Vulgar name calling; always a great way to show your intellectual prowess in a debate.
-- who do you think makes decislons like "I can record you; you can't record me." -- some computer on the third floor? Of course it's done by humans. But if the decision-makers don't have the balls to come out on the sales floor and defend their decisions, well, we'll just have to deal with their human shields instead.
No one owes you an explanation of the rationale behind the store policies. It's their property and they set up the rules for how you behave while there. If you aren't willing to abide by the rules, then just leave.
Instead, Steve Mann, a college professor, gets his jollies by picking on minimum wage high-school kids who are just trying to keep their jobs in retail stores. And people like you aplaud him for that kind of behavior. What has happened to our society?
You motherfucking cretin -- you're exactly what this world needs -- another asshole who feels slighted and wants to unleash violence on anyone who disses you for being not worth listening to.
I'm sorry, I didn't catch all of that. About halfway through I started reading my e-mail...
Try reading the article:
Mann greets you, warmly at first, though he soon gets distracted by something on the tiny computer monitor wedged over his eye.
In fact, being with Mann sometimes feels like the ultimate, in-your-face version of having a dinner companion who talks on a cell phone.
Steve Mann agreed to the interview and then didn't even have the courtesy to give the reporter his full attention. Maybe asocial assholes like you think that's appropriate behavior but I don't and neither do the other normal people in the world.
Not everyone can afford your life style, Mr. Mann, some people have to make an honest living, and can't go around being ridiculous the whole day. Some people aren't going to "fight The System" because they have a family to support and lives to lead. This Professor just needs to get a freakin' life, seriously.
Thank you!
Steve Mann is just a self-impressed geek who lugs around a portable computer. He's not some kind of visionary. His work isn't improving people's lives. It's not making him more intelligent, healthier, more physically capable, or longer-lived. In fact, about the time that he started drifting away to read e-mail while I was talking to him, I'd be tempted to drive that EyeTap 3" back into his cranium -- which couldn't possibly be good for him.
Why doesn't Steve Mann take some of that energy and apply it towards systems that do real-time text-to-speech for blind people trying to get around in the sighted world? Why doesn't he put some effort towards a system that stimulates muscles so that paralyzed people could perform tasks we take for granted, like picking things up or turning door knobs? No, he's too full of himself to try to actually help someone.
This whole relativistic crap is a scam. By dropping the top X% of users, they lower the average bandwidth usage (since those users were pulling far more than the average). Then the next month, they can do the same thing and drop another X% of users -- even if those users aren't using any more bandwidth than they were the month before.
That statement still looks true to me.
Dropping those who use more than 100x the median usage will not result in losing either a fixed number or percentage. It will eventually truncate the curve, however.
And when you truncate the curve, you lower the median. The median is the middle value in a distribution, above and below which lie an equal number of values. Take some of the values away at the top side and the median shifts down.
I suspect typical residential bandwidth usage patterns follow a Poisson distribution shaped curve-- and that's probably what the ISP is expecting.
I would not expect that at all. There are sizeable groups of people at each end of the curve. There are many customers who only use their broadband to check e-mail every other day. What's that use? Maybe a meg per month? At the other end, you will have lots of users who do filesharing, ISO downloads, Bittorrent, etc. I think that you would find that the usage curve would have significant up-ticks at each end.
Of course, as available bandwidth increases, more applications will arise, and more people will want high bandwidth-- which is good for those who sell it. On the other hand, the more applications, the more throughput the individual people using the bandwidth will want-- which is bad.
Right. Broadband companies want to entice people with streaming video and "unlimited" Internet access then punish those who do anything more than moderate surfing.
This story is pointing out something that I've been saying for months: BitTorrent is going to break the usage models at many ISPs, who structure everything for a much higher download than upload rate. Look at what's happening in the gaming industry. You don't download 50MB patches and demos from the game companies' servers. You download them from various subscription and ad-supported servers. What happens when those companies start using BitTorrent links? What happens when the movie studios go to a BitTorrent style of P2P downloading of movie trailers? Broadband companies are not going to be able to keep customers if they tell them that they can't download the movie trailer that they want, can't get the patch for their game, because of something as obscure as what protocol is used for the download.
If they are going to threaten to turn off your service for using "more than 100 times the national median", then they should offer to refund the monthly service charge to users who use "less than 1/100th of the national median." But, of course, they won't.
This whole relativistic crap is a scam. By dropping the top X% of users, they lower the average bandwidth usage (since those users were pulling far more than the average). Then the next month, they can do the same thing and drop another X% of users -- even if those users aren't using any more bandwidth than they were the month before. Suppose your company told you that they would lay off the 5 highest paid employees every month. If you're number 7 this month, you better start looking for work.
So how much have you given to a Democratic candidate this year, then? To the DNC? Hopefully it's a lot:-)
I have contributed to Democratic candidates this year, but the amount of those contributions is not the business of every reader of Slashdot.
I'm a Democrat -- but that's not incompatible with helping the occasional Republican who's willing to cross the aisle.
