If your library is like mine, there's only ONE "copy" of that book for the entire CITY, and the line to read it stretches all the way into the next millennium. So lots of luck there.
If they're going to attempt to control access on replicable items, I wish they'd at least take a page from ASCAP and allow as many concurrent readers as possible, with royalties distributed per-read instead of artificially restricting the distribution.
Funny how both the fanatical adherents and fanatical opposition will take any -ism to an absurd level for the sake of argument.
You're living in the wrong century. We have computers and can only think in binary terms. You're either with us or with the Enemy. Every problem can be solved if you hit it with my hammer hard enough and long enough. The opposing side (notice we can only have 2 sides?) has no worthy contributions to make, and following even the least of their ideals will lead to the End of the World in right short order.
It's SOOO much more satisfying to be able to simply quack "Taxes are Theft" and things like that. Saves actually having to switch on one's brain. To say nothing of how absolutism gets everyone's adrenaline up, thus ensuring that instead of solving problems we can simply all be angry at each other.
Look, its another person twisting Libertarianism in to something it isn't so it sounds unpleasent to people who don't know any better.
Looks like you've got your work cut out for you, because what most of my self-described Libertarian friends say would fit right into this stereotype. I.e., indistinguishable from pure anarchy. Basing that on the 2 most of-repeated "Libertarian" maxims:
A) Government Regulation is Evil. Admittedly if you corner them, you can usually get a self-described Libertarian to confess that there's room for regulation, but when operating on auto-pilot they tend to forget to mention that. There's no clearly-defined ground rules for us outsiders to understand.
B) Taxes are Theft. Because apparently whatever government functions are admissible under Libertarianism are funded by the fairies. A belief also promoted liberally in recent years by the Conservative crowd who took the "tax" out of tax-and-spend, but not the "spend".
There's you a starting point. It's up to you to take the ball and run with it. Have fun!
Man, there are a lot of bitter people on/. If you don't like Gnome, you'll be using XFCE or KDE or Mate or Cinnamon or something - we already know. Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore. Every time 'Gnome' is in a post topic, we get all the same people rambling on about the same stuff, and Gnome users like myself barely bother reading anymore.
Some of us aren't willing to write off Gnome entirely. We just hate the direction it has been going.
If we didn't say anything, we'd effectively be endorsing the continued deterioration. If we complain loud enough and long enough, maybe the arrogant bastards will realize that they're not as wonderful as they think they are and actually make a Gnome that's what we want, not what they're trying to shove down our throats.
It just...didn't happen. Partly due to a shortage of people wanting to explode, and partly due to our security measures.
Our security measures suck. Even in the "secured" areas they demonstrably suck. I can only conclude that it's mostly due to a shortage of people wanting to explode, since far more people die in the USA at the hands of disgruntled ex-employees and general psychos than from terrorists, and the terrorists don't bother with the unprotected targets, like the psychos do. The terrorists fart around attempting to blow up airplanes when they've got the whole airport to explode in.
But what can you do when the legitimate opposition to our security agrees with the exploding people and wishes our society would cease to exist?
This would seem to imply that you hate our freedoms. Not to mention a large enough percentage of our citizenry that feels different from you that they can block turning the country into an armed camp. Just in case someone explodes.
I'm not intimate with all the details of US power distribution, but my understanding is that the norm is that the long-distance lines operate very high voltage from the generating plants to the local substations, the local substations step it down to high voltage and distribute it to neighbourhoods, and the neighbourhoods have multiple transformers that step down to consumer voltage, with 1 local transformer per every 10 houses (give or take). No transformers on the house, just split-phase to provide 110 and 220.
They definitely do that where I live. Other places may vary.
During the Falklands War, the BBC reported that although several British ships had been hit by bombs, casualties were light because most of the bombs had defective detonators. Argentina quickly fixed the problem with the detonators. No one was shot for treason.
I found verification for half of that statement. Can't find enough details for the other half. For all I can determine, the news was released on behalf of the British Government to misdirect the enemy.
Geraldo, on the other hand, was broadcasting real-time troop information. The only thing that kept Saddam from being able to exploit it was that his army was not merely less effective than we thought, it was less effective than HE thought. Then again, the same was true of his WMDs. His Ministry of Information wasn't so hot, either.
A real labor movement would dispense with the corrupt Democratic Party machine politics, and lobby for an expanded minimum wage involving workplace standards in a region regardless of whether or not you paid dues.
Something for nothing? I thought that's what Socialism was for!
I wish people would stop blaming the electoral college. The system is fine. It is the method in which the individual states assign the votes that is the problem. Florida in 2000 wouldn't have been such a big deal if they had distributed the electoral votes by district, rather than winner take all.
Win California by one vote? You get all 55 electoral votes! How stupid is that?
