FYI, American sporting events also tend to be based around metric units. Running tracks tend to be 400m in circumference, making the conversion to miles very easy (1600m ~ 0.994 miles)
Swimming tends to be a mixed bag, with yards and meters used interchangeably. The conversion's not quite as accurate, however.
Bamboo is one of the worst invasive plants, and grows fast and readily enough to kill any other plants in its way, while sucking all the nutrients out of the soil.
This is like sending a wolf to catch the dog to catch the cat to catch the mouse. Covering the earth with Bamboo is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Also don't connect them to dimmer switches (even if you leave the dimmers at 100% all the time)
Many dimmers designed for incandescents work by rapidly turning the light on and off. This is a very bad thing for inductive loads such as fluorescent starter coils, and will destroy the device in no time flat.
But, yeah... avoiding the cheap ones seems to work pretty well. I'm sure there are also name-brands that are also crap, and cheap ones that are good, so I suppose you're best off switching brands until you find one that works well for you.
Alaska has a ton of oil and very few people. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an endowment created by the state government that sets aside approximately 25% of the state's proceeds from mineral sales.
The dividends from this endowment are then divvied up and paid to the people living in the state.
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
[citation-needed]
I lived in Alaska for a while. All of the power plants I knew of ran on gas or coal. I believe there's one hydro plant outside of Anchorage.
One thing's for sure -- long distance transmission lines are bloody difficult to implement on the tundra, and would be hard to justify.
Why is this bad? We also "free them from oppression" for free, and "bring them American culture" for free and "educate them on intellectual property law" for free. Since we are the world police, why shouldn't we do something that might actually benefit them--for free? I think it will ultimately help us in the end since the USA isn't a closed system, but even if it helps others and not us, is it a bad thing? What happened to pride in your country's generosity and nobility? Are we all so coldhearted that helping others is treasonous?
Perhaps you misunderstood my point: Ph.D. Graduates who want to stay and contribute to American society are being sent back to their home countries. I agree that accepting foreign students is a great way to improve our image overseas.
I'm all in favor of an open education system. However, when we're training (and retaining) very few of our own as a matter of policy, there's a serious problem.
let us not forget that microsoft let go about 5000 workers to reduce costs
It's not a great comparison. It's normal and healthy for a corporation to trim the fat. The American automotive industry is a great example of what happens when you don't get rid of workers and assets after they become redundant and/or unnecessary.
If Microsoft legitimately can't find talented workers, I suppose there's nothing wrong with employing a handful of foreigners. The total number of H1-B visas isn't terribly high in the grand scheme of things (limited to 65,000 per year, maximum stay of 3 years; 6 if a renewal is approved)
Microsoft employs approximately 89,000 people, and received 3,517 H1-Bs in 2006.
Also don't forget that there are plenty of American citizens working abroad. I can't find a great source for data on this, but Google turned up an article from 2005, claiming that there were approximately 4 million American expatriates at the time.
H1-B visa holders also tend to be highly educated by the very nature of the program. I fully support the notion of attracting the best and brightest minds to my country. It might make me less competitive in the job market, but will almost certainly be good for the country as a whole.
Perhaps the biggest injustice of the system is the manner in which foreign graduate students are treated. We award a huge number of advanced Ph.D positions (often government funded) to foreign students, and force them to return home after they've received their degree! Not only are we depriving American citizens from educational opportunities, but we're also essentially educating other countries' workers for free.
here's no focus on class structure or rich vs. poor or anything of the like. It's about letting people be free to make their own choices in life.
I'll bite. Under the current system, the poor have very few opportunities to make their own choices in life. If you're born poor, odds are that you're going to stay that way.
In fact, the routine costs of living for the poor are often higher than what the rest of us pay, creating a vicious cycle from which there is little chance of escape.
I'm not saying that the ultra-rich should support the poor.
I'm saying that they shouldn't pay their workers wages that prevent them from doing anything above the bare minimum of supporting themselves.
And yes. It's the ultra-rich who make these calls, and are often the most distantly removed from the actual implications of these decisions.
Marx was almost certainly correct in suggesting that these sorts of abuses are inherent in a laissez-faire capitalist system. The ultra-wealthy justify their treatment of the lower classes by distancing and placing several layers of abstraction between themselves and those most greatly affected by their actions. (Disclaimer: Marx and Engels excelled at identifying and diagnosing the socioeconomic problems of 19th-Century Europe. Their proposed solutions were terrible.)