Even if he uses the money to defeat a Democratic challenger -- one who may be much more closely aligned with your own views?
What scares me about this kind of one-vote activism is that it ignores the overall voting records of the candidates. Let's just look at the voting record for the first Representative listed; John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN). The ACLU scores him at 0. He voted against an amendment to the Head Start Reauthorization bill protecting teachers, staff, and volunteers from employment discrimination based on religion. He voted for the partial birth abortion ban. He voted for in favor of an amendment to the Constitution to prohibit "flag burning". He voted in favor of DC school vouchers, effectively funneling federal tax dollars to religious schools. He co-sponsored legislation (H.J.RES.46) which proposes and amendment to the Constitution to permit prayer in public schools. He co-sponsored H.R.234 and H.R.534 to prohibit human cloning. He co-sponsored H.R.1146, which had the purpose of withdrawing our membership from the United Nations. Maybe those votes are in-line with your political views, but they are not representative of mine.
(Note: I have no interest in arguing my political views here. I just mention them to show why it's bad to give to a candidate based on liking his position on a single piece of legislation.)
The above comment was humorous and relevent. The moderators were simply too ignorant to understand it. From the Wikipedia entry:
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during Saturday Night Live's first season in 1975 served as the source of one of the first catch phrases from SNL to enter the general populace.
Franco lingered near death for weeks before dying. On slow news days, United States network television news casters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive, or not yet dead. The imminent death of Franco was the headline story on the NBC news for a number of weeks previous.
After Franco's death, Chevy Chase, reader of the news on Saturday Night Live's comedic news segment, announced the fascist dictator's death and read a quote from Richard Nixon praising Franco as a good friend of the United States; as an ironic counterpoint to this, a picture was displayed behind Chase, showing Franco standing alongside Adolf Hitler.
From that point on, Chase made it clear that SNL would get the last laugh at Franco's expense. "This breaking news just in", Chase would announce-- "Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead!" The top story of the news segment for several weeks running was that Generalisimo Francisco Franco was still dead. Chase would repeat the story at the end of the news segment, aided by Garrett Morris, "head of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing", whose "aid" in repeating the story involved cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting the headline.
I was obviously comparing the continued news coverage about the silent Beagle 2 spacecraft to the aforementioned Saturday Night Live Weekend Update reports about Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Moral of the story for moderators: I you think something I've posted is off-topic, then do some research or ask a grown-up before moderating it down.
The idea is that you put fifteen dollars into the campaign fund -- one dollar for each of those Republicans who voted the right way -- and when the campaign ends, the total funds raised will be split equally between all fifteen of them, and each one will get a letter with his share explaining that this money comes from citizens who want to thank him for doing the Right Thing on this bill.
Do that and you help the Republicans maintain control of the House, which means that the Democrats, who almost unanimously voted against this bill, will still be out of power. They won't head up committees. They won't control what bills go to the floor. And the Republicans will continue to build their Orwellian police state.
Sorry, but rather than rewarding 15 members of the Republican party who did the right thing once, I'd rather reward the Democrats who have consistently fought against such anti-American bills.
I assume penguin7of9 made a typo when he suggested people work 7 hour days.
You are more generous than I am. I think that he actually believes the "9-to-5" that was bandied around for so many years.
His point is still valid: many (he said most, but I will only say many) people have pretty standard work schedules.
While I will agree with that, it's also true that many engineering professionals have all-too-frequent interruptions to those schedules.
If someone uses the excuse that they don't have time to eat healthy, then they need to realize that is only a result of the choices they have made.
The reality is that job market in the U.S. tech sector is such that you are likely to find yourself without work if you are steadfastly refuse to ever cut your lunch hour short, work into the evening, or arrive early in order to meet your employer's needs. It sucks, but it's reality.
This whole thread branched from a post which read:
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, their is a chance within 30 years you'll be acting like, yes-a mad cow.
To which Penguin7of9 replied: If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, you have already acted like a mad cow.
While the original poster implied that there was a chance that eating beef at McDonald's would lead to Mad Cow Disease, Penguin7of9 stated that anyone who ate there was insane. That's where it crossed the line for me.
I'm sorry, but what do the two have to do with one another?
You're the one claiming that one can just choose to have some idyllic life where lunch is never interrupted, there's always time for breakfast, and you work a 9-5 workday with an hour for lunch. So I asked you about it:
And what life have you chosen. Tell me about having a life where you have no responsibilities.
Now please answer it.
"Having responsibilities" doesn't mean that you have to cut your lunch short or not take time for breakfast.
You are wrong. I'm 42 years old and have been a software engineer and, more recently, in engineering management throughout my career. I have over 20 years of real-world experience working as both a consultant and a salaried employee in full-time positions at ten different companies. What are your qualifications to tell me how the world works? Are you in high school? College? Are you working at a blue-collar job? I'm trying to get a handle on how you get these ideas that you've been putting forth.
Most people living in civilized nations have predictable working hours. You know: 9am to noon, one hour lunch break, 1pm to 5pm.