The system is not fine. In 2000, a guy with fewer votes than his competitor won the election. System broken.
Florida in 2000 was intensely gerrymandered. They had some pretty nasty fights about it shortly thereafter because, it, like Texas was platted out to favor those in power.
I don't like this all-or-nothing allocation either, but I think it would be a lot more representative if the electors were allocated by popular vote percentages of the entire state, not by political districts.
David Brooks is completely wrong about this. For instance, I'm in Ohio, the swing state that everyone was focused on for months. Here are some of the appeals I got in my mailbox and on billboards: - Obama is actually the son of a convicted drug dealer and a porn actress, not a Kenyan. And he's been lying about his name the whole time.
Did they send you the professionally produced DVD that "proves" it like they did in Florida? In the final few days, we also got hysterical phone calls and flyers claiming that Obama was the most pro-abortion president ever and that if we didn't get him out, he'd start killing babies right and left.
The truth didn't merely leave the building, it jumped off the roof.
On the other hand, if I'm not confused, one of the reasons now being put forth for Romney losing is that the "Evil MainStream Media" made it look like like Obama was going to win, so he did.
Then, on the other hand, I flipped by the Fox website on election day and I could have sworn that they were declaring Black Panthers had taken over polling places and that Obama was personally getting involved. So maybe I just confuse easily.
I agree, this would be the "Killer App". I'd love to run openoffice on the server, and not have to install and patch it on every machine in my house. It's a pig, but it's better then the alternative...
In this case, probably non-conventional logic; computers don't operate the way human brains do, it takes a twisted head to program well. Especially if you're attempting to optimize a system using low level programming languages.
Only if you think computers think and don't understand how they work. Binary and hexadecimal arithmetic are no different than decimal in the way they work, only where the carry is. Knowing how an ALU works, how an and gate or a nor gate works, etc, and the machine is simple to understand. It's just an electric abacus and almost as simple, it just has billions of beads and wires.
You no more need a twisted brain to program a computer than you do to design an automobile.
Anyone who has endured the recent political campaigns should have no problems with binary.
In Melbourne, FL (small city). Was in and out in 45 minutes, and everyone was friendly. Had a bunch of City Councilmen to vote on that I hadn't read into (and some I had). No other issues, really. I'm hoping I didn't misunderstand some of the statutes I had to vote on, but read into them twice over last night and this morning.
The Florida constitutional amendments weren't really that hard to understand as long as you got someone to translate all the high-minded language into the intended effect. They all wanted to do one of the following.
1. Remove another revenue source from the already tight tax rolls. 2. Give religious groups another way to push their agenda and/or slurp up goodies from the public trough 3. Allow politicians to meddle in places that historically were protected from political meddling.
None of the amendments were from non-partisan or popular demand, they were all crafted by the State Legislature. Which at the moment is dominated by a single political party. You can probably guess which one by what the amendments call for.
The constitution is an opt-out thing, just like the Do Not Call lists. Your continued residence implies acceptance. You don't like it, you emigrate to some place it doesn't apply. Don't let the screen door hit you...
My line in Florida was long as hell. I waited two hours and the line was longer than when I left. My district is tiny, so it seems like everyone came out this morning to vote.
Seems to vary with time and place. No waiting when I went in, although apparently the early-to-work crowd got backed up.
Then again, the local early voting location was overflowing for the past week or 2. Statewide, I think it was supposed to be about 30% early voters, but for all I know it was a lot higher in my neighborhood.
VA - Filed registration 45 days ago, didn't take effect, told yesterday by three election offices to vote where I was previously registered, two hours of driving, turned away, told to file provisional ballot where I live, provisional ballot where I live must be defended.
I've read about this happening to other people but can't believe it happened to me. Understand what voter ID laws are. They are voter fraud laws - they create voter fraud. Can't believe it happened to me.
This is what worries me. The election is, by most polls, a dead heat. It was bad enough in 2000 with all the jockeying done then and the accusations flying back and forth. But this time around there's been so much interference via both official and unofficial channels that getting a generally-accepted winner in the event of a tie is going to be next to impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
... they are not going to suicide.
Unless they encounter Marvin the Paranoid Android.
The chances are quite good that you can borrow e-books formatted for the Kindle through the online services of your local public library:
Nioga Digital Home [Western New York]
No they aren't.
If your library is like mine, there's only ONE "copy" of that book for the entire CITY, and the line to read it stretches all the way into the next millennium. So lots of luck there.
If they're going to attempt to control access on replicable items, I wish they'd at least take a page from ASCAP and allow as many concurrent readers as possible, with royalties distributed per-read instead of artificially restricting the distribution.
Funny how both the fanatical adherents and fanatical opposition will take any -ism to an absurd level for the sake of argument.
