I would much rather it go the other way -- singular conjugations could de-ambigouize the singular they.
A very sensible idea, but regrettably one which wouldn't work for English. The history of English is that it is running away from (verbal) inflections. If anything, I could see "they" becoming a very well accepted 3rd person singular pronoun, and then that causing the "-s" ending on 3rd person singular present tense verbs to start disappearing, so all the present tense, regular verbs would be the same. If this were Russian, a highly inflected language that Russians like to sit around all day re-inflecting, then perhaps your idea could work....
We still do have a healthy set of inflections for nouns from singular to plural (which are innovations stemming from somewhere else.)
box>>boxen (admittedly something from the computing world...but it's the one I can think of.)
It's about time this is fixed. Imagine if the government allowed TV to develop this way.
If you see the history of color television, you will find that the government attempted to mandate a standard that would have stranded lots of people into those who could see color programs, and those who could not. (The FCC chose the CBS color TV system, which was incompatible with the b+w we were using. They made the choice early enough and few people had TV's at that time anyway...but RCA sued, delaying the final decision, which was made about 1953 for the CBS system anyway. By that time, too many people had b+w televisions which wouldn't view programs on the CBS system (which had, I may add, two fucking spinning color disks.) Therefore the color TV standard was locked out of the market.
Eventually, the color system we adopted was the RCA system, and is now known as NTSC (and had the big advantage of being viewable on older b+w sets. Incidentally, this was not the case in PAL/SECAM countries, I think TV's there needed a converter...b+w programming on BBC1 was 425 lines, but color programming on BBC2 was 625 lines.) RCA owned NBC, so NBC started color programming very early on (as early as 1953.) However, CBS was still pissed off about losing the color TV war, even though they won FCC approval, so they wouldn't touch color, and ABC had no reason to produce color programming, since that would have just sold RCA sets anyway. In the mid 1960's, ABC started color programming, and that's when color TV took off.
As a pollworker in Columbus (actually I work in Dublin, but it's still Franklin County) I can say with confidence that counting the 80-300 ballots (per precinct) would be just as labor intensive (and perhaps less so) than dealing with the Shouptronic machines (which have a fairly cumbersome closing down procedure, and are heavy as all hell.)
Municipal races are in odd years, state/federal in even (all over Ohio), so that keeps ballots from getting too big.
Columbus, OH where I live often has problems finding enough poll workers
a.) no need to add the "Ohio" tag. we're the biggest, so let people assume it b.) the problem is slightly exaggerated c.) well if you're not a poll worker already, go volunteer:-)
I still got CO as a fingerprinting state. (Not that I'm disagreeing with your experience...I'm also trying to get to the bottom of it.)
Page 3 of this doc (which is Part 1 of the driver's handbook) still mentions fingerprinting. http://www.mv.state.co.us/formspd f/drvrbook-1.pdf
It's also mentioned on the FAQ for CO licenses http://www.mv.state.co.us/faqdrli.html While I have no new info on this, perhaps they removed the fingerprinting for facial recognition...I know that CO was considering that.
Using a credit card typically requires a signature to match against the one on the card's back
Which is false security. The main defense against credit card fraud is people being able to cancel the card if its lost/stolen. The signature is semi-worthless...and you can fool people with photo ID cards in ways that are pretty damn scary.
The addition of the signature is somewhat new. But its interesting to note, credit card companies rather just absorb credit card fraud (which is on a decline, and the majority of which is online fraud, where no card is presented anyway) than pursue even holder's photos on the cards (which comes up every few years and then is abandoned. I've always maintained, incidentally, if you're gonna counterfeit a credit card, put your photo on it, fools em every time.) The main system of cancelling the card works, and works pretty well.
Carjacker + knife + need for your finger = not a pretty scene
Actually, while that is a worst case scenario, much more likely is someone dusting the car for the owner's thumbprint (after all...it seems impossible that the owner wouldn't have touched his own car) and then casting an image to fool the scanner (and then applying the cast to a current thumbprint, or just doing whatever it takes to mimic a thumbprint in the way the scanner requires.)