So you think that most professionals work a seven hour day? You really are living in fantasy land, aren't you? According to a study by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, combined weekly work hours for dual-earning couples with children rose to 91 hours in 2002. That means that parents are averaging 45.5 hours each. That's an average. Now consider the households where one parent works only part time. They are part of that average, too. That pretty much shoots down your claims about what "most people" do.
Eating a salad alone is unhealthy and, what is more, uncivilized. A decent, civilized lunch consists of an appetizer, a main dish, and desert.
You must be the size of a house! This may come as a shock to you, but most people need to keep an eye on how many calories they consume.
More than 50% of the revenues of companies like IBM come from overseas, so having 23% of their high-tech jobs move overseas still seems disproportionately low; more jobs need to move overseas, not fewer, for the imbalance to be corrected.
More than 50% of the revenues of any Asian-owned motherboard company come from the U.S. What percentage of the workforce at Asus, Gigabyte, Abit, and MSI is non-Asian (I can tell you from reading the manuals that all of the people in their technical writing departments are Asian).
Americans have just been able to pick out the choice jobs in the past. But there is no justification for that anymore: many Indians are well-educated and willing to work for less; why shouldn't they get the jobs?
Because Indian workers did not build the company up throughout its history. U.S. workers are the ones who contributed to the success of the company and for the company to simply abandon them is despicable.
Of course Indian workers will accept less pay. Their cost of living is practically nothing. They get $6,000(U.S.) per year and can live like kings. IBM gets out of having to comply with U.S. labor regulations, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the workers in the U.S. get screwed.
And what life have you chosen. Tell me about having a life where you have no responsibilities. Tell me about how you can just leave your work at a moment's notice to have a liesurely lunch. Tell me about how you never oversleep, never have to stay up late to finish something, and never have something which forces you to cut your lunch short. And then tell me about the unicorns dancing outside of your window. Come on! Being alive, human, and part of the working world means that you don't always have time for a liesurely meal.
"Fast food" is intrinsically unhealthy--you need to take your time to eat in order to eat healthy.
If eating a salad in 15 minutes is unhealthy but picking over it for 50 minutes (while the airborne bacteria and germs have a chance to settle in) is, then I'll just eat unhealthy.
I think you have a distorted view of where US jobs comes from. Companies like IBM have huge overseas operations. Yet, most of their R&D and high-tech work is still carried out in the US.
!) Buy your food from them more often (so that they have the money to build one, and 2) while you're there, lobby them for a drive-through.
I don't need one restaurant to do it. I need lots of them near my home, my work, client sites, on the highway, etc. I just can't believe that there is not a sufficient market to support such a restaurant chain.
That pretty much says it... The fact that you've only scheduled yourself for a 20Min lunch says something...
I've scheduled an hour for lunch. But sometimes reality intrudes and I don't get an hour.
It's not like you can't put some real time for lunch into your schedule... It's just not a priority for you.
I guess that I should tell my boss to go f*** himself when he asks me to do something that would cut my lunch short. 'The license server is down and the demo is at 1:00PM? Well screw that, I'm out to get my nutritious, healthy lunch. See you at 1:00. Hope it fixes itself before then.'
Maybe you have the kind of job where your lunch break is signalled by a bell, but I do not. I'm a professional software developer and an engineering manager. If I don't want to end up working at McDonalds, I have to eat there occasionally.
There are all sorts of ways to arrange things, including paying someone in your community to make a (real) bagged lunch for you that probably has way more nutritional value than 3 or 4 McDonalds lunches (and probably better taste, too).
Lunch is a social occasion and a chance to get away from the office. I go to lunch with coworkers and friends who come to the office to unwind. I can't show up at a restaurant with a bagged lunch in hand. Nor do I want to become one of those pathetic type-A people who eats lunch while working, responding to e-mails, and answering the phone.
How hard would it be for some company to open a fast-food restarant that has healthy food? It's not like it takes longer to fix healthy food than it takes to make a Big Mac. I don't mind paying more for better ingredients. Instead of trying to blame people who eat at McDonalds, why don't you blame the "healthy" restaurants who won't meet consumer demand for drive throughs and quick "to-go" meals?
How do you know that those doing the regulation will be moral people?
That's why we have a democracy. We elect leaders we trust and they appoint persons to serve the public interest.
I have chosen to make it moral while you have chosen to make it immoral.
You don't get to choose the actions of others. Enron, Martha Stewart, and Halliburton are all companies working withing a capitalist system.
I think it is immoral and it should be illegal to deprive another individual of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud. "Harming others" is much more vague
So what is "fraud"? What if you order some kitchen gadget from an infomercial and find that it doesn't work nearly so well as it appeared on the ad? Is that fraud? What about when a car is advertised as "powerful" -- even though it has less horsepower and a longer 0-60 time than 75% of the cars on the road? Is that fraud? How about when a food is sold as "organic" even though it contains pesticides (legal as per the Bush administration's FDA revamping of the word "organic")?