You're living in the wrong century. We have computers and can only think in binary terms. You're either with us or with the Enemy. Every problem can be solved if you hit it with my hammer hard enough and long enough. The opposing side (notice we can only have 2 sides?) has no worthy contributions to make, and following even the least of their ideals will lead to the End of the World in right short order.
It's SOOO much more satisfying to be able to simply quack "Taxes are Theft" and things like that. Saves actually having to switch on one's brain. To say nothing of how absolutism gets everyone's adrenaline up, thus ensuring that instead of solving problems we can simply all be angry at each other.
Look, its another person twisting Libertarianism in to something it isn't so it sounds unpleasent to people who don't know any better.
Looks like you've got your work cut out for you, because what most of my self-described Libertarian friends say would fit right into this stereotype. I.e., indistinguishable from pure anarchy. Basing that on the 2 most of-repeated "Libertarian" maxims:
A) Government Regulation is Evil. Admittedly if you corner them, you can usually get a self-described Libertarian to confess that there's room for regulation, but when operating on auto-pilot they tend to forget to mention that. There's no clearly-defined ground rules for us outsiders to understand.
B) Taxes are Theft. Because apparently whatever government functions are admissible under Libertarianism are funded by the fairies. A belief also promoted liberally in recent years by the Conservative crowd who took the "tax" out of tax-and-spend, but not the "spend".
There's you a starting point. It's up to you to take the ball and run with it. Have fun!
Running a rather boring software company to description like some sort of supervillain, thats quite a transition.
Dear god let his compound contain an active volcano lair.
With a shark pool. With...
Ah, you know the rest!
Will you take it to the apothecary or the cobbler to get it fixed? Or perhaps you could take your autogyro to the haberdasherer instead.
"Ending is better than Mending."
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Man, there are a lot of bitter people on /. If you don't like Gnome, you'll be using XFCE or KDE or Mate or Cinnamon or something - we already know. Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore. Every time 'Gnome' is in a post topic, we get all the same people rambling on about the same stuff, and Gnome users like myself barely bother reading anymore.
Some of us aren't willing to write off Gnome entirely. We just hate the direction it has been going.
If we didn't say anything, we'd effectively be endorsing the continued deterioration. If we complain loud enough and long enough, maybe the arrogant bastards will realize that they're not as wonderful as they think they are and actually make a Gnome that's what we want, not what they're trying to shove down our throats.
It just...didn't happen. Partly due to a shortage of people wanting to explode, and partly due to our security measures.
Our security measures suck. Even in the "secured" areas they demonstrably suck. I can only conclude that it's mostly due to a shortage of people wanting to explode, since far more people die in the USA at the hands of disgruntled ex-employees and general psychos than from terrorists, and the terrorists don't bother with the unprotected targets, like the psychos do. The terrorists fart around attempting to blow up airplanes when they've got the whole airport to explode in.
But what can you do when the legitimate opposition to our security agrees with the exploding people and wishes our society would cease to exist?
This would seem to imply that you hate our freedoms. Not to mention a large enough percentage of our citizenry that feels different from you that they can block turning the country into an armed camp. Just in case someone explodes.
I'm not intimate with all the details of US power distribution, but my understanding is that the norm is that the long-distance lines operate very high voltage from the generating plants to the local substations, the local substations step it down to high voltage and distribute it to neighbourhoods, and the neighbourhoods have multiple transformers that step down to consumer voltage, with 1 local transformer per every 10 houses (give or take). No transformers on the house, just split-phase to provide 110 and 220.
They definitely do that where I live. Other places may vary.
During the Falklands War, the BBC reported that although several British ships had been hit by bombs, casualties were light because most of the bombs had defective detonators. Argentina quickly fixed the problem with the detonators. No one was shot for treason.
I found verification for half of that statement. Can't find enough details for the other half. For all I can determine, the news was released on behalf of the British Government to misdirect the enemy.
Geraldo, on the other hand, was broadcasting real-time troop information. The only thing that kept Saddam from being able to exploit it was that his army was not merely less effective than we thought, it was less effective than HE thought. Then again, the same was true of his WMDs. His Ministry of Information wasn't so hot, either.
"I'm here in Iraq with the Army's 101st Airborne Division, and we're headed this way (draws map in sand for camera)."
Geraldo Rivera, during the invasion of Iraq.
Any other war, any other network and he would have been shot for treason. Can't give a whole lot more aid to the enemy than that.
A real labor movement would dispense with the corrupt Democratic Party machine politics, and lobby for an expanded minimum wage involving workplace standards in a region regardless of whether or not you paid dues.
Something for nothing? I thought that's what Socialism was for!
I wish people would stop blaming the electoral college. The system is fine. It is the method in which the individual states assign the votes that is the problem. Florida in 2000 wouldn't have been such a big deal if they had distributed the electoral votes by district, rather than winner take all.
