As an American I guess I could respond to this with 'the First Amendment', but then you'd probably claim that basic rights like 'freedom of speech' only apply to U.S. citizens. The first ammendment only applies to U.S. citizens and, unfortunately, is not considered a basic right globally.
My government started a war over WMD and terrorism, against a nation which has no WMD and wasn't even remotely involved in 9/11, simply to steal that country's oil while proving that Shrub has a bigger dick than Saddam.
Wow, talk about someone wearing the proverbial blinders. Been watching the nightly news? I guess so. Did you forget about, or just never even knew about, the fact that one of Saddam's sons gassed an entire city? Thousands of people died from what is classified as a WMD. These were Iraqi people. The U.S. were certainly afraid he would use these chemicals against the American attackers and for good reason. He has them and is not afraid of using them. If you had a dozen years, a desert, and a multi billion dollar budget, do you think you could hide a few thousand gallons of chemicals? Should be pretty easy to hide a few thousand barrels in a country twice the size of Idaho or about 437,072 sq km. Oh, and not "even remotely involved?" The money trail goes through Baghdad. The attacks appear to have had partial funding from Iraq.
Shrub and mini-Shrub
Ad hominem attacks. Wow, I'm impressed. If it really was about the oil, then why don't we take over a country like Saudi Arabia where we already have a huge military force installed and a larger supply of oil? It would be very easy to stage a coup there and turn it into a puppet state, supplying all the oil we need at cheap prices.
No, you don't have the moral authority as is evidenced by your post, but you do have the basic right as granted by the Bill of Rights. That Bill of Rights is one of this countries greatest strengths as well as one of its greatest weakness, but I would much rather have it than the alternative. We are spoiled here.
Actually, it may use X10 commonly as that is the cheapest/most common way of controlling your house, but if you read the lists you find that many people use these cool Weeder digital I/O boards, alarm systems, I-Buttons, and all sorts of other home control systems that are countless it seems. I'm working on doing that myself, now that I'm a homeowner, but money is tight, now that I'm a homeowner.
Also if it doesn't support it today, it will as soon as you write the interface for it, which is usually quite simple. Most of these control devices have some sort of serial connection which makes it very easy to code for.
I've been using MisterHouse for quite some time now and am actually a contributing author. Me and 208 other people!;)
I'm working on the planning stage for this same type of thing in my 88 unit complex.
An idea I have is to run wireless between the buildings in the complex and Cat5 inside each attic to drops for each unit. It wouldn't take very many wireless runs to connect all the buildings together. That would be nice. I would much rather run Cat5 to each building, but I doubt I can get the permission to do that kind of digging nor do I really want to dig. Hiring someone to do it would be too expensive.
Was Clinton's budget surplusses caused by increased taxes, reduced spending, or both? Was Clinton a "tax and spend" democrat?
The facts are: Increased taxes on an increasing economy. The largest single tax increase ever levied on the American people combined with an already increasing (massivly increasing, I might add) economy created a large influx of cash into the Federal budget. The tax percentage of the GDP went from 17.5% in 1992 to 20.8% in 2000. More money and taking more of it. Then the bubble popped as we all knew it would. Yes, Clinton was tax and spend. Right after he got to office the tax rate for GDP went up by 0.5% and then 0.4% the next year. Most politicians in America have at least some of that tax and spend stuck in their heads, unfortunately.
GWB seems to be decreasing taxes while increasing spending. That doesn't make much business sense to me.
The problem is that it isn't a business. It is government. If you ran a business like a government, you would go out of business. This isn't to say that government management is necessarily bad, just usually. The biggest difference is that you can not arbitrarily raise your prices in a business as your customers will go elsewhere. If they can't go elsewhere then you have a monopoly, or a government. When you raise taxes, you slow the economy as people have less to spend. When you lower the taxes people spend more. This is a fact of government economics that is well backed up by evidence throughout modern America. It is very similar to the "Fed" raising or lowering interest rates, but it is a bit more universal. Now the bit about increasing spending, well, that sucks. A bad economy causes social programs to spend more, the 9/11 attack and all the repercussions of that, and a whole host of things add to it. I personally want spending decreased dramatically all around the board, but it has to be a slow process otherwise it will screw up the economy even more than it is today.
This isn't just in comparison with other "democracies", this is of anywhere, including dictatorships.
Yeah, but in some of those dictatorships the criminals are usually either shot or beheaded! Check out what it was like living under the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam in Iraq. I'd much rather go to jail for a year in a luxurious American jail than spend a single day in a prison in many countries around the world. You know, right to due process, no cruel and unusual punishment and all that.
I have a project that you can look at to get some Linux source for this and some simple hardware to look at for hooking up 8 LEDs to a parallel port. This is very simple and safe to do. I have it running on my desktop at home giving me the CPU usage in bright blue LEDs across the front bezel of the machine. Looks awesome. Very easy to adapt the code to utilize other values to control it. Just replace the function that gets the CPU usage with whatever you want. Diskspace on a server, network utilization, flowrate in the sewage system, whatever.