And they don't do a damn thing (I maintain that it makes things worse, because people believe it's useful when its not, thereby increasing fraud.) In no state are they even remotely forensic quality.
So you called the TV repairman and he would come out, open up the back of the set, see which tube wasn't working, and replace it.
As you pointed out, your dad fixed the TV. Most of the tube blowing issues could be fixed by the TV owner.
One need for the repairman was initial installation. Tuning was much more an art at that time period (hence the reason for test cards (UK)/test patterns (US)...the card allowed the repairman/installer to figure out if he got the tuning right.)
All of this explains a label found on many electronics (though less these days) that never made any sense to me.
No user-serviceable parts inside
It never made sense to me because the idea of someone opening up an electronics product and fixing it was absurd. But at another time in history it made more sense. My step-father has a 1970's Panasonic sound system and the no user serviceable parts label is gigantic...they were just coming off tubes.
Don't let them meet online people in real life except in a public place when you are present.
That's an outstanding rule. Peeps meet other peeps on the internet all the time, and, as you noted, it's normally a very safe thing to do. (As they get older, your presence may no longer be necessary...but always do it in public.)
My experience has been that teens who would not be allowed to meet someone off the net by their parents then end up sneaking around to do it...and that dramatically raises the chances it'll be done at a bad time of the day in a bad (private) place.
My parents were very laissez faire. I was allowed to meet a girl off the net when I was 14...that required me to fly to Maryland (flew in morning, left in evening, fares were really cheap then.)Girl was 13...her father picked us up...the three of us chilled.
Isn't this something that Slashdot should not be attempting to answer?
It's actually an interesting question, and a lot of the posts actually answered it in a very technical way, which seems to be a good fit for slashdot. The rest of the posts did of course discuss opinion's on parenting.
Slashdot is a great place to go if you happen to have children who are geeks. There are unique issues involved that parents may not be aware of.
Each child is different of course, and you'll just have to figure out what's best for yours. Slashdotters, when they were kids/teens, needed lots of freedom, could make sophisticated decisions at an early age, and had no problems taking on responsibility. They all resented encroachment. So you'll find lots of posts on here blasting parental interference in teenager's lives. On the other hand, there are lots of teens out there who do need much stronger direction than your average geek (and there are a good amount of posts advocating strong parenting, though, (and this is just my opinion, though I had very laissez faire parents) that they were just raised in a very strict environment, and because of that, believe it's the right thing to do (and of course, others strongly rebel from it.)
I don't disagree with you...but I have this to add:
a friend of mine (with two children...one of them 13) said to me that you have to parent a teenager assuming that they hate you with ever fiber of their body (which may or may not be true.)
With that in mind, you may have to adjust your parenting style accordingly. A very strict system can work with lots of respect, but honestly, if they hate you with every fiber of their body, a strict parenting style, as suggested in your post, may turn your home into a mini Israeli-Palestinian conflict (that, or as other posts have indicated, you would have rampant lying...which is often the case when authority is disrespected/hated. This is no different from a hated government or a detested boss.)
I know legally you are required to be 18 to look at porn
I admit I've never actually looked at the law...but I suspect this is not the case. It may be illegal to *supply* porn to someone under 18, but I don't believe that there is actually a law providing for punishment for someone under 18 looking at porn.
I also wonder if that may be affected by age of consent laws. In my Ohio, 16 is the legal age of consent...so a 16 year old could view a naked adult through the process of sex, so it would seem slightly irrational to then not allow them to see porn.
Admittedly, I can have sex with a 16 year old (thereby seeing them naked) but I can't view pictures of a 16 year old naked. So irrationality is just part and parcel of the system.
That, my friend, is the difference between a consenting adult and a minor child. Why is there an age of consent? It's because younger children and teens generally don't have the ability, breadth of experience, or perspective to assent to certain activities. This is why slime like NAMBLA are so fundamentally wrong. A child cannot consