Yes, and to some, living in those places is a luxury.
My family were farmers. Ever try to grow corn on a parking lot? It doesn't work very well.
Of course, if you don't mind giving up the artificially low food prices created by USDA subsidies, then we could pass on the real expense of growing food to you and farmers could actually make some money.
But don't be surprised if food becomes one of your single biggest expenses, like it is for many Europeans.
I think I made it pretty clear that I really wanted a candidate that was both anti-abortion and pro environment. By supporting Bush, you perpetuate the miserable two-party system that guarantees that we will never get such a candidate.
The issue is this: if the Green party candidate gets 5%, then they get matching funds. Since they are not, for the most part, built on an ego like United We Stand was, they might actually become viable.
Besides, what good is saving the unborn children if they're going to get killed by the drinking water?
There's something that I've just got to get off my chest.
Probably, way too many people (even on Slashdot) are voting for Bush on the theory that he's the "Christian" candidate. After all, Clinton/Gore are morally pretty icky, and they support abortion, right?
However, if you are in that position, I want you to think about the following propositions:
Abortion is not mentioned in the Bible once. Not once.
Failing to care for the poor is repeatedly mentioned (especially in the minor prophects). Its specifically mentioned 147 times. How 'bout Proverbs 29:7, which says "The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor, The wicked does not understand such concern?" That is just one example.
The Bible is distinctly opposed to some things that are core parts of corporate practice. For example, hoarding of property and charging interest.
If you think there are no poor people in this country, then you've lived a sheltered life. My wife runs a food bank (I help) -- I meet poor people regularly. There are people with no place to stay. There are people who can't work and have to live on a wopping $512/month from social security. (And no, they really can't work.) There are people working their butts off at dead-end jobs who can't afford to feed their families. (And a lot of dead-beats. The solution is not to cut off the people who really need it to get the dead beats.)
Stop whining about the "marriage penalty" -- every day families are broken up by the welfare system, and not so Suzie can have a new radio for her SUV, but so that the family can survive. The solution is not to abolish it, but to really fix it. It's going to cost more -- so be it.
Let's not forget issues like the fact that in 10 years we're going to have to pay taxes on our thoughts because some company will have patented them!
What's the first responsibility that God gave man? To cultivate the ground. Genesis 2:5. That doesn't mean clear-cutting it. Guess what people: Christians SHOULD be environmentalists.
Guess what: there are people who can't afford medical care, and who can't buy health insurance at any price. My mother was one of them. Here last 36 hours cost $37,000 at a time when my father was making $40K! Should we just allow those people who can't afford health insurance to die in the service of the almighty buck?
And, oh yeah, the federal government created a lot of these problems. The welfare system, for example. Or the high cost of healthcare, which was created back in the days when Medicare/caid would pay pretty much any charge without blinking. The federal gov't is the only one who can fix them.
So who am I voting for? Not Bush, with the silver spoon stuck to his tonsils and the big oil backers who would rather die than see real environmental regulation.
But not Gore either. As far as I'm concerned, he lost my vote when he supported a known felon and adulterer as president of the United States because it was politically expedient. (I am also voting againt Senator's Warner and Robb, as well as my representative, on those grounds.) Not to mention the fact that he supports aggressive expansion
As for Harry Browne -- well, Laisez Faire economics is bull, always has been and always will be. Anyone who thinks that corporations will take care of their workers in the long term needs to go back and read some history. Start with the industrial revolution. (Besides, the end of that path is corporate Feudalism and "the Company Store". Why don't we just repeal the Thirteenth ammendment -- which abolished slavery -- and get it over with?)
I guess its Nader. There are some things I'm not comfortable with. His stance on abortion. His stance on homosexuality. His desire to expand government without bound. But what's my choice?
I would really like to see a candidate with a bit of common sense. Sadly, no one with any sense would want the misbegotten job.
Similarly, I believe there should be a HIGHER tax on gas, and maybe even cigarettes. By increasing the cost of driving around a big honkin' INEFFICIENT SUVs or whatever, it will tend to make people buy more efficeint vehicles. Same thing with cigs. If they are more expensive, people will smoke less beause they have an economic incentive.
I have no problem with this, so long as such a tax is regionalized. Here's the problem: There are some places in the United States where driving and travel are not luxuries. I grew up in a town (Wakefield, VA) where the nearest clothing store was 30 miles away. That was also the nearest place you could get a job that was not farm labor.
The nearest community college? 40 miles. The nearest real college? 55 miles. To slap such communities with a $5/gallon gas tax would totally destroy them (they're already in trouble).
