after. This has gotten to the point that one sticking point of buying a fighter aircraft from another country is that the interface won't necessarily fit, not your pilots, but your doctrine on how to fight! Your doctrine of course affecting how you train your pilots. (I have a nice reference for that, but unfortunately its in swedish.)
Now, I can't see why the same wouldn't be true of programming languages in spades, as the task is at least as complex, and probably orders of magnitude more complex in many cases as flying an air plane. Now, we basically don't know anything, at least in a structured way, of how a programming language should be designed to best fit certain programming task, but the anecdotal experience is telling (look for example at Ericsson's work with Erlang, experience that matches my own). Put another way, that 'C' should already be "perfect" by random chance is completely unlikely. We both know more about how to implement programming languages today (and hence can make more concessions to the programmer), and know more about programming in general.
Now of course, if you're argument is, to paraphrase the Erlang FAQ, that you can "still mess up an Erlang program by having hour long meetings about the colour of the project napkins" that's of course true. The best rifle doesn't win the fight, if you put it in the hands of untrained troops, especially if you have the worst trucks to take them to the front. BUT, all else being equal, the troops with the best rifles win, not every time, but more often than not. That's what it means to have a better tool, and its generally a worthwhile endeavour.
Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976, and that's just naming a few of the more egregious ones.
Or was your point that they used the own troops, instead of bribing/cajoling/threatening/funding/organising someone elses? Some people would say that doing your own dirty work is the stand up thing to do, but that's some people...
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Humans have been living in concrete in NYC for over 100 years. They seem to enjoy it.
And they're quite good at sealing up cracks in concrete to! No bacteria needed, and no need for complicated feeding schemes. Just send the sealers to the next supermarket. (They even pay for the food themselves!)
I think you are a bit confused. The EU (United States of Europe) is ONE economy with ONE currency - the Euro.
Nope. Not even close. The Eurozone excludes important economies, such as the UK. So their poor state doesn't have anything to do with the Euro per se.
Now it's not surprising that an american would see the EU as a US style federation, but it's anything but. Far from it. All the member states retain their full freedom, the limits of which are only voluntarily agreed to by convention. Hence the Euro was as doomed as all previous European currency collaborations, when push came to shove, there wasn't sufficient power to actually punish the countries not holding up their end of the bargain.
Now traditionally, that was "fixed" by leaving the cooperation, hence it was thought that by actually agreeing on one currency, that would take that option away and make everybody keep in line. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the opposite. Instead we got all the old problems without the old solution available. Hence they're in worse shape than they were before...
That couldn't happen in a federation such as the US as the central bank has actual teeth. In the Eurozone, it doesn't. Hence the two economies are not comparable.
That's quite a load of bullocks. The Greek people, for instance, have always been one of the hardest working cultures on the continent. For you to simply claim it's because they are in trouble because they are lazy is really stunning.
Nice way of putting words in my mouth... But at least we now know that you consider yourself Greek, and hence the big mouth, and bad manners have been explained... ;-)
No, I didn't ascribe the Greek/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese economic situation to laziness. As a matter of fact, I pointedly, didn't ascribe it to any one, multitude of, or particular cause. I just observed that these economies have never done well in modern times, for more than a short period of time at a stretch. And that's even when pumping in billions to try and get them on the right track. (Hell, this is even true within Italy, and hence the Lega Nord party's rhetoric to get rid of the "south," meaning southern Italy).
Of course, it goes without saying that however hard the Greeks work (or not), has no bearing whatsoever on the Spanish economy... You might as well blame their lack of economic success on too much sun. At least they have that in common.
Well, it's not just Germany. There's Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria etc. doing great, for example.
Now of course, economy is a complex beast, but compare the deficits in this table with the US 2014 deficit of 2.8% of GDP (which was a record low). You'll see that most EU countries are doing better or much better than the US even though the EU as a whole is doing slightly worse as some of the large southern economies are pulling the rest of us down.
So, as is always the case these days, news reporting skews the general picture to be (much) worse than it already is. That the southernes aren't doing to good is furthermore not exactly news... They've always done poorly, one way or another... (So why someone thought it would be a good idea to include them in the Euro I don't know.)