I did manual labor for a living for several years until I got through college and got a computer job. I worked for an equipment rental company loading and unloading equipment, etc. I'm a small person. Some of the equipment I had to lift and load was rather heavy and I couldn't lift it by myself. The customer quite often lent a hand loading it into their vehicle. I was amazed at just how weak these people are. I remember to this day one guy that looked like a body builder who was struggling to help me lift something like a lawnmower. I can lift it by myself fairly easily, but getting it into the bed of his truck alone would have been difficult. The guy was groaning and straining like it weighed five times what it did.
I've never known why people go to the gym and yet pay someone to mow their lawn. I agree, don't wimp out and take it like a man. Too many people take the elevator. I take the stairs instead.
The idea of being able to even feel a four pound change with a decent bag is kind of alien to me
On a plane with all your other luggage? Every pound counts when you are airport hopping. If you are in four different airports in a single day, it gets tiring preparing for your presentations and meetings while lugging around all your equipment. Shave a few pounds here and there and you aren't quite as exhausted at the end of the day. It really does make a difference. Yes, a good bag helps, but in and out of planes and taxis it really doesn't matter what bag you have. You get tired.
Obviously the idiot hasn't had to carry a laptop every day. There is a huge difference in carrying a 3lb v. a 7lb laptop. Mine is closer to the 7lb variety. My old boss had the less than 3lb one. Really awesome little thing. He travelled extensively for business while my laptop was almost exclusively on my desk. I did travel with mine a couple of times, but I was glad to have the larger screen on mine as I used it daily. I'd hate to have to travel often with one as big as mine.
No they can't or more precicely they won't. Look at the level of intelligence required to read the daily newspapers across America. It requires just an elementary school reading level to read the average newspaper. The letters to the editor are far more intellectual than anything the editors can produce and they only choose to print the ones that the editors can read themselves. It is pathetic. They can't even get the facts straight on simple stories, let alone something that they have no conceptual grasp of.
They print crap that they haven't bothered to research and verify the facts of and yet it is something so trivial to verify. I would much rather that the general media didn't touch the scientific stories as they can't even get "human interest" or book reviews correct. Ever read any of the books the New York lists in their Notable Books list? Didn't think so as nobody else did either.
I agree that people drive too much, but the "get out of your cars" approach hasn't worked.
I think you misunderstood. I am in no way saying that. I am saying that if they were truely concerned about traffic congestion then they would have left the freeway in addition to the tunnel. The fact that they are tearing it down to plant a park shows that there was a different motive other than just alleviating traffic congestion. I am a firm believer in having your own car, but I love public transportation. The difference being that I think the local or state governments should be in charge of it and not the Federal government. I recall that the vast majority of this project if funded by the Federal government. I disagree with this as it appears to go directly against the Constitution.
Allowing the congestion to get so bad that people are forced out of there cars would be very expensive: think of the time wasted in traffic jams.
That is why I am a proponent of public transportation, especially for alleviating massive traffic congestion in and around large cities. I think that good city planning (including both highways and public transportation as well as a host of other issues) will take care of huge amounts of our gridlock problems. The problem is just that. Very rarely do we see good planning anywhere, especially in government.
Another point: Boston isn't paying much for the Big Dig, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is.
Interresting. I don't know how the government is structured in Mass. so I don't know if that is appropriate or not (my opinion is the city should foot a large part of the bill, but I don't know local tax structure, etc.). I do know that Federal funding for this (that was vetoed by Reagan and forced through later) is a bad thing.
Careful, you don't want to be too condecending do you?
Sorry, didn't mean to sound that way. I get so frustrated with people saying that it is "unconstitutional" when it isn't mentioned anywhere near the Constitution.
I firmly believe that you have bought into a knee-jerk reactionary mantra that government is bad.
I don't believe that the government is bad, just that it has its proper place. I think that our Founding Fathers knew that they needed to keep the Federal government specifically limited so that laws would be passed for the states and cities by those respective states and cities. This means that we do not have overly broad laws that affect people adversly that the law was not intended to affect. Unfortunately it seems that we have forgotten much of that in just about 200 years.
I firmly believe that, infact, most people can NOT build there own safe highway system, and that the government should be doing it.
Yes, the state or city governments should. I think that the Federal government should pass strict guidlines for building highways for the sake of interstate commerce and national defense, but stay out the funding and control except when it actually serves the purpose of interstate commerce and national defense.
well... no, they didn't have the roads to do it; that's why they started the Interstate Highway Project.
I was speaking strictly of Hawaii in this context. They seemed to move equipment around quite nicely in WWII before this project started.
We wouldn't be having this conversation if the government hadn't taken some tax-payer money and invested in DARPANet.
A great example of what can be done in the interest of national defense. Does the Federal government still fund the Internet? Not any more than they use it for their own purposes. It is now paid for by the consumers (for a large part). It was started to allow scientists, scholars, defense contractors, etc. to collaborate better. Great. Wonderful. They still use it for that and pay for their bandwidth usage just like the rest of us. We should be paying our local road provider for the priviledge of driving on a nice superhighway just like we do for our Internet.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that the constitution envisions federal investment in the internet but not in highways.