On the other hand, it would probably be good for communities such as Hampton Roads (the cities of Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Newport News, Virginia Beach, (and so forth) Virginia, that are all right together) where I live now: it would force them to develop infrastructure allowing people not to drive. I won't even talk about how much good it would do in Northern Virginia. Suffice it to say that I go up there every other week to my employer (UUNet) and when I leave it takes me two hours to go 30 miles because the traffic is so bad.
So what's the plan? Scale the tax to the size of the urban area. CALL it a pollution tax, and scale it to the pollution content of the air. That way, rural areas would hardly get hit at all, and the urban areas (who cause most of smog anyway because a car sitting in traffic has the lowest theoretically possible gas mileag: 0 miles/gallon) would get nailed.
I saw an article a few weeks ago interviewing all the creator of survivor. Apparently, one of his criteria for selecting an applicant was that they be a bit neurotic. This was to produce the "soap opera" effect.
Do we really want people who would engage in the kind of back-biting that went on in "Survivor" going to space?
Believe it or not, there is a substantial group of people who are quite Geeky and Christian. If you're interested, take a look at http://www.geeks4christ.org/ for a fledgling slashdot-like site that caters to Jesus-Geeks. (By the way, if you can do graphics... HELP! The site is really ugly, but it's at least moderately active.)
When you get down to it, Jesus was the original geek. He was persecuted for the first thirty years of his life, then he "graduated" amidst a storm of insults and is now lord of all he surveys.
Nuclear power is something which is far too dangerous to tolerate even when it is under the most stringent of security at power plants, but for a company to trade it over the Internet is just asking for trouble!
You should go research some facts, troll-man. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of power. The average coal power plant puts out more radioactivity per year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. Yes -- that's right -- coal smoke is mildly radioactive.
The bottom line is that Nuclear power is extremely safe compared to every other form of power we have available. Three mile island and Chernobyl not withstanding. Have you ever seen what coal soot can do to your lungs?
I suspect that the real reason that *n[ui]x vendors are attracted to GNOME is that it is in C.
The problem is simply this: there is no standard binary formats for C++ object files, even on the same platform. So, code compiled in g++ will not link with code compiled in Sun C++ will not link with... While there is a draft standard for object format, no one is following it yet, and probably everyone won't for years.
This makes KDE unacceptable to a UNIX vendor, because half of their customers buy C++ (at great expense) and the other half use g++. Which half will the support? GNOME, based in C, doesn't have this problem. So it gets tapped even though (IMNSHO) KDE is the better desktop.
My big concern is this: presumably, AFS includes some kind of kernel driver. If the IBM public license covers AFS, then will we be able to integrate AFS into the Linux kernel?
Incidentally: for those of you claiming that AFS is obsoleted by Coda, think again. There's no way I could get my employer (one of the biggest Internet providers out there) to buy into Coda at this stage of development. AFS on the other hand they would/definitely/ go for. The biggest problem has been that IBM doesn't really push it, so it's hard to get executive attention for it. If it's oss, I don't need executive attention -- I just do it.
The right solution to this is for each file format to encode metadata within the file, just as MP3 does with ID3. The fact that most formats don't do this is screwed up.
ICANN is Government, boys and girls. And pretty bad government at that. They are totally, completely, and utterly dominated by thge intellectual propery special interests.
Take back your government. Of course, I doubt that ICANN's by-laws will allow you much of a chance. A boycott might be a better approach.
You might want to seriously consider what the great advantages of Mandrake (which VA will not install) over Redhat (which VA will install) are.
The bottom line is that you have brought this on yourself by choosing to go your own way. If you are not going to run their supported configuration, there is no point in buying from VA -- buy from whoever's cheapest instead.
At 6 foot 2 inches (177 cm) and 300 pounds, I cannot physically get behind the wheel of most small cars. Specifcally, this includes your Ford Fiesta. And I'm not the tallest person I know by any means (although I am one of the largest).
Also, in the US we have many people who live in rural areas the likes of which you have never seen in Europe. I used to live in a town where, to get to the nearest clothing store, you had to drive thirty miles. Groceries were ten miles, and at that overpriced. If you wanted to buy a computer, 50 miles (this was in rural Virginia -- we won't even talk about the western states.) A job good enough to afford a car was 50 miles as well.
At $6/gallon, a trip to work in the smallest car I can drive comfortably (which probably gets 23 miles/gallon highway) costs me $24.
Incidentally, in Europe your much higher population density also allows much better mass transit. In the US, mass transit is almost totally unavailable except in major metropolitan areas, and spotty even there. To get from Wakefield (where I used to live) to the nearest train station, you had to drive 30-40 miles. There was no other way.