The very notion that 'ultra rich' should even exist as an entire class is troubling. I have no problem rewarding successes, although it's beginning to show that wealth is increasingly hereditary. Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet both deserve their wealth, being exceptionally good at what they do, and deserve to be rewarded for their successes. However, these individuals are most certainly the exception rather than the rule. Although the Bush and Kennedy families have both a number of exceptionally brilliant minds, they've also had a number of complete idiots who managed work their way into positions of power equal to or greater than their similarly-named relatives.
In a capitalistic society, wealth begets power. Unfortunately, the people being placed at the top very rarely deserve to be there. Nobody *EVER* suggested a complete and total equalization of wages, as it would indeed cause a complete and total stagnation of the economy. However, when the working classes have nothing to aspire to, you experience that same exact stagnation.
Additionally, once an ultra-wealthy social class emerges and entrenches itself, various other social problems begin to emerge, and we begin to see sweatshops and debters prisons reappear. This is an extremely well-established historical trend.
How is socialism in Europe failing to live up to expectations? I've actually lived in both Europe and the US, and can say (without any reservations) that the standard of healthcare I witnessed while living there was astonishingly higher than what I saw in the US. Additionally, the standard of living for the "average joe" seemed to be much higher.
All of these things are true for Lithium Ion batteries.
However, Apple's current line of notebooks use Lithium Polymer instead of Lithium Ion. Additionally, the charging circuitry is supposedly much more sophisticated.
I'm not sure if the modes of failure for commerical Li-Pol packs are well-known at this point, and I have no reason to believe that they'd be the same as those for Li-Ion.
Exactly! I bought a new battery for my old powerbook about 4 years after I got it and the replacement batter had so much more juice that I actually got 2x the battery life out of it that the original battery gave me (when brand new).
Bullshit.
Batteries have improved. Lithium Polymer cells in particular are much better (although a moot point here, as they are incompatible with Li-Ion chargers). However, batteries have most certainly not doubled in capacity over the past 4 years, and that technology certainly hasn't been backported to replacement batteries for old laptops.
I'm pretty sure that Chrome also does a better job of dumping inactive tabs into the swapfile in the event that you end up biting off more than you can chew. I suppose this makes its slightly more wasteful approach to memory management more tolerable.
That all said, RAM is cheap these days, although the latest cost-cutting trend amongst computer manufacturers seems to be limiting the maximum amount of RAM that any one system can hold. I suppose that 32-bit will continue to play a role for some time, although I'm more than a little peeved that my 3-year-old Mac Mini can't hold more than 2GB, while many new netbooks max out at 1GB.
Hm. Not is it only a legend, but it's a complete misrepresentation of how a socialist government works!
Even In Soviet Russia, hard-workers were allowed to reap rewards for their labors. High achievers were placed into more desirable jobs, and given more attractive perks.
The Soviet system had a great many flaws, although it somehow managed to survive for 80 years, and transformed their country into a superpower. If the system actually functioned as the professor described it, the country would have collapsed within 5 years.
The problem described by the fictional professor could even broadly be applied to any organized society.
Drawing the line is indeed tricky. If you're just tuning in, political theorists have been having this discussion since the mid-1800s, while the rest of the world has been pretty much content to sit by and ignore it.
Go read up on John Stuart Mill. He started formulating his ideas around the same time as Marx and Engels, in response to the same socioeconomic crises of the era. However, his core theory of government would be considered libertarian (and surprisingly relevant) by modern ideals:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.â
In my experience, this model tends to be popular with both modern conservatives and liberals. It doesn't place any explicit limits of the size of the government, but, rather places a more fundamental restriction on a government's purpose or function. In that regard, it actually allows for certain socialist ideals to exist alongside a relatively restricted government.
Healthcare often isn't an individual problem, but rather a societal one. If the state can provide a system of healthcare that serves the vast majority of the population better and more efficiently than a privatized system, the government reserves every right to implement such a system.
I think the fear is more that, like Social Security, they don't trust that it isn't going to completely fuck us later BECAUSE we can't kill the program.
You mean, when humans stop requiring medical care?
Part of the rationale behind Social Security is that people are too stupid to voluntarily put away their money.
The number of bankruptcies and foreclosures that took place over the past year should be sufficient to confirm this.
I don't like paying for irresponsible people any more than you do. However, the societal cost of widespread poverty would be far greater than the cost of the social security tax. Once again, the current economic kerfuffle is a perfect example of how the irresponsible decisions of a few have lead to the suffering of a great many.