Note also today's news that even if Greece didn't pay back their loans, it wouldn't be a disaster, and could be handled quite nicely. Not that we don't care, it's a precedent we don't want set, but still. The worst is over. And if you're looking for economic stability, go to Northern Europe. South of the Alps is and has always been a crap shot. And stay out of the east if you don't know what you're doing... :-)
We'd be happy to pay those people. But the current system doesn't allow us.
But this isn't news to you...
You would think unions would have learned the lesson by now, with all the jobs they have lost by destroying companies with non-union competition and putting ALL of the workers on the street. But it seems the union bosses are doing just as well as the corporate CEOs with their golden parachutes, so fuck all those prols, I guess. It's almost like the elites are cooperating to screw everyone else and only put on a show of "protecting the workers."
I don't know about american unions, but as I said in other posts, that's most definitely not true about northern European unions (let's call them "Germanic" for short). Not by a long shot. We have the highest standard of living indices known to man, lowest inequality, and well running economies (much better than the US), and some of the strongest unions on the planet. In fact, many big business leaders admit in private that it's the unions that make it easy to do business here. It levels the playing field when it comes to employees, everybody knows the rules, and you don't have to suffer strikes all the time, but can negotiate instead.
Ask yourself what your high school economics class was like. Were you ever taught there was any way but free market laissez faire economics? Heck, in my class they didn't even bother demonizing it, it just wasn't taught. Libertarianism was a fait accompli. The grandparent, like a lot of /.ers is fighting the same uphill battle. It's the same reason the right wing just won the UK. You take control of the basic discussion and thought processes. Hell, look what we're doing. We're not talking about our standard of living, we're talking about "Job Creators". They've framed the debate in such a way that we can't even start to talk about the real issues.
Even such well known leftist bastions as the IMF and OECD have finally come to the conclusion that income inequality hurts economic growth. Yes the almighty economic growth of the whole nation.
In Sweden we increased our financial inequality in the nineties due to our banking crisis. And even though we've had very good growth since then, the IMF believes we have lost a substantial amount due to the increase in income inequality. If we had kept our old system we would be much richer now as a country, and as a people.
How do you fix this? Easy, redistribution tax the rich, and let the money flow to the relatively poorer. Says the IMF and the OECD. Bloody communist bastards the lot of them... Yeah, right.
When's the last time you opened a product labeled "Made in one of those four countries"?
Probably not too long ago. Check out Volvo cars (built in Sweden) or Volvo trucks (built in Sweden, and Swedish owned). To just name two. There are many others.
Now of course, we've been non white for the last 30 years or so. Still going strong. If you lot would just stop starting wars all over, or at least take care of the refugees we wouldn't have to. The town of Sodertalje (home to Scania) took in more Iraq refugees than all of the US of A. Combined.
Then again, if you weren't so hot on wars, the Norwegians couldn't export their "Raufoss" rounds to you, so there's that...
Fact of the matter is that we have a very positive trade balance with you, even considering how small Sweden is. So a lot more shit gets done here, than over there... A lot more...
Nope. The unions in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and, to a lesser extent, Norway, for example, are much stronger than the unions in the countries you mentioned. As far as Europe is concerned the countries you mention are on the lower half when it comes to union strength. (Which is clear if you notice the antics they get up to. A strong union wouldn't have to behave like that.)
So, no cigarr. Try again.
Even many staunch union supporters would agree that giving workers more power than employers is a bad idea.
Why? If the workers are supposed to just smile and take it when they get laid off, and get another job, why shouldn't the same be true of businesses? If the workers had more power and used it unwisely the company would just go bust, and the owner would have to get another job, which is how free market capitalism is supposed to work... How is that different?
In fact, with powerful unions comes a more responsible work force, not less. If everyone's job is at stake, then you have to tread carefully. Otherwise, how could we in northern Europe have large multinational companies when we have some of the strongest unions in the world? Our current PM was a former top union boss, and lo and behold, there wasn't any mass flight of Sandvikens and SAABs...
I had supported hardware, as it turned out, but then Linux did tend to support the most common commodity hardware at the time.
This is the main one. We bought out 386:s with the "best" hardware of the day, i.e. the stuff that was reported to work best with the MS-DOS games of the time and that didn't cost much. We were students and didn't have any money. Just the base system basically broke the bank.