Bear in mind that the UK is the size of one US state, and if memory serves has about 50% of the US population. Different circumstances require different approaches.
Every time I just about give up on you, you post something with some content.
What, however, is your conclusion? Anyone who reads CNN knows that privacy is in danger, that the hacker ethic is under more concerted attack than it has ever been. What do we do about it? Your article implies, without ever stating, "nothing".
Is that really your conclusion? In that case, why write about it? Where's the solution? That's what the technology elite are looking for.
The one thing I'm interested in is that, apparently, they are planning to let you to send an email to an address, which they will then print and hand-deliver to the addressee. For me, this would be really nice -- my wifes grandparents and I enjoy a regular correspondence -- a correspondence that would be much more regular if I could email instead of snail-mail. The chances of them ever getting a computer are virtually nil, so this is the best that could probably be hoped for.
This could also be good for business. It could essentially be used as a reliable stamping & stuffing operation with costs of only 8 cents per document. Ultimately, it could save a lot of gas and air-miles as things are sent electronically to the post office, then printer rather than send physically the whole way.
Here's to hoping they don't come out with a fourth class version of this. The spam would then become extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if you don't mind giving up the artificially low food prices created by USDA subsidies, then we could pass on the real expense of growing food to you and farmers could actually make some money.
But don't be surprised if food becomes one of your single biggest expenses, like it is for many Europeans.
--
The issue is this: if the Green party candidate gets 5%, then they get matching funds. Since they are not, for the most part, built on an ego like United We Stand was, they might actually become viable.
Besides, what good is saving the unborn children if they're going to get killed by the drinking water?
--
Probably, way too many people (even on Slashdot) are voting for Bush on the theory that he's the "Christian" candidate. After all, Clinton/Gore are morally pretty icky, and they support abortion, right?
However, if you are in that position, I want you to think about the following propositions:
- Abortion is not mentioned in the Bible once. Not once.
- Failing to care for the poor is repeatedly mentioned (especially in the minor prophects). Its specifically mentioned 147 times. How 'bout Proverbs 29:7, which says "The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor, The wicked does not understand such concern?" That is just one example.
- The Bible is distinctly opposed to some things that are core parts of corporate practice. For example, hoarding of property and charging interest.
- If you think there are no poor people in this country, then you've lived a sheltered life. My wife runs a food bank (I help) -- I meet poor people regularly. There are people with no place to stay. There are people who can't work and have to live on a wopping $512/month from social security. (And no, they really can't work.) There are people working their butts off at dead-end jobs who can't afford to feed their families. (And a lot of dead-beats. The solution is not to cut off the people who really need it to get the dead beats.)
- Stop whining about the "marriage penalty" -- every day families are broken up by the welfare system, and not so Suzie can have a new radio for her SUV, but so that the family can survive. The solution is not to abolish it, but to really fix it. It's going to cost more -- so be it.
- Let's not forget issues like the fact that in 10 years we're going to have to pay taxes on our thoughts because some company will have patented them!
- What's the first responsibility that God gave man? To cultivate the ground. Genesis 2:5. That doesn't mean clear-cutting it. Guess what people: Christians SHOULD be environmentalists.
- Guess what: there are people who can't afford medical care, and who can't buy health insurance at any price. My mother was one of them. Here last 36 hours cost $37,000 at a time when my father was making $40K! Should we just allow those people who can't afford health insurance to die in the service of the almighty buck?
- And, oh yeah, the federal government created a lot of these problems. The welfare system, for example. Or the high cost of healthcare, which was created back in the days when Medicare/caid would pay pretty much any charge without blinking. The federal gov't is the only one who can fix them.
So who am I voting for? Not Bush, with the silver spoon stuck to his tonsils and the big oil backers who would rather die than see real environmental regulation.But not Gore either. As far as I'm concerned, he lost my vote when he supported a known felon and adulterer as president of the United States because it was politically expedient. (I am also voting againt Senator's Warner and Robb, as well as my representative, on those grounds.) Not to mention the fact that he supports aggressive expansion
As for Harry Browne -- well, Laisez Faire economics is bull, always has been and always will be. Anyone who thinks that corporations will take care of their workers in the long term needs to go back and read some history. Start with the industrial revolution. (Besides, the end of that path is corporate Feudalism and "the Company Store". Why don't we just repeal the Thirteenth ammendment -- which abolished slavery -- and get it over with?)
I guess its Nader. There are some things I'm not comfortable with. His stance on abortion. His stance on homosexuality. His desire to expand government without bound. But what's my choice?