What is "force"? Does that mean that a police officer should not be able to impound the car of a drunk driver? Is depriving a child molester of liberty through forceful imprisonment immoral? Is it immoral to shoot someone who's holding a knife at your wife's throat, thus depriving them of life through force? You do a good job of parroting patriotism in your words, but they are rather amorphous.
It fits in well with your emotion-based philosophy.
My philosophy is logic-based and I could humiliate you in a public debate.
If you are late for work, it's because you got up late. If you only have 20 minutes for lunch, you could pack lunch at home and bring it with you.
It must be nice to have unlimited time and never have anything unexpected happen. My life doesn't work like that. Sometimes I oversleep and don't have time to cook a healthy meal. Then I go to work planning to have a liesurely hour-long lunch and then run into unexpected problems, delays, or meetings. That's what life is like.
Maybe, eventually, when people like you stop eating at McDonalds, that chain of organic restaurants can finally start competing.
You've just described a world in which they don't have to compete. They can start competing now. I'm sure that I'm not the only person alive who would like fast food that is healthy and nutritious. Wouldn't you eat at such a restaurant?
But I disagree with your reasoning: a family farmer has no more right to have his way of life preserved at taxpayer expense than a programmer has the right to have his job not shipped to India or a cashier has the right not to have his job replaced by new technologies.
I don't know who you are answering, but I never wrote anything about that topic. I simply explained why McDonalds continues to draw such large crowds.
But since you brought it up, I do believe that the government should do something about the loss of U.S. jobs. I don't care if you have to pay more for goods and services. In fact, I'm in favor of it if it saves U.S. jobs. When good jobs go away, the economy suffers. Sure, the CEO of IBM might be able to get himself an even bigger seven-figure compensation package by outsourcing software engineering to India, but increasing his personal wealth is not so important that tens of thousands of Americans should have to lose their good jobs for it.
But instead of taking responsibility for your own actions, you want the government to step in and regulate McDonalds in a way that fits your world view because you are too lazy to take action yourself. Never mind that either the taxpayer needs to foot the bill or that it will greatly increase the cost of that McDonalds meal.
Please, read my original message and tell me where I said anything even remotely like that.
Your concept of "regulation" is unAmerican. People will always lie and cheat. Free people make laws to punish liars and cheats.
And intelligent people make regulations to prevent the lying and cheating from being so easy.
Liers and cheats make regulations that screw everyone else.
Like the regulations that require ingredients be listed on foods? The ones that require medicines to be FDA-approved? The ones that require that car dealers honor warranties even if you have Jiffy Lube do your oil changes?
Thomas Jefferson contrasted the condition of Native Americans, who he thought had too few laws, with the condition of French nationals, who he though had too many laws and decided that the Indians were better off.
They are now, too, aren't they? Oh, I forgot about the freedom-loving capitalists who then went on to buy land from the Indians for a few trinkets.
You suggesting that fraud is compatible with freedom, however, is misguided.
I said that fraud and deception are the result of unregulated capitalism, not that everyones' freedoms must be curtailed. SRequiring that Walmart disclose the country of origin for that sweater they want to sell isn't taking away anyone's freedom.
Everyone creates their own understandings for what capitalism implies.
And that's why we need regulation. You may choose to reject the idea of fraud, but the next guy won't. He's going to be interested in making as much money as possible selling ineffective penis enlargement pills, supposed "sea monkeys", and "miracle" baldness cures.
The definition you gave contains none of these. You imposed them.
And the definition contains nothing about "honesty and exchange of value for value." You imposed that on the definition. The difference is that we are surrounded by huge corporations who don't share your professed values.
Do you believe that individual property rights are good or bad?
They are very good. And what needs to be done is insure that someone else's desire for property doesn't end up harming others.
If you eat at McDonalds, you have already made your choice to support an industrial food infrastructure: industrial cooking of products derived from industrial farms. If you wanted to support family farms, you would cook for yourself or eat at businesses that buy from family farms. There are plenty of organic restaurants, after all. But, oh no, those are probably far too Birkenstock for you--all the wrong people go there, right?
You ever try to find a drive-through at an organic restaurant when you are running late for work or only have 20 minutes to grab lunch? How easy are they to find when you are on an interstate highway that's running through a rural area?
McDonalds is a known quantity. People know what they serve, know what the food costs, and obviously find it palatable. McDonalds also has cleanliness and food safety standards that far exceed state-mandated minimums. A state health inspector that my friend knew said that McDonalds were the most sanitary restaurants that he inspected - by a long shot. By contrast, the vegetarian, organic, Indian restaurant that I used to eat at was closed down by the health department after multiple violations (somwthing I only learned of years later). I'd much rather have a cheeseburger that's been prepared in sanitary conditions than eat aloo chole that's laden with bacteria.
Find me a nationwide chain of organic restaurants that have drive-throughs, impeccable standards of cleanliness, internal food safety inspectors, good tasting food, and reasonable prices and I'm a convert.
Fraud and looting, both of which are intrinsically part of spamming, are the antithesis of capitalism. Capitalism is about exchanging value for value freely, not about taking others' property or using lies to make money.