I appreciate that it's not necessarily a good idea to subscribe to any political philosophy as doctrine.
However, how do you properly implement a "common sense government" into a society that is very much conflicted about the direction in which it wants to go? Furthermore, how would you implement such a government without handing an inordinate amount of power over to a tiny minority?
Modern politics necessitates compromise. This tends to knock out any "really bad" ideas at the expense of also blocking the "really good" ones. If you can find a workable solution to this problem, the Nobel Prize Committee would very much like to hear from you.
Moving back ontopic, I'm not sure how the debate over healthcare has carried on for so long. The benefits appear to be very clear-cut for the vast majority of citizens, given the track record in other countries. From an economic perspective alone, we can identify how our system is already socialized in many respects, and yet costs a fortune to run, and underperforms consistently.
It's just plain sad that "evidence-based medicine" is being used as a buzzword in 2009. That phrase should have become redundant a very long time ago. The system is broken in no ambiguous terms, and desperately needs to be fixed.
Although perhaps unintentional, the parent post is easily the most well-crafted troll/flamebait post I've seen in in quite a long time.
While I'm not going to immediately rush to defend my country's culture, 230 years is quite a long period of time. It's disingenuous to blame all of our current woes on any single cause.
It's even more disingenuous to compare our current form taxation with that which we were subjected to during colonial rule. The crafters of the American Revolution would very likely have found our system of representative government to be quite acceptable.
The primary concern of the founding fathers was the formation of a representative government, which we still seem to be doing a passable job at. Although I'm sure they'd balk over many of the present functions of the federal government, I'm even more certain that they'd balk over the godlike status with which they are treated by many today. The constitution was created as a flexible document for a reason, and the world in 2009 is certainly quite different from the world in 1788.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, American sporting events also tend to be based around metric units. Running tracks tend to be 400m in circumference, making the conversion to miles very easy (1600m ~ 0.994 miles)
Swimming tends to be a mixed bag, with yards and meters used interchangeably. The conversion's not quite as accurate, however.
Actually, we'd be overrun with friggin' bamboo.
Bamboo is one of the worst invasive plants, and grows fast and readily enough to kill any other plants in its way, while sucking all the nutrients out of the soil.
This is like sending a wolf to catch the dog to catch the cat to catch the mouse. Covering the earth with Bamboo is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Also don't connect them to dimmer switches (even if you leave the dimmers at 100% all the time)
Many dimmers designed for incandescents work by rapidly turning the light on and off. This is a very bad thing for inductive loads such as fluorescent starter coils, and will destroy the device in no time flat.
But, yeah... avoiding the cheap ones seems to work pretty well. I'm sure there are also name-brands that are also crap, and cheap ones that are good, so I suppose you're best off switching brands until you find one that works well for you.
Uhm, no.
Alaska has a ton of oil and very few people. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an endowment created by the state government that sets aside approximately 25% of the state's proceeds from mineral sales.
The dividends from this endowment are then divvied up and paid to the people living in the state.
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
[citation-needed]
I lived in Alaska for a while. All of the power plants I knew of ran on gas or coal. I believe there's one hydro plant outside of Anchorage.
One thing's for sure -- long distance transmission lines are bloody difficult to implement on the tundra, and would be hard to justify.
Please. Glass buildings kill just as many (if not more) birds than wind turbines. I don't hear anybody making a fuss about those.
Why is this bad? We also "free them from oppression" for free, and "bring them American culture" for free and "educate them on intellectual property law" for free. Since we are the world police, why shouldn't we do something that might actually benefit them--for free? I think it will ultimately help us in the end since the USA isn't a closed system, but even if it helps others and not us, is it a bad thing? What happened to pride in your country's generosity and nobility? Are we all so coldhearted that helping others is treasonous?
Perhaps you misunderstood my point: Ph.D. Graduates who want to stay and contribute to American society are being sent back to their home countries. I agree that accepting foreign students is a great way to improve our image overseas.
I'm all in favor of an open education system. However, when we're training (and retaining) very few of our own as a matter of policy, there's a serious problem.
let us not forget that microsoft let go about 5000 workers to reduce costs
It's not a great comparison. It's normal and healthy for a corporation to trim the fat. The American automotive industry is a great example of what happens when you don't get rid of workers and assets after they become redundant and/or unnecessary.
If Microsoft legitimately can't find talented workers, I suppose there's nothing wrong with employing a handful of foreigners. The total number of H1-B visas isn't terribly high in the grand scheme of things (limited to 65,000 per year, maximum stay of 3 years; 6 if a renewal is approved)
Microsoft employs approximately 89,000 people, and received 3,517 H1-Bs in 2006.