I would really like to see a candidate with a bit of common sense. Sadly, no one with any sense would want the misbegotten job.
--
The nearest community college? 40 miles. The nearest real college? 55 miles. To slap such communities with a $5/gallon gas tax would totally destroy them (they're already in trouble).
On the other hand, it would probably be good for communities such as Hampton Roads (the cities of Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Newport News, Virginia Beach, (and so forth) Virginia, that are all right together) where I live now: it would force them to develop infrastructure allowing people not to drive. I won't even talk about how much good it would do in Northern Virginia. Suffice it to say that I go up there every other week to my employer (UUNet) and when I leave it takes me two hours to go 30 miles because the traffic is so bad.
So what's the plan? Scale the tax to the size of the urban area. CALL it a pollution tax, and scale it to the pollution content of the air. That way, rural areas would hardly get hit at all, and the urban areas (who cause most of smog anyway because a car sitting in traffic has the lowest theoretically possible gas mileag: 0 miles/gallon) would get nailed.
Sounds fair to me.
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Could've been worse. If it had been boys, I was going to name them "Jacob and Esau".
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Do we really want people who would engage in the kind of back-biting that went on in "Survivor" going to space?
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I guess this just proves /. has a distinctively anti-Christian bias, eh? Way to go on the tolerance there people.
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When you get down to it, Jesus was the original geek. He was persecuted for the first thirty years of his life, then he "graduated" amidst a storm of insults and is now lord of all he surveys.
*boik*
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The bottom line is that Nuclear power is extremely safe compared to every other form of power we have available. Three mile island and Chernobyl not withstanding. Have you ever seen what coal soot can do to your lungs?
--
The problem is simply this: there is no standard binary formats for C++ object files, even on the same platform. So, code compiled in g++ will not link with code compiled in Sun C++ will not link with... While there is a draft standard for object format, no one is following it yet, and probably everyone won't for years.
This makes KDE unacceptable to a UNIX vendor, because half of their customers buy C++ (at great expense) and the other half use g++. Which half will the support? GNOME, based in C, doesn't have this problem. So it gets tapped even though (IMNSHO) KDE is the better desktop.
--
Incidentally: for those of you claiming that AFS is obsoleted by Coda, think again. There's no way I could get my employer (one of the biggest Internet providers out there) to buy into Coda at this stage of development. AFS on the other hand they would /definitely/ go for. The biggest problem has been that IBM doesn't really push it, so it's hard to get executive attention for it. If it's oss, I don't need executive attention -- I just do it.
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And on Slashdot, you can belong to any religion you want, so long as it's not Christianity.
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Take back your government. Of course, I doubt that ICANN's by-laws will allow you much of a chance. A boycott might be a better approach.
--
The bottom line is that you have brought this on yourself by choosing to go your own way. If you are not going to run their supported configuration, there is no point in buying from VA -- buy from whoever's cheapest instead.
--
At 6 foot 2 inches (177 cm) and 300 pounds, I cannot physically get behind the wheel of most small cars. Specifcally, this includes your Ford Fiesta. And I'm not the tallest person I know by any means (although I am one of the largest).
Also, in the US we have many people who live in rural areas the likes of which you have never seen in Europe. I used to live in a town where, to get to the nearest clothing store, you had to drive thirty miles. Groceries were ten miles, and at that overpriced. If you wanted to buy a computer, 50 miles (this was in rural Virginia -- we won't even talk about the western states.) A job good enough to afford a car was 50 miles as well.
At $6/gallon, a trip to work in the smallest car I can drive comfortably (which probably gets 23 miles/gallon highway) costs me $24.
Incidentally, in Europe your much higher population density also allows much better mass transit. In the US, mass transit is almost totally unavailable except in major metropolitan areas, and spotty even there. To get from Wakefield (where I used to live) to the nearest train station, you had to drive 30-40 miles. There was no other way.
Bear in mind that the UK is the size of one US state, and if memory serves has about 50% of the US population. Different circumstances require different approaches.
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Muahahahhaha!
Total world domination!
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What, however, is your conclusion? Anyone who reads CNN knows that privacy is in danger, that the hacker ethic is under more concerted attack than it has ever been. What do we do about it? Your article implies, without ever stating, "nothing".
Is that really your conclusion? In that case, why write about it? Where's the solution? That's what the technology elite are looking for.
--
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This could also be good for business. It could essentially be used as a reliable stamping & stuffing operation with costs of only 8 cents per document. Ultimately, it could save a lot of gas and air-miles as things are sent electronically to the post office, then printer rather than send physically the whole way.
Here's to hoping they don't come out with a fourth class version of this. The spam would then become extreme.
--