Try looking up the definition of capitalism:
capitalism - n : an economic system based on private ownership of capital
There's nothing about honesty or providing a fair exchange in the definition of capitalism. It's all about acquisition. Capitalism is about getting as much money as possible through whatever means achieve it. Lies, deception, and fraud are what happens when capitalism is not sufficiently regulated by the government.
Mosty by talking to other music fans to see what they like. I have friends with similar tastes to my own and we recommend music to one another. Someone who's known me for ten years has a lot better chance of correctly guessing what I will like than does a DJ working for Clear Channel.
Slashdot Mirror
You fucking moron
Vulgar name calling; always a great way to show your intellectual prowess in a debate.
-- who do you think makes decislons like "I can record you; you can't record me." -- some computer on the third floor? Of course it's done by humans. But if the decision-makers don't have the balls to come out on the sales floor and defend their decisions, well, we'll just have to deal with their human shields instead.
No one owes you an explanation of the rationale behind the store policies. It's their property and they set up the rules for how you behave while there. If you aren't willing to abide by the rules, then just leave.
Instead, Steve Mann, a college professor, gets his jollies by picking on minimum wage high-school kids who are just trying to keep their jobs in retail stores. And people like you aplaud him for that kind of behavior. What has happened to our society?
I'm sorry, I didn't catch all of that. About halfway through I started reading my e-mail...
Try reading the article:Steve Mann agreed to the interview and then didn't even have the courtesy to give the reporter his full attention. Maybe asocial assholes like you think that's appropriate behavior but I don't and neither do the other normal people in the world.
Not everyone can afford your life style, Mr. Mann, some people have to make an honest living, and can't go around being ridiculous the whole day. Some people aren't going to "fight The System" because they have a family to support and lives to lead. This Professor just needs to get a freakin' life, seriously.
Thank you!
Steve Mann is just a self-impressed geek who lugs around a portable computer. He's not some kind of visionary. His work isn't improving people's lives. It's not making him more intelligent, healthier, more physically capable, or longer-lived. In fact, about the time that he started drifting away to read e-mail while I was talking to him, I'd be tempted to drive that EyeTap 3" back into his cranium -- which couldn't possibly be good for him.
Why doesn't Steve Mann take some of that energy and apply it towards systems that do real-time text-to-speech for blind people trying to get around in the sighted world? Why doesn't he put some effort towards a system that stimulates muscles so that paralyzed people could perform tasks we take for granted, like picking things up or turning door knobs? No, he's too full of himself to try to actually help someone.
"That looks more like a 3.5 inch floppy to me" she replied...
"Type R" and "VTEC" badges for your PC's case
A huge bolt-on wing for the back of the case
A 5" diameter chrome outlet for the exhaust fan
A "ground effects" kit for the bottom of the case
A small fire extinguisher and bracket
Asianux is a lifestyle, man, not just a distro!
Dropping those who use more than 100x the median usage will not result in losing either a fixed number or percentage. It will eventually truncate the curve, however.
And when you truncate the curve, you lower the median. The median is the middle value in a distribution, above and below which lie an equal number of values. Take some of the values away at the top side and the median shifts down.
I suspect typical residential bandwidth usage patterns follow a Poisson distribution shaped curve-- and that's probably what the ISP is expecting.
I would not expect that at all. There are sizeable groups of people at each end of the curve. There are many customers who only use their broadband to check e-mail every other day. What's that use? Maybe a meg per month? At the other end, you will have lots of users who do filesharing, ISO downloads, Bittorrent, etc. I think that you would find that the usage curve would have significant up-ticks at each end.
Of course, as available bandwidth increases, more applications will arise, and more people will want high bandwidth-- which is good for those who sell it. On the other hand, the more applications, the more throughput the individual people using the bandwidth will want-- which is bad.
Right. Broadband companies want to entice people with streaming video and "unlimited" Internet access then punish those who do anything more than moderate surfing.
This story is pointing out something that I've been saying for months: BitTorrent is going to break the usage models at many ISPs, who structure everything for a much higher download than upload rate. Look at what's happening in the gaming industry. You don't download 50MB patches and demos from the game companies' servers. You download them from various subscription and ad-supported servers. What happens when those companies start using BitTorrent links? What happens when the movie studios go to a BitTorrent style of P2P downloading of movie trailers? Broadband companies are not going to be able to keep customers if they tell them that they can't download the movie trailer that they want, can't get the patch for their game, because of something as obscure as what protocol is used for the download.
If they are going to threaten to turn off your service for using "more than 100 times the national median", then they should offer to refund the monthly service charge to users who use "less than 1/100th of the national median." But, of course, they won't.
This whole relativistic crap is a scam. By dropping the top X% of users, they lower the average bandwidth usage (since those users were pulling far more than the average). Then the next month, they can do the same thing and drop another X% of users -- even if those users aren't using any more bandwidth than they were the month before. Suppose your company told you that they would lay off the 5 highest paid employees every month. If you're number 7 this month, you better start looking for work.