All BSD systems of the era basically started with, "First make sure you have this technically the most beautiful hardware". When we cried "We don't have that, we have this", the answer was invariably "We don't care about you, we don't care about that piece of shit card/disk/whatever, we wouldn't write a driver even if you sent us the equipment".
Linux OTOH was inclusive. If someone/everybody used a piece of hardware, that hardware got supported quicker, since more people depended on it. Instead the kernel/drivers adapted to the flaws of the hardware, instead of turning up its nose at it.
So even if we could pirate several other Unix systems, AT&T lawsuits be damned, they wouldn't run anyway, and was hence out of the running before they even got started.
fish don't have shotguns in the back seat
No, they have friggin laserbeams on their heads!
Yepp. They're the only ones right now. The physicists won't touch it with a ten foot pole...
The legacy Unix system, was expensive due to the fact that it required high end hardware. NT would run on your consumer PC as well. So Unix systems did work better because of the whole architecture not just the OS.
Nope. It was just worse. When I was in telecoms we tried to build a "router" (big iron) on our own custom hardware, with full vendor support (as in source code if we wanted it), based on windows NT instead of Solaris. (And of course we built the hardware to suit the OS/application. Not the other way around).
Crashed and burned leaving not as much as a flake of soot behind. Couldn't be done. What the Redmond people told us turned out to be simply not true as in "didn't work the way it was documented to work". And nothing much else worked either.
So, building on VAX/VMS worked. Industrial strength. Building on Unix/Solaris (and a few others), worked as well. Also industrial strength. WIndows NT. Not even close.
Today it's based on. You guessed it; Linux.
.
"am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?"
Uhh? What? Where's this outstanding interface design, and why haven't they told anyone about it?
Look, we're not ignoring it. They just haven't shown it to us! Please, why keep that a secret and release Gnome 3 shell instead?
Well, at least in northern Europe we add iodine to table salt. Don't know that we add much fluoride.
Well, many of the US military combat postings are barred to women, but that is changing (slowly), so there is active work going on in putting more women in those specialities.
The pentagon's blanket rule against women in combat postings was only lifted in 2013, so you have to give it some time.
But those old courses were designed with the same objective of every other course, to attract students.
Uhh? I guess you are on the young side if you think that courses of old were designed with the objective of attracting students. Only thirty years ago let me tell you that courses and programs were designed with the expressed and implied intent that they were what you needed to know and what you thought of it be damned.
The "it has to be fun or else" came much later, with the millennials and gen-Y:ers. We gen X:ers we slogged through, and if we didn't like it, well, there's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out.
This approach to teaching of course had drawbacks, I'm not saying it didn't. But it also had some advantages, that have fallen by the wayside in the last two decades, that's not something that should be forgotten either.
I dunno, but I guarantee you that in my college years had we had "Engineering solutions to kill people from orbit", I'd have signed up for that shit in a heartbeat.
Well, we almost had. I remember our main engineering mechanics text being written by a retired admiral in the US coast guard. Many if not most of the problems in the book was of the type "A ship moves forward at ten knots and fires a shell in a 35 deg angle off the bow... etc. etc.
And I do remember the girls complaining that there was too much "rockets and guns", and the boys countering that there wasn't enough. :-)
Well played, sir! Well played! :-)
Varicella immunization, as you point out, wanes after a decade or so (as does tetanus, diphtheria and especially pertussis) and chicken pox is a largely benign illness (although complications do occur). The pediatric community has decided that a nuanced approach to this won't work so it's "everybody gets everything all of the time
That's an interesting difference between countries. In Sweden we don't have much of an anti-vaccer movement, though the mishandling of the bird flu didn't help, so let's say "not yet" at least. However, while we vaccinate children on schedule for most of the above, Varicella is not on the general schedule yet.
The schedule here is, wait and see if you get it, and if you haven't had it by your late teens, then we'll talk immunization. So we're still holding chicken pox play parties, to expose our children at as young an age as is practical (it usually is worse the older you are).
The profession says themselves that given the severity of the disease, you could perhaps make an argument for vaccination on economic grounds; having people stay home from work (on the governments dime) to care for sick children has a non-neglible cost, but from a pure medical perspective they don't feel it's justified, and hence it stays of the recommended list. For now at least.