Also don't forget that there are plenty of American citizens working abroad. I can't find a great source for data on this, but Google turned up an article from 2005, claiming that there were approximately 4 million American expatriates at the time.
H1-B visa holders also tend to be highly educated by the very nature of the program. I fully support the notion of attracting the best and brightest minds to my country. It might make me less competitive in the job market, but will almost certainly be good for the country as a whole.
Perhaps the biggest injustice of the system is the manner in which foreign graduate students are treated. We award a huge number of advanced Ph.D positions (often government funded) to foreign students, and force them to return home after they've received their degree! Not only are we depriving American citizens from educational opportunities, but we're also essentially educating other countries' workers for free.
Personally I prefer Xfce. It's bloody fast, looks quite nice, and includes all of the features I'd expect a modern operating system to have.
A lot of the backend stuff of GNOME eventually makes its way over to Xfce after it's had time to mature.
I can also personally attest that it's fast and lean on older machines.
here's no focus on class structure or rich vs. poor or anything of the like. It's about letting people be free to make their own choices in life.
I'll bite. Under the current system, the poor have very few opportunities to make their own choices in life. If you're born poor, odds are that you're going to stay that way.
In fact, the routine costs of living for the poor are often higher than what the rest of us pay, creating a vicious cycle from which there is little chance of escape.
I'm not saying that the ultra-rich should support the poor.
I'm saying that they shouldn't pay their workers wages that prevent them from doing anything above the bare minimum of supporting themselves.
And yes. It's the ultra-rich who make these calls, and are often the most distantly removed from the actual implications of these decisions.
Marx was almost certainly correct in suggesting that these sorts of abuses are inherent in a laissez-faire capitalist system. The ultra-wealthy justify their treatment of the lower classes by distancing and placing several layers of abstraction between themselves and those most greatly affected by their actions. (Disclaimer: Marx and Engels excelled at identifying and diagnosing the socioeconomic problems of 19th-Century Europe. Their proposed solutions were terrible.)
The very notion that 'ultra rich' should even exist as an entire class is troubling. I have no problem rewarding successes, although it's beginning to show that wealth is increasingly hereditary. Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet both deserve their wealth, being exceptionally good at what they do, and deserve to be rewarded for their successes. However, these individuals are most certainly the exception rather than the rule. Although the Bush and Kennedy families have both a number of exceptionally brilliant minds, they've also had a number of complete idiots who managed work their way into positions of power equal to or greater than their similarly-named relatives.
In a capitalistic society, wealth begets power. Unfortunately, the people being placed at the top very rarely deserve to be there. Nobody *EVER* suggested a complete and total equalization of wages, as it would indeed cause a complete and total stagnation of the economy. However, when the working classes have nothing to aspire to, you experience that same exact stagnation.
Additionally, once an ultra-wealthy social class emerges and entrenches itself, various other social problems begin to emerge, and we begin to see sweatshops and debters prisons reappear. This is an extremely well-established historical trend.
How is socialism in Europe failing to live up to expectations? I've actually lived in both Europe and the US, and can say (without any reservations) that the standard of healthcare I witnessed while living there was astonishingly higher than what I saw in the US. Additionally, the standard of living for the "average joe" seemed to be much higher.
I think the more interesting question here is why Tennessee has a wait time 6x shorter than the national average.
(And since 306 is the national average, we can guess that 20-30 states have an even longer wait time than that)
All of these things are true for Lithium Ion batteries.
However, Apple's current line of notebooks use Lithium Polymer instead of Lithium Ion. Additionally, the charging circuitry is supposedly much more sophisticated.
I'm not sure if the modes of failure for commerical Li-Pol packs are well-known at this point, and I have no reason to believe that they'd be the same as those for Li-Ion.
Exactly! I bought a new battery for my old powerbook about 4 years after I got it and the replacement batter had so much more juice that I actually got 2x the battery life out of it that the original battery gave me (when brand new).
Bullshit.
Batteries have improved. Lithium Polymer cells in particular are much better (although a moot point here, as they are incompatible with Li-Ion chargers). However, batteries have most certainly not doubled in capacity over the past 4 years, and that technology certainly hasn't been backported to replacement batteries for old laptops.
I'm pretty sure that Chrome also does a better job of dumping inactive tabs into the swapfile in the event that you end up biting off more than you can chew. I suppose this makes its slightly more wasteful approach to memory management more tolerable.