So how much have you given to a Democratic candidate this year, then? To the DNC? Hopefully it's a lot :-)
I have contributed to Democratic candidates this year, but the amount of those contributions is not the business of every reader of Slashdot.
I'm a Democrat -- but that's not incompatible with helping the occasional Republican who's willing to cross the aisle.
Even if he uses the money to defeat a Democratic challenger -- one who may be much more closely aligned with your own views?
What scares me about this kind of one-vote activism is that it ignores the overall voting records of the candidates. Let's just look at the voting record for the first Representative listed; John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN). The ACLU scores him at 0. He voted against an amendment to the Head Start Reauthorization bill protecting teachers, staff, and volunteers from employment discrimination based on religion. He voted for the partial birth abortion ban. He voted for in favor of an amendment to the Constitution to prohibit "flag burning". He voted in favor of DC school vouchers, effectively funneling federal tax dollars to religious schools. He co-sponsored legislation (H.J.RES.46) which proposes and amendment to the Constitution to permit prayer in public schools. He co-sponsored H.R.234 and H.R.534 to prohibit human cloning. He co-sponsored H.R.1146, which had the purpose of withdrawing our membership from the United Nations. Maybe those votes are in-line with your political views, but they are not representative of mine.
(Note: I have no interest in arguing my political views here. I just mention them to show why it's bad to give to a candidate based on liking his position on a single piece of legislation.)
I checked the sources:
Republican YEA: 209 NAY: 15 NO VOTE:4
Democratic YEA: 55 NAY:147 NO VOTE:3
Independent NAY: 1
Numerically, that means that 71.7% of Democrats voted against that horrible bill while only 6.5% of Republicans voted against it.
Nice try, liar.
Moral of the story for moderators: I you think something I've posted is off-topic, then do some research or ask a grown-up before moderating it down.
Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead!
No. They had no telemetry, no radio signals, and gravity reversed itself at the last minute.
Some of the questions on Slashdot are just scary.
The idea is that you put fifteen dollars into the campaign fund -- one dollar for each of those Republicans who voted the right way -- and when the campaign ends, the total funds raised will be split equally between all fifteen of them, and each one will get a letter with his share explaining that this money comes from citizens who want to thank him for doing the Right Thing on this bill.
Do that and you help the Republicans maintain control of the House, which means that the Democrats, who almost unanimously voted against this bill, will still be out of power. They won't head up committees. They won't control what bills go to the floor. And the Republicans will continue to build their Orwellian police state.
Sorry, but rather than rewarding 15 members of the Republican party who did the right thing once, I'd rather reward the Democrats who have consistently fought against such anti-American bills.
I assume penguin7of9 made a typo when he suggested people work 7 hour days.
You are more generous than I am. I think that he actually believes the "9-to-5" that was bandied around for so many years.
His point is still valid: many (he said most, but I will only say many) people have pretty standard work schedules.
While I will agree with that, it's also true that many engineering professionals have all-too-frequent interruptions to those schedules.
If someone uses the excuse that they don't have time to eat healthy, then they need to realize that is only a result of the choices they have made.
The reality is that job market in the U.S. tech sector is such that you are likely to find yourself without work if you are steadfastly refuse to ever cut your lunch hour short, work into the evening, or arrive early in order to meet your employer's needs. It sucks, but it's reality.
This whole thread branched from a post which read:
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, their is a chance within 30 years you'll be acting like, yes-a mad cow.
To which Penguin7of9 replied: If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, you have already acted like a mad cow.
While the original poster implied that there was a chance that eating beef at McDonald's would lead to Mad Cow Disease, Penguin7of9 stated that anyone who ate there was insane. That's where it crossed the line for me.
You're the one claiming that one can just choose to have some idyllic life where lunch is never interrupted, there's always time for breakfast, and you work a 9-5 workday with an hour for lunch. So I asked you about it: Now please answer it.
"Having responsibilities" doesn't mean that you have to cut your lunch short or not take time for breakfast.
You are wrong. I'm 42 years old and have been a software engineer and, more recently, in engineering management throughout my career. I have over 20 years of real-world experience working as both a consultant and a salaried employee in full-time positions at ten different companies. What are your qualifications to tell me how the world works? Are you in high school? College? Are you working at a blue-collar job? I'm trying to get a handle on how you get these ideas that you've been putting forth.
Most people living in civilized nations have predictable working hours. You know: 9am to noon, one hour lunch break, 1pm to 5pm.
So you think that most professionals work a seven hour day? You really are living in fantasy land, aren't you? According to a study by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, combined weekly work hours for dual-earning couples with children rose to 91 hours in 2002. That means that parents are averaging 45.5 hours each. That's an average. Now consider the households where one parent works only part time. They are part of that average, too. That pretty much shoots down your claims about what "most people" do.
Eating a salad alone is unhealthy and, what is more, uncivilized. A decent, civilized lunch consists of an appetizer, a main dish, and desert.
You must be the size of a house! This may come as a shock to you, but most people need to keep an eye on how many calories they consume.