The view that industrial revolution destroyed cheap labor intensive jobs while creating more value added higher paying jobs and more high paying jobs were created than destroyed is a very Euro-centric view.
That's all true, and it's even worse than that. It's not even true from a European perspective. We sent 20% of our population to the US as a direct result of the mechanisation of agriculture. That's two people out of every ten that didn't get those higher paying jobs in Europe as there was "unused" lands across the ocean to take advantage of.
That's not true any more. The US in particular and the rest of the world in general is already taken. The next 20% in Europe are going unemployed at this time, and the next 20% after those will as well.
Earlier boxes had turbo buttons because they could shift back into a nominally PC/PC/XT compatible 4.77mhz (in the case of 8088/8086 boxes) or PC/AT compatible 6 or 8mhz (in the case of 286/386 boxes). It actually had a good reason - many early games were highly dependent on the system's clock speed.
Yes. I remember playing a flight simulator game on my 386 that did assume that you were on a PC/AT for timing. As the game didn't have a "fast forward" mode to cut down on the long flights to/from missions/target the turbo button actually came in handy. However, since that meant that everything went faster you had to be really light on the stick in "turbo" mode or you would end up in a smoking hole in the ground.
In my minds eye the game play was military simulatior grade and graphics was near picture perfect, but neither was probably pretty far from both. I doubt graphics was even 640x480, though it might just have eked over that resolution... :-)
One thing I can't for the life of me understand is why the manufacturers don't install an Eberspaecher or similar good old fashioned fuel burning heater for those of us in colder climates.
The fuel consumption is a deciliter per hour or so, so a 5-10 litre tank (2-3 gal) should be plenty, and you could fuel it with bio diesel or similar if you're CO2 averse. It's well known technology that's already available and popular e.g. here in Sweden, so it should be a no-brainer that you don't use precious battery power to make heat in a car.
Indeed. I think these people are so in love with their own genius that they have overlooked that their tool is probably going to do a lot more harm than good. After several decades of research into software reliability and security it is clear that it is not a question of the tools used, although that flawed idea is strong in some academic and industrial quarters. What these people are basically saying is that if you have just the right kind of hammer, then you cannot hurt yourself with it anymore. Of course, that would be a Styrofoam hammer (or similar) that is also completely unfit for its primary purpose. The same is true for programming languages.
Well, having done (some very small part of) that research I think you're over egging your argument. While its true that tool users make the difference, and it's a poor carpenter etc. etc. the fact of the matter is that some tools are more likely to be used correctly in certain situations than others. If you look at the human factors work in e.g. aviation, esp. military aviation, then that becomes apparent. Much thought, research and experience goes into designing the cockpit interface for a fighter pilot, for example, and for good reason. The workload is already overwhelming and one mistake can kill you so anything that makes that mistake less likely is sought after. This has gotten to the point that one sticking point of buying a fighter aircraft from another country is that the interface won't necessarily fit, not your pilots, but your doctrine on how to fight! Your doctrine of course affecting how you train your pilots. (I have a nice reference for that, but unfortunately its in swedish.)
Now, I can't see why the same wouldn't be true of programming languages in spades, as the task is at least as complex, and probably orders of magnitude more complex in many cases as flying an air plane. Now, we basically don't know anything, at least in a structured way, of how a programming language should be designed to best fit certain programming task, but the anecdotal experience is telling (look for example at Ericsson's work with Erlang, experience that matches my own). Put another way, that 'C' should already be "perfect" by random chance is completely unlikely. We both know more about how to implement programming languages today (and hence can make more concessions to the programmer), and know more about programming in general.
Now of course, if you're argument is, to paraphrase the Erlang FAQ, that you can "still mess up an Erlang program by having hour long meetings about the colour of the project napkins" that's of course true. The best rifle doesn't win the fight, if you put it in the hands of untrained troops, especially if you have the worst trucks to take them to the front. BUT, all else being equal, the troops with the best rifles win, not every time, but more often than not. That's what it means to have a better tool, and its generally a worthwhile endeavour.
Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976, and that's just naming a few of the more egregious ones.
Or was your point that they used the own troops, instead of bribing/cajoling/threatening/funding/organising someone elses? Some people would say that doing your own dirty work is the stand up thing to do, but that's some people...