Win California by one vote? You get all 55 electoral votes! How stupid is that?
The system is not fine. In 2000, a guy with fewer votes than his competitor won the election. System broken.
Florida in 2000 was intensely gerrymandered. They had some pretty nasty fights about it shortly thereafter because, it, like Texas was platted out to favor those in power.
I don't like this all-or-nothing allocation either, but I think it would be a lot more representative if the electors were allocated by popular vote percentages of the entire state, not by political districts.
David Brooks is completely wrong about this. For instance, I'm in Ohio, the swing state that everyone was focused on for months. Here are some of the appeals I got in my mailbox and on billboards:
- Obama is actually the son of a convicted drug dealer and a porn actress, not a Kenyan. And he's been lying about his name the whole time.
Did they send you the professionally produced DVD that "proves" it like they did in Florida? In the final few days, we also got hysterical phone calls and flyers claiming that Obama was the most pro-abortion president ever and that if we didn't get him out, he'd start killing babies right and left.
The truth didn't merely leave the building, it jumped off the roof.
This made me laugh...wish i had mod points!
On the other hand, if I'm not confused, one of the reasons now being put forth for Romney losing is that the "Evil MainStream Media" made it look like like Obama was going to win, so he did.
Then, on the other hand, I flipped by the Fox website on election day and I could have sworn that they were declaring Black Panthers had taken over polling places and that Obama was personally getting involved. So maybe I just confuse easily.
I agree, this would be the "Killer App". I'd love to run openoffice on the server, and not have to install and patch it on every machine in my house. It's a pig, but it's better then the alternative...
YES!!!
In this case, probably non-conventional logic; computers don't operate the way human brains do, it takes a twisted head to program well. Especially if you're attempting to optimize a system using low level programming languages.
Only if you think computers think and don't understand how they work. Binary and hexadecimal arithmetic are no different than decimal in the way they work, only where the carry is. Knowing how an ALU works, how an and gate or a nor gate works, etc, and the machine is simple to understand. It's just an electric abacus and almost as simple, it just has billions of beads and wires.
You no more need a twisted brain to program a computer than you do to design an automobile.
Anyone who has endured the recent political campaigns should have no problems with binary.
Decimal on the other hand...
Unfortunately, all of our HR employees are stoned.
So are your salesmen.
You executives, in the other hand, are just naturally stupid.
Until this year, Mountain Dew was caffeine-free in Canada.....
Now that's just sick!
In Melbourne, FL (small city). Was in and out in 45 minutes, and everyone was friendly. Had a bunch of City Councilmen to vote on that I hadn't read into (and some I had). No other issues, really. I'm hoping I didn't misunderstand some of the statutes I had to vote on, but read into them twice over last night and this morning.
The Florida constitutional amendments weren't really that hard to understand as long as you got someone to translate all the high-minded language into the intended effect. They all wanted to do one of the following.
1. Remove another revenue source from the already tight tax rolls.
2. Give religious groups another way to push their agenda and/or slurp up goodies from the public trough
3. Allow politicians to meddle in places that historically were protected from political meddling.
None of the amendments were from non-partisan or popular demand, they were all crafted by the State Legislature. Which at the moment is dominated by a single political party. You can probably guess which one by what the amendments call for.
The constitution is an opt-out thing, just like the Do Not Call lists. Your continued residence implies acceptance. You don't like it, you emigrate to some place it doesn't apply. Don't let the screen door hit you...
My line in Florida was long as hell. I waited two hours and the line was longer than when I left. My district is tiny, so it seems like everyone came out this morning to vote.
Seems to vary with time and place. No waiting when I went in, although apparently the early-to-work crowd got backed up.
Then again, the local early voting location was overflowing for the past week or 2. Statewide, I think it was supposed to be about 30% early voters, but for all I know it was a lot higher in my neighborhood.
How's the weather in Chicago?
Partly cloudy with chance of zombies.
VA - Filed registration 45 days ago, didn't take effect, told yesterday by three election offices to vote where I was previously registered, two hours of driving, turned away, told to file provisional ballot where I live, provisional ballot where I live must be defended.
Apparently these guys made their money and did their job:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/virginia-voter-fraud-case-expands-to-focus-on-gop-firm/2012/11/02/76285252-24eb-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_story.html
I've read about this happening to other people but can't believe it happened to me. Understand what voter ID laws are. They are voter fraud laws - they create voter fraud. Can't believe it happened to me.
This is what worries me. The election is, by most polls, a dead heat. It was bad enough in 2000 with all the jockeying done then and the accusations flying back and forth. But this time around there's been so much interference via both official and unofficial channels that getting a generally-accepted winner in the event of a tie is going to be next to impossible.
Partisans that game the system by intimidating voters and reducing participation should be ashamed. Unfortunately it is not so.
That's no way to talk about our state Governors!