More than 50% of the revenues of companies like IBM come from overseas, so having 23% of their high-tech jobs move overseas still seems disproportionately low; more jobs need to move overseas, not fewer, for the imbalance to be corrected.
More than 50% of the revenues of any Asian-owned motherboard company come from the U.S. What percentage of the workforce at Asus, Gigabyte, Abit, and MSI is non-Asian (I can tell you from reading the manuals that all of the people in their technical writing departments are Asian).
Americans have just been able to pick out the choice jobs in the past. But there is no justification for that anymore: many Indians are well-educated and willing to work for less; why shouldn't they get the jobs?
Because Indian workers did not build the company up throughout its history. U.S. workers are the ones who contributed to the success of the company and for the company to simply abandon them is despicable.
Of course Indian workers will accept less pay. Their cost of living is practically nothing. They get $6,000(U.S.) per year and can live like kings. IBM gets out of having to comply with U.S. labor regulations, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the workers in the U.S. get screwed.
No, it's just the life you have chosen.
And what life have you chosen. Tell me about having a life where you have no responsibilities. Tell me about how you can just leave your work at a moment's notice to have a liesurely lunch. Tell me about how you never oversleep, never have to stay up late to finish something, and never have something which forces you to cut your lunch short. And then tell me about the unicorns dancing outside of your window. Come on! Being alive, human, and part of the working world means that you don't always have time for a liesurely meal.
"Fast food" is intrinsically unhealthy--you need to take your time to eat in order to eat healthy.
If eating a salad in 15 minutes is unhealthy but picking over it for 50 minutes (while the airborne bacteria and germs have a chance to settle in) is, then I'll just eat unhealthy.
I think you have a distorted view of where US jobs comes from. Companies like IBM have huge overseas operations. Yet, most of their R&D and high-tech work is still carried out in the US.
Try reading this for a good example.
!) Buy your food from them more often (so that they have the money to build one, and
2) while you're there, lobby them for a drive-through.
I don't need one restaurant to do it. I need lots of them near my home, my work, client sites, on the highway, etc. I just can't believe that there is not a sufficient market to support such a restaurant chain.
That pretty much says it... The fact that you've only scheduled yourself for a 20Min lunch says something...
I've scheduled an hour for lunch. But sometimes reality intrudes and I don't get an hour.
It's not like you can't put some real time for lunch into your schedule... It's just not a priority for you.
I guess that I should tell my boss to go f*** himself when he asks me to do something that would cut my lunch short. 'The license server is down and the demo is at 1:00PM? Well screw that, I'm out to get my nutritious, healthy lunch. See you at 1:00. Hope it fixes itself before then.'
Maybe you have the kind of job where your lunch break is signalled by a bell, but I do not. I'm a professional software developer and an engineering manager. If I don't want to end up working at McDonalds, I have to eat there occasionally.
There are all sorts of ways to arrange things, including paying someone in your community to make a (real) bagged lunch for you that probably has way more nutritional value than 3 or 4 McDonalds lunches (and probably better taste, too).
Lunch is a social occasion and a chance to get away from the office. I go to lunch with coworkers and friends who come to the office to unwind. I can't show up at a restaurant with a bagged lunch in hand. Nor do I want to become one of those pathetic type-A people who eats lunch while working, responding to e-mails, and answering the phone.
How hard would it be for some company to open a fast-food restarant that has healthy food? It's not like it takes longer to fix healthy food than it takes to make a Big Mac. I don't mind paying more for better ingredients. Instead of trying to blame people who eat at McDonalds, why don't you blame the "healthy" restaurants who won't meet consumer demand for drive throughs and quick "to-go" meals?
How do you know that those doing the regulation will be moral people?
That's why we have a democracy. We elect leaders we trust and they appoint persons to serve the public interest.
I have chosen to make it moral while you have chosen to make it immoral.
You don't get to choose the actions of others. Enron, Martha Stewart, and Halliburton are all companies working withing a capitalist system.
I think it is immoral and it should be illegal to deprive another individual of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud. "Harming others" is much more vague
So what is "fraud"? What if you order some kitchen gadget from an infomercial and find that it doesn't work nearly so well as it appeared on the ad? Is that fraud? What about when a car is advertised as "powerful" -- even though it has less horsepower and a longer 0-60 time than 75% of the cars on the road? Is that fraud? How about when a food is sold as "organic" even though it contains pesticides (legal as per the Bush administration's FDA revamping of the word "organic")?
What is "force"? Does that mean that a police officer should not be able to impound the car of a drunk driver? Is depriving a child molester of liberty through forceful imprisonment immoral? Is it immoral to shoot someone who's holding a knife at your wife's throat, thus depriving them of life through force? You do a good job of parroting patriotism in your words, but they are rather amorphous.
It fits in well with your emotion-based philosophy.
My philosophy is logic-based and I could humiliate you in a public debate.
If you are late for work, it's because you got up late. If you only have 20 minutes for lunch, you could pack lunch at home and bring it with you.