Nowhere does it say they shouldn't be involved in roads and Internet, but that they should not be running a Federal ISP that all are required to get their Internet access through. That is what it amounts to with the highway system. We have a several major phone companies that provide our "highway system" and the local providers give us our "last mile" coverage. The Federal government is a consumer of this, just like the rest of us. I think that we should not have our taxes so high to pay for so many projects. I would rather have my state/city taxes higher so that it goes to improvements here in my state and city. That is the type of system that the Constitution describes. OK, so that is a strange comparison, but I think it works.
As a footnote, I'm not trying to be a zealot, I just sound that way when I type.
Well, actually it is NOT a perfectly good highway. It is woefully inadequate for the traffic it carries.
Understood, but if they were truely concerned about traffic congestion, shouldn't they leave the highway? That arguement doesn't make any sence.
Also, livability if a city is a legitimate social and govermental concern, and this project goes a long way to make Boston more livable.
No disagreement here. That is exactly what I was saying. It is a beautification project.
Also, the interstate highway system was actually concieved during WWII because of problems the military had moving heavy equipment around the country.
Awesome use for it. The Union's defense. So, if the Army Corps of Engineers built it primarily to transport military equipment why is the federal government still funding it inside of cities. I'm pretty sure Boston isn't paying much of the almost $15,000,000,000 that it is costing to build this tunnel. I'm not saying that the Interstate system is not a good idea, what I am saying is that it is yet another way for the Federal government to sidestep the Constitution and take control over something not intended for the Federal government to have. If it is not expressly given to the Feds, it is for the States. Pop open your handy Constitution and take a look.
Finally, the constitution gaurantees equal protection under the law.
So, build ports in Hawaii on each island. Wait, did that. You are using the slippery slope logic that they want you to use. The Feds want to take care of you as they don't think you can take care of yourself.
If your state and my state get high quality highways, then Hawaii gets some too (besides, we may need to move some M1 tanks across the Big Island.)
Again, poor logic. If they want to move tanks, they have the road system to do so, not to mention the huge number of ports. The Interstate in Hawaii was built to handle the city traffic. It had nothing to do with Interstate Commerce nor National Defense. Both of these are items given to the Federal government under the Constitution and neither are present in this example.
And Finally Finally, the federal government doesn't build highways, the states do. The feds just chip in. The Federal government is NOT paying for the entire Big Dig.
"America will survive until politicians discover they can bribe people with their own money." -- de Tocqueville. Need I say more?
Please tell me how replacing a highway with a park is upgrading a highway? They are tearing out a perfectly good highway only for the aesthetics of it. Doesn't make any sence to me.
Oh, I've driven Interstates most every day of my life. I just don't understand why the Federal government has to fund a local highway. There is an Interstate in Hawaii. How is that? I understand the Feds working with the states to build the highways between them, but it should be the states building, especially when it doesn't cross the state line. Where does the Constitution grant the Federal government the right to build highways? It doesn't. I know it falls under the interstate commerce section, but they have exploited and expanded it way beyond what was allowed by the Constitution to the point where you can't even see the Constitution anymore.
I watched a TV special on this a few weeks ago. This project isn't just expensive, it is taking forever to complete. It was started in the 1980's, plans were finalized in the late 80's, construction started in 1991, and it is not scheduled to be completed until 2005. The thing that struck me most from the TV show was that the people who pushed it through the Congress to get funding for this were gloating about how they blackmailed individuals to get it passed. I was astonished that they would admit to that, first, and second that they would be so gleeful on camera about blackmailing legislators. You wonder why our taxes are so high in America now? Politics like this. Shouldn't the people of Boston paid for the renovation of their highway? Nope, I guess not. I've never even been to Boston and I'm paying to make their city look better. That is all this project is about. Making the city pretty by tearing down that nasty, ugly highway that runs through the middle and replacing it with a park.
It could revolutionise optical instruments because it reflects 10 to 20 times less light
How can you multiply by 10 - 20 and come up with a smaller number? I've never understood this common misconception in grammar/math. It just doesn't make any sence.
I'm so tired of reading so much crap about the New York Times and their horrible reporting practices that I wish people would outright boycott them. The NY Times routinely prints news that is slander or libel without any regard to the truth. The printing of this libel agains Kevin is just one out of many in recent memory. Please stop reading it. Please stop submitting stories from that rag. Find some other source to quote.
Nemesis tanked for the same reason that UHF did in 1989... too many other good movies for the fanbase to watch. So very true. They did their standard limited previews and found that UHF was the all-time highest rated comedy movie and thought that they could pit it up against the big boys. Everybody loves to see action/adventure type of movies. Plus Batman stirs up childhood memories of comic books and Indiana Jones had a killer first movie. UHF is one of the best funny movies of all time, but you can't compare the draw of it to something like Indiana Jones.