That all said, RAM is cheap these days, although the latest cost-cutting trend amongst computer manufacturers seems to be limiting the maximum amount of RAM that any one system can hold. I suppose that 32-bit will continue to play a role for some time, although I'm more than a little peeved that my 3-year-old Mac Mini can't hold more than 2GB, while many new netbooks max out at 1GB.
Why isn't this illegal?
Hm. Not is it only a legend, but it's a complete misrepresentation of how a socialist government works!
Even In Soviet Russia, hard-workers were allowed to reap rewards for their labors. High achievers were placed into more desirable jobs, and given more attractive perks.
The Soviet system had a great many flaws, although it somehow managed to survive for 80 years, and transformed their country into a superpower. If the system actually functioned as the professor described it, the country would have collapsed within 5 years.
The problem described by the fictional professor could even broadly be applied to any organized society.
It's not that conservatives hate the poor, but, rather that they strive for a society with a rigid class structure.
Effectively, this works out to be a very bad deal for the poor, leaving them in a situation that is literally hopeless.
Also, what about the mayors (usually republican) who round up the homeless, put them on buses, and offload them in other counties?
Drawing the line is indeed tricky. If you're just tuning in, political theorists have been having this discussion since the mid-1800s, while the rest of the world has been pretty much content to sit by and ignore it.
Go read up on John Stuart Mill. He started formulating his ideas around the same time as Marx and Engels, in response to the same socioeconomic crises of the era. However, his core theory of government would be considered libertarian (and surprisingly relevant) by modern ideals:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.â
In my experience, this model tends to be popular with both modern conservatives and liberals. It doesn't place any explicit limits of the size of the government, but, rather places a more fundamental restriction on a government's purpose or function. In that regard, it actually allows for certain socialist ideals to exist alongside a relatively restricted government.
Healthcare often isn't an individual problem, but rather a societal one. If the state can provide a system of healthcare that serves the vast majority of the population better and more efficiently than a privatized system, the government reserves every right to implement such a system.
I think the fear is more that, like Social Security, they don't trust that it isn't going to completely fuck us later BECAUSE we can't kill the program.
You mean, when humans stop requiring medical care?
Part of the rationale behind Social Security is that people are too stupid to voluntarily put away their money.
The number of bankruptcies and foreclosures that took place over the past year should be sufficient to confirm this.
I don't like paying for irresponsible people any more than you do. However, the societal cost of widespread poverty would be far greater than the cost of the social security tax. Once again, the current economic kerfuffle is a perfect example of how the irresponsible decisions of a few have lead to the suffering of a great many.
But how do you codify that into law?
I appreciate that it's not necessarily a good idea to subscribe to any political philosophy as doctrine.
However, how do you properly implement a "common sense government" into a society that is very much conflicted about the direction in which it wants to go? Furthermore, how would you implement such a government without handing an inordinate amount of power over to a tiny minority?
Modern politics necessitates compromise. This tends to knock out any "really bad" ideas at the expense of also blocking the "really good" ones. If you can find a workable solution to this problem, the Nobel Prize Committee would very much like to hear from you.
Moving back ontopic, I'm not sure how the debate over healthcare has carried on for so long. The benefits appear to be very clear-cut for the vast majority of citizens, given the track record in other countries. From an economic perspective alone, we can identify how our system is already socialized in many respects, and yet costs a fortune to run, and underperforms consistently.
It's just plain sad that "evidence-based medicine" is being used as a buzzword in 2009. That phrase should have become redundant a very long time ago. The system is broken in no ambiguous terms, and desperately needs to be fixed.
Although perhaps unintentional, the parent post is easily the most well-crafted troll/flamebait post I've seen in in quite a long time.
While I'm not going to immediately rush to defend my country's culture, 230 years is quite a long period of time. It's disingenuous to blame all of our current woes on any single cause.
It's even more disingenuous to compare our current form taxation with that which we were subjected to during colonial rule. The crafters of the American Revolution would very likely have found our system of representative government to be quite acceptable.
The primary concern of the founding fathers was the formation of a representative government, which we still seem to be doing a passable job at. Although I'm sure they'd balk over many of the present functions of the federal government, I'm even more certain that they'd balk over the godlike status with which they are treated by many today. The constitution was created as a flexible document for a reason, and the world in 2009 is certainly quite different from the world in 1788.
If I could hug you right now, I would.
You had shirts!!???