It must be nice to have unlimited time and never have anything unexpected happen. My life doesn't work like that. Sometimes I oversleep and don't have time to cook a healthy meal. Then I go to work planning to have a liesurely hour-long lunch and then run into unexpected problems, delays, or meetings. That's what life is like.
Maybe, eventually, when people like you stop eating at McDonalds, that chain of organic restaurants can finally start competing.
You've just described a world in which they don't have to compete. They can start competing now. I'm sure that I'm not the only person alive who would like fast food that is healthy and nutritious. Wouldn't you eat at such a restaurant?
But I disagree with your reasoning: a family farmer has no more right to have his way of life preserved at taxpayer expense than a programmer has the right to have his job not shipped to India or a cashier has the right not to have his job replaced by new technologies.
I don't know who you are answering, but I never wrote anything about that topic. I simply explained why McDonalds continues to draw such large crowds.
But since you brought it up, I do believe that the government should do something about the loss of U.S. jobs. I don't care if you have to pay more for goods and services. In fact, I'm in favor of it if it saves U.S. jobs. When good jobs go away, the economy suffers. Sure, the CEO of IBM might be able to get himself an even bigger seven-figure compensation package by outsourcing software engineering to India, but increasing his personal wealth is not so important that tens of thousands of Americans should have to lose their good jobs for it.
But instead of taking responsibility for your own actions, you want the government to step in and regulate McDonalds in a way that fits your world view because you are too lazy to take action yourself. Never mind that either the taxpayer needs to foot the bill or that it will greatly increase the cost of that McDonalds meal.
Please, read my original message and tell me where I said anything even remotely like that.
Your concept of "regulation" is unAmerican. People will always lie and cheat. Free people make laws to punish liars and cheats.
And intelligent people make regulations to prevent the lying and cheating from being so easy.
Liers and cheats make regulations that screw everyone else.
Like the regulations that require ingredients be listed on foods? The ones that require medicines to be FDA-approved? The ones that require that car dealers honor warranties even if you have Jiffy Lube do your oil changes?
Thomas Jefferson contrasted the condition of Native Americans, who he thought had too few laws, with the condition of French nationals, who he though had too many laws and decided that the Indians were better off.
They are now, too, aren't they? Oh, I forgot about the freedom-loving capitalists who then went on to buy land from the Indians for a few trinkets.
You suggesting that fraud is compatible with freedom, however, is misguided.
I said that fraud and deception are the result of unregulated capitalism, not that everyones' freedoms must be curtailed. SRequiring that Walmart disclose the country of origin for that sweater they want to sell isn't taking away anyone's freedom.
Everyone creates their own understandings for what capitalism implies.
And that's why we need regulation. You may choose to reject the idea of fraud, but the next guy won't. He's going to be interested in making as much money as possible selling ineffective penis enlargement pills, supposed "sea monkeys", and "miracle" baldness cures.
The definition you gave contains none of these. You imposed them.
And the definition contains nothing about "honesty and exchange of value for value." You imposed that on the definition. The difference is that we are surrounded by huge corporations who don't share your professed values.
Do you believe that individual property rights are good or bad?
They are very good. And what needs to be done is insure that someone else's desire for property doesn't end up harming others.
If you eat at McDonalds, you have already made your choice to support an industrial food infrastructure: industrial cooking of products derived from industrial farms. If you wanted to support family farms, you would cook for yourself or eat at businesses that buy from family farms. There are plenty of organic restaurants, after all. But, oh no, those are probably far too Birkenstock for you--all the wrong people go there, right?
You ever try to find a drive-through at an organic restaurant when you are running late for work or only have 20 minutes to grab lunch? How easy are they to find when you are on an interstate highway that's running through a rural area?
McDonalds is a known quantity. People know what they serve, know what the food costs, and obviously find it palatable. McDonalds also has cleanliness and food safety standards that far exceed state-mandated minimums. A state health inspector that my friend knew said that McDonalds were the most sanitary restaurants that he inspected - by a long shot. By contrast, the vegetarian, organic, Indian restaurant that I used to eat at was closed down by the health department after multiple violations (somwthing I only learned of years later). I'd much rather have a cheeseburger that's been prepared in sanitary conditions than eat aloo chole that's laden with bacteria.
Find me a nationwide chain of organic restaurants that have drive-throughs, impeccable standards of cleanliness, internal food safety inspectors, good tasting food, and reasonable prices and I'm a convert.
Fraud and looting, both of which are intrinsically part of spamming, are the antithesis of capitalism. Capitalism is about exchanging value for value freely, not about taking others' property or using lies to make money.
Try looking up the definition of capitalism:
capitalism - n : an economic system based on private ownership of capital
There's nothing about honesty or providing a fair exchange in the definition of capitalism. It's all about acquisition. Capitalism is about getting as much money as possible through whatever means achieve it. Lies, deception, and fraud are what happens when capitalism is not sufficiently regulated by the government.
And how do you find new music to like?
Mosty by talking to other music fans to see what they like. I have friends with similar tastes to my own and we recommend music to one another. Someone who's known me for ten years has a lot better chance of correctly guessing what I will like than does a DJ working for Clear Channel.