Even I'd rather watch Indiana Jones than UHF on any given day and UHF is one of my favorite movies plus I'm on Weird Al's mailing list! The problem is that I'm not in the mode for comedy every day, but I'll take an action packed movie any day. I think that many other viewers are in the same category. Too bad for Al. The flop of this movie devestated him. He is one of the few real talents in the entertainment industry, even if he can never be serious.
Cherry picking students.
Don't take in foreign language speakers. Don't take in the poor. Don't take in those who do not meet a minimum test score. Don't take in the autistic, the hyperactive, the troublemakers, the emotionally crippled, the illegal immigrants, the hard-to-educate of all kinds.
$Profit!
I guess you've never even been to California. Don't you know it is illegal to discriminate based upon anything here? It is even to the point where it is difficult for the bloody universities to keep out the losers and low achievers!;)
I've been to both private and public here. The poor can't go as they can not afford them, hence the voucher initiatives. They do take in foreign speakers, autistic, etc. I remember having some in my classes. I did go to a religious school and it might have been different than most, so I am going from my personal experience here.
True, but building and planning adequate roadways is something entirely different than just building road for the sake of building roads. The freeway project included a bridge over a river that now funnels traffic over three existing, 50 year old bridges. The freeway could have had room for a railway for the light rail system. The combination of those two would have reduced the traffic problems here to managable levels.
I doubt it's half the money for private, though I'd like to see a figure. I know my old school (private) was and is $$$, and it is outstanding academically. I was surprised to learn that our spending in Arlington VA is in the top 10 nationwide, about $12,000 per pupil and similar to private school. Yet the teachers generally can't afford to live here. That number comes from an initiative for school vouchers here in California. They were touting that the average (not the $12,000 per year jobbies) private schools were less than half the cost per student as the public ones. There was some propaganda in that I'm sure. California spends about $6500 per student per year and the voucher initiative says that the $4000 that the voucher would have given would give a surplus to the parents as the average was lower than that. My numbers I used for "half" were old. These are more current as I just looked them up.
Oh, one more thing. Why is it that the private schools in California can do so much more (higher test scores, higher college attendence, etc.) than the public schools for less than half the money per student? I personally think this backs up my massive bureaucracy theory of above.
Your theory is that your education sucks so you should cut funding to it? Just throw in the towel? Please tell me you didn't think that through.
Actually, I was just saying that the return on investment was terrible. We spend more per student here than most other school systems across the country and we have the second worst education system. I'm not saying to throw in the towel, but just a bit of a comparison with the mismanagement at NASA. $40 Billion to our schools anually, much of it wasted and we have no clue how much as we have no way of measuring the return on investment. Sound familiar? I think that we should cut some of the funding, but we need to find out which spigot is open letting all that money out. IMHO it is with the massive bureaucracy that we have supporting the schools. Ask the teachers if they would rather have the state dictate what they teach or the school. This is a big problem here.
Plenty of places spend much more on education than California; the problem is definitely not an excess of money. When I was growing up in California, it was known to have decent education. That was shortly before the "tax revolt." And the spending has only gone up since the tax revolt with no improvement in education. The solution here in California (and at NASA) is usually just throw more money at it. That will fix the problem. Sorry. Studied that in project management classes at school in California. It doesn't work.
It is all to easy to say, hey, if we just eliminated waste, we could... But it's not that easy to do. The Bush Administration said something similar when they claimed they could make up a good part of the deficit by just getting tax cheats. Turned out to be harder than that. It is always harder than it seems. I don't claim to know the solution, but I know it when I'm looking at a "boondoggle" or however you spell it.
Cost of the most recent tax cut? What do you mean cost? The cost comes out of my paycheck. That $300 could buy me one killer graphics card. If you don't want it, just send it to me. I'll take it.
On those same lines, how many space stations could be built if they CUT programs rather than spend more on crap? I'm not even going to attempt to tackle the huge numbers in the federal budget, just take California's annual budget of $98.9 Billion of which $76.7 Billion is general fund (The rest is specific taxation for a specific purpose, I'll leave that alone). Of that $40.5 Billion is for education (obviously a major waste here in California which is number 49 out of 50 states, even Arkansas is above California). $0.228 Billion is lumped together with a bunch of other stuff for transportation (you can tell by driving on any of our roads here). Subtracting for courts and jails (just $6 Billion) that still leaves enough to fund a space station every other year or so.
Cut the stupid crap and give me my money back. I should send in a bill for all the damage to my car from these poorly maintained roads or gas bill for having to sit through terrible traffic because the public transportation is lousy and roads too congested. Good old Governor Moonbeam sold off all the land that was allocated for a freeway right here and would have alleviated most of the traffic problems I experience daily. That was along the same lines as "nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM" but for roads. If the money was managed properly (wow, imagine that) then we could afford that high speed rail line or a hotel in space. Either of which I'm game for.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, couldn't bite my tongue any longer.
As an American I guess I could respond to this with 'the First Amendment', but then you'd probably claim that basic rights like 'freedom of speech' only apply to U.S. citizens.
The first ammendment only applies to U.S. citizens and, unfortunately, is not considered a basic right globally.
My government started a war over WMD and terrorism, against a nation which has no WMD and wasn't even remotely involved in 9/11, simply to steal that country's oil while proving that Shrub has a bigger dick than Saddam.
Wow, talk about someone wearing the proverbial blinders. Been watching the nightly news? I guess so. Did you forget about, or just never even knew about, the fact that one of Saddam's sons gassed an entire city? Thousands of people died from what is classified as a WMD. These were Iraqi people. The U.S. were certainly afraid he would use these chemicals against the American attackers and for good reason. He has them and is not afraid of using them. If you had a dozen years, a desert, and a multi billion dollar budget, do you think you could hide a few thousand gallons of chemicals? Should be pretty easy to hide a few thousand barrels in a country twice the size of Idaho or about 437,072 sq km. Oh, and not "even remotely involved?" The money trail goes through Baghdad. The attacks appear to have had partial funding from Iraq.
Shrub and mini-Shrub
Ad hominem attacks. Wow, I'm impressed. If it really was about the oil, then why don't we take over a country like Saudi Arabia where we already have a huge military force installed and a larger supply of oil? It would be very easy to stage a coup there and turn it into a puppet state, supplying all the oil we need at cheap prices.
No, you don't have the moral authority as is evidenced by your post, but you do have the basic right as granted by the Bill of Rights. That Bill of Rights is one of this countries greatest strengths as well as one of its greatest weakness, but I would much rather have it than the alternative. We are spoiled here.
Actually, it may use X10 commonly as that is the cheapest/most common way of controlling your house, but if you read the lists you find that many people use these cool Weeder digital I/O boards, alarm systems, I-Buttons, and all sorts of other home control systems that are countless it seems. I'm working on doing that myself, now that I'm a homeowner, but money is tight, now that I'm a homeowner.
;)
Also if it doesn't support it today, it will as soon as you write the interface for it, which is usually quite simple. Most of these control devices have some sort of serial connection which makes it very easy to code for.
I've been using MisterHouse for quite some time now and am actually a contributing author. Me and 208 other people!
I'm working on the planning stage for this same type of thing in my 88 unit complex.
An idea I have is to run wireless between the buildings in the complex and Cat5 inside each attic to drops for each unit. It wouldn't take very many wireless runs to connect all the buildings together. That would be nice. I would much rather run Cat5 to each building, but I doubt I can get the permission to do that kind of digging nor do I really want to dig. Hiring someone to do it would be too expensive.
Anyone know a good, cheap way to load balance?
Light Amplification by Ztimulated Emission of Radiation?
Was Clinton's budget surplusses caused by increased taxes, reduced spending, or both? Was Clinton a "tax and spend" democrat?
The facts are: Increased taxes on an increasing economy. The largest single tax increase ever levied on the American people combined with an already increasing (massivly increasing, I might add) economy created a large influx of cash into the Federal budget. The tax percentage of the GDP went from 17.5% in 1992 to 20.8% in 2000. More money and taking more of it. Then the bubble popped as we all knew it would. Yes, Clinton was tax and spend. Right after he got to office the tax rate for GDP went up by 0.5% and then 0.4% the next year. Most politicians in America have at least some of that tax and spend stuck in their heads, unfortunately.
GWB seems to be decreasing taxes while increasing spending. That doesn't make much business sense to me.
The problem is that it isn't a business. It is government. If you ran a business like a government, you would go out of business. This isn't to say that government management is necessarily bad, just usually. The biggest difference is that you can not arbitrarily raise your prices in a business as your customers will go elsewhere. If they can't go elsewhere then you have a monopoly, or a government. When you raise taxes, you slow the economy as people have less to spend. When you lower the taxes people spend more. This is a fact of government economics that is well backed up by evidence throughout modern America. It is very similar to the "Fed" raising or lowering interest rates, but it is a bit more universal. Now the bit about increasing spending, well, that sucks. A bad economy causes social programs to spend more, the 9/11 attack and all the repercussions of that, and a whole host of things add to it. I personally want spending decreased dramatically all around the board, but it has to be a slow process otherwise it will screw up the economy even more than it is today.
This isn't just in comparison with other "democracies", this is of anywhere, including dictatorships.
Yeah, but in some of those dictatorships the criminals are usually either shot or beheaded! Check out what it was like living under the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam in Iraq. I'd much rather go to jail for a year in a luxurious American jail than spend a single day in a prison in many countries around the world. You know, right to due process, no cruel and unusual punishment and all that.
I have a project that you can look at to get some Linux source for this and some simple hardware to look at for hooking up 8 LEDs to a parallel port. This is very simple and safe to do. I have it running on my desktop at home giving me the CPU usage in bright blue LEDs across the front bezel of the machine. Looks awesome. Very easy to adapt the code to utilize other values to control it. Just replace the function that gets the CPU usage with whatever you want. Diskspace on a server, network utilization, flowrate in the sewage system, whatever.
I did manual labor for a living for several years until I got through college and got a computer job. I worked for an equipment rental company loading and unloading equipment, etc. I'm a small person. Some of the equipment I had to lift and load was rather heavy and I couldn't lift it by myself. The customer quite often lent a hand loading it into their vehicle. I was amazed at just how weak these people are. I remember to this day one guy that looked like a body builder who was struggling to help me lift something like a lawnmower. I can lift it by myself fairly easily, but getting it into the bed of his truck alone would have been difficult. The guy was groaning and straining like it weighed five times what it did.
I've never known why people go to the gym and yet pay someone to mow their lawn. I agree, don't wimp out and take it like a man. Too many people take the elevator. I take the stairs instead.
The idea of being able to even feel a four pound change with a decent bag is kind of alien to me
On a plane with all your other luggage? Every pound counts when you are airport hopping. If you are in four different airports in a single day, it gets tiring preparing for your presentations and meetings while lugging around all your equipment. Shave a few pounds here and there and you aren't quite as exhausted at the end of the day. It really does make a difference. Yes, a good bag helps, but in and out of planes and taxis it really doesn't matter what bag you have. You get tired.
Obviously the idiot hasn't had to carry a laptop every day. There is a huge difference in carrying a 3lb v. a 7lb laptop. Mine is closer to the 7lb variety. My old boss had the less than 3lb one. Really awesome little thing. He travelled extensively for business while my laptop was almost exclusively on my desk. I did travel with mine a couple of times, but I was glad to have the larger screen on mine as I used it daily. I'd hate to have to travel often with one as big as mine.
No they can't or more precicely they won't. Look at the level of intelligence required to read the daily newspapers across America. It requires just an elementary school reading level to read the average newspaper. The letters to the editor are far more intellectual than anything the editors can produce and they only choose to print the ones that the editors can read themselves. It is pathetic. They can't even get the facts straight on simple stories, let alone something that they have no conceptual grasp of.
They print crap that they haven't bothered to research and verify the facts of and yet it is something so trivial to verify. I would much rather that the general media didn't touch the scientific stories as they can't even get "human interest" or book reviews correct. Ever read any of the books the New York lists in their Notable Books list? Didn't think so as nobody else did either.
I agree that people drive too much, but the "get out of your cars" approach hasn't worked.
I think you misunderstood. I am in no way saying that. I am saying that if they were truely concerned about traffic congestion then they would have left the freeway in addition to the tunnel. The fact that they are tearing it down to plant a park shows that there was a different motive other than just alleviating traffic congestion. I am a firm believer in having your own car, but I love public transportation. The difference being that I think the local or state governments should be in charge of it and not the Federal government. I recall that the vast majority of this project if funded by the Federal government. I disagree with this as it appears to go directly against the Constitution.
Allowing the congestion to get so bad that people are forced out of there cars would be very expensive: think of the time wasted in traffic jams.
That is why I am a proponent of public transportation, especially for alleviating massive traffic congestion in and around large cities. I think that good city planning (including both highways and public transportation as well as a host of other issues) will take care of huge amounts of our gridlock problems. The problem is just that. Very rarely do we see good planning anywhere, especially in government.
Another point: Boston isn't paying much for the Big Dig, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is.
Interresting. I don't know how the government is structured in Mass. so I don't know if that is appropriate or not (my opinion is the city should foot a large part of the bill, but I don't know local tax structure, etc.). I do know that Federal funding for this (that was vetoed by Reagan and forced through later) is a bad thing.
Careful, you don't want to be too condecending do you?
Sorry, didn't mean to sound that way. I get so frustrated with people saying that it is "unconstitutional" when it isn't mentioned anywhere near the Constitution.
I firmly believe that you have bought into a knee-jerk reactionary mantra that government is bad.
I don't believe that the government is bad, just that it has its proper place. I think that our Founding Fathers knew that they needed to keep the Federal government specifically limited so that laws would be passed for the states and cities by those respective states and cities. This means that we do not have overly broad laws that affect people adversly that the law was not intended to affect. Unfortunately it seems that we have forgotten much of that in just about 200 years.
I firmly believe that, infact, most people can NOT build there own safe highway system, and that the government should be doing it.
Yes, the state or city governments should. I think that the Federal government should pass strict guidlines for building highways for the sake of interstate commerce and national defense, but stay out the funding and control except when it actually serves the purpose of interstate commerce and national defense.
well... no, they didn't have the roads to do it; that's why they started the Interstate Highway Project.
I was speaking strictly of Hawaii in this context. They seemed to move equipment around quite nicely in WWII before this project started.
We wouldn't be having this conversation if the government hadn't taken some tax-payer money and invested in DARPANet.
A great example of what can be done in the interest of national defense. Does the Federal government still fund the Internet? Not any more than they use it for their own purposes. It is now paid for by the consumers (for a large part). It was started to allow scientists, scholars, defense contractors, etc. to collaborate better. Great. Wonderful. They still use it for that and pay for their bandwidth usage just like the rest of us. We should be paying our local road provider for the priviledge of driving on a nice superhighway just like we do for our Internet.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that the constitution envisions federal investment in the internet but not in highways.
Nowhere does it say they shouldn't be involved in roads and Internet, but that they should not be running a Federal ISP that all are required to get their Internet access through. That is what it amounts to with the highway system. We have a several major phone companies that provide our "highway system" and the local providers give us our "last mile" coverage. The Federal government is a consumer of this, just like the rest of us. I think that we should not have our taxes so high to pay for so many projects. I would rather have my state/city taxes higher so that it goes to improvements here in my state and city. That is the type of system that the Constitution describes. OK, so that is a strange comparison, but I think it works.
As a footnote, I'm not trying to be a zealot, I just sound that way when I type.
Well, actually it is NOT a perfectly good highway. It is woefully inadequate for the traffic it carries.
Understood, but if they were truely concerned about traffic congestion, shouldn't they leave the highway? That arguement doesn't make any sence.
Also, livability if a city is a legitimate social and govermental concern, and this project goes a long way to make Boston more livable.
No disagreement here. That is exactly what I was saying. It is a beautification project.
Also, the interstate highway system was actually concieved during WWII because of problems the military had moving heavy equipment around the country.
Awesome use for it. The Union's defense. So, if the Army Corps of Engineers built it primarily to transport military equipment why is the federal government still funding it inside of cities. I'm pretty sure Boston isn't paying much of the almost $15,000,000,000 that it is costing to build this tunnel. I'm not saying that the Interstate system is not a good idea, what I am saying is that it is yet another way for the Federal government to sidestep the Constitution and take control over something not intended for the Federal government to have. If it is not expressly given to the Feds, it is for the States. Pop open your handy Constitution and take a look.
Finally, the constitution gaurantees equal protection under the law.
So, build ports in Hawaii on each island. Wait, did that. You are using the slippery slope logic that they want you to use. The Feds want to take care of you as they don't think you can take care of yourself.
If your state and my state get high quality highways, then Hawaii gets some too (besides, we may need to move some M1 tanks across the Big Island.)
Again, poor logic. If they want to move tanks, they have the road system to do so, not to mention the huge number of ports. The Interstate in Hawaii was built to handle the city traffic. It had nothing to do with Interstate Commerce nor National Defense. Both of these are items given to the Federal government under the Constitution and neither are present in this example.
And Finally Finally, the federal government doesn't build highways, the states do. The feds just chip in. The Federal government is NOT paying for the entire Big Dig.
"America will survive until politicians discover they can bribe people with their own money." -- de Tocqueville. Need I say more?
Please tell me how replacing a highway with a park is upgrading a highway? They are tearing out a perfectly good highway only for the aesthetics of it. Doesn't make any sence to me.
Oh, I've driven Interstates most every day of my life. I just don't understand why the Federal government has to fund a local highway. There is an Interstate in Hawaii. How is that? I understand the Feds working with the states to build the highways between them, but it should be the states building, especially when it doesn't cross the state line. Where does the Constitution grant the Federal government the right to build highways? It doesn't. I know it falls under the interstate commerce section, but they have exploited and expanded it way beyond what was allowed by the Constitution to the point where you can't even see the Constitution anymore.
I watched a TV special on this a few weeks ago. This project isn't just expensive, it is taking forever to complete. It was started in the 1980's, plans were finalized in the late 80's, construction started in 1991, and it is not scheduled to be completed until 2005. The thing that struck me most from the TV show was that the people who pushed it through the Congress to get funding for this were gloating about how they blackmailed individuals to get it passed. I was astonished that they would admit to that, first, and second that they would be so gleeful on camera about blackmailing legislators. You wonder why our taxes are so high in America now? Politics like this. Shouldn't the people of Boston paid for the renovation of their highway? Nope, I guess not. I've never even been to Boston and I'm paying to make their city look better. That is all this project is about. Making the city pretty by tearing down that nasty, ugly highway that runs through the middle and replacing it with a park.
It could revolutionise optical instruments because it reflects 10 to 20 times less light
How can you multiply by 10 - 20 and come up with a smaller number? I've never understood this common misconception in grammar/math. It just doesn't make any sence.
I'm so tired of reading so much crap about the New York Times and their horrible reporting practices that I wish people would outright boycott them. The NY Times routinely prints news that is slander or libel without any regard to the truth. The printing of this libel agains Kevin is just one out of many in recent memory. Please stop reading it. Please stop submitting stories from that rag. Find some other source to quote.
Nemesis tanked for the same reason that UHF did in 1989... too many other good movies for the fanbase to watch.
So very true. They did their standard limited previews and found that UHF was the all-time highest rated comedy movie and thought that they could pit it up against the big boys. Everybody loves to see action/adventure type of movies. Plus Batman stirs up childhood memories of comic books and Indiana Jones had a killer first movie. UHF is one of the best funny movies of all time, but you can't compare the draw of it to something like Indiana Jones.
Even I'd rather watch Indiana Jones than UHF on any given day and UHF is one of my favorite movies plus I'm on Weird Al's mailing list! The problem is that I'm not in the mode for comedy every day, but I'll take an action packed movie any day. I think that many other viewers are in the same category. Too bad for Al. The flop of this movie devestated him. He is one of the few real talents in the entertainment industry, even if he can never be serious.
Are you hiring?
Cherry picking students. ;)
Don't take in foreign language speakers. Don't take in the poor. Don't take in those who do not meet a minimum test score. Don't take in the autistic, the hyperactive, the troublemakers, the emotionally crippled, the illegal immigrants, the hard-to-educate of all kinds.
$Profit!
I guess you've never even been to California. Don't you know it is illegal to discriminate based upon anything here? It is even to the point where it is difficult for the bloody universities to keep out the losers and low achievers!
I've been to both private and public here. The poor can't go as they can not afford them, hence the voucher initiatives. They do take in foreign speakers, autistic, etc. I remember having some in my classes. I did go to a religious school and it might have been different than most, so I am going from my personal experience here.
True, but building and planning adequate roadways is something entirely different than just building road for the sake of building roads. The freeway project included a bridge over a river that now funnels traffic over three existing, 50 year old bridges. The freeway could have had room for a railway for the light rail system. The combination of those two would have reduced the traffic problems here to managable levels.
I doubt it's half the money for private, though I'd like to see a figure. I know my old school (private) was and is $$$, and it is outstanding academically. I was surprised to learn that our spending in Arlington VA is in the top 10 nationwide, about $12,000 per pupil and similar to private school. Yet the teachers generally can't afford to live here.
That number comes from an initiative for school vouchers here in California. They were touting that the average (not the $12,000 per year jobbies) private schools were less than half the cost per student as the public ones. There was some propaganda in that I'm sure. California spends about $6500 per student per year and the voucher initiative says that the $4000 that the voucher would have given would give a surplus to the parents as the average was lower than that. My numbers I used for "half" were old. These are more current as I just looked them up.
Oh, one more thing. Why is it that the private schools in California can do so much more (higher test scores, higher college attendence, etc.) than the public schools for less than half the money per student? I personally think this backs up my massive bureaucracy theory of above.
Your theory is that your education sucks so you should cut funding to it? Just throw in the towel? Please tell me you didn't think that through.
Actually, I was just saying that the return on investment was terrible. We spend more per student here than most other school systems across the country and we have the second worst education system. I'm not saying to throw in the towel, but just a bit of a comparison with the mismanagement at NASA. $40 Billion to our schools anually, much of it wasted and we have no clue how much as we have no way of measuring the return on investment. Sound familiar? I think that we should cut some of the funding, but we need to find out which spigot is open letting all that money out. IMHO it is with the massive bureaucracy that we have supporting the schools. Ask the teachers if they would rather have the state dictate what they teach or the school. This is a big problem here.
Plenty of places spend much more on education than California; the problem is definitely not an excess of money. When I was growing up in California, it was known to have decent education. That was shortly before the "tax revolt."
And the spending has only gone up since the tax revolt with no improvement in education. The solution here in California (and at NASA) is usually just throw more money at it. That will fix the problem. Sorry. Studied that in project management classes at school in California. It doesn't work.
It is all to easy to say, hey, if we just eliminated waste, we could... But it's not that easy to do. The Bush Administration said something similar when they claimed they could make up a good part of the deficit by just getting tax cheats. Turned out to be harder than that.
It is always harder than it seems. I don't claim to know the solution, but I know it when I'm looking at a "boondoggle" or however you spell it.
Cost of the most recent tax cut? What do you mean cost? The cost comes out of my paycheck. That $300 could buy me one killer graphics card. If you don't want it, just send it to me. I'll take it.
On those same lines, how many space stations could be built if they CUT programs rather than spend more on crap? I'm not even going to attempt to tackle the huge numbers in the federal budget, just take California's annual budget of $98.9 Billion of which $76.7 Billion is general fund (The rest is specific taxation for a specific purpose, I'll leave that alone). Of that $40.5 Billion is for education (obviously a major waste here in California which is number 49 out of 50 states, even Arkansas is above California). $0.228 Billion is lumped together with a bunch of other stuff for transportation (you can tell by driving on any of our roads here). Subtracting for courts and jails (just $6 Billion) that still leaves enough to fund a space station every other year or so.
Cut the stupid crap and give me my money back. I should send in a bill for all the damage to my car from these poorly maintained roads or gas bill for having to sit through terrible traffic because the public transportation is lousy and roads too congested. Good old Governor Moonbeam sold off all the land that was allocated for a freeway right here and would have alleviated most of the traffic problems I experience daily. That was along the same lines as "nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM" but for roads. If the money was managed properly (wow, imagine that) then we could afford that high speed rail line or a hotel in space. Either of which I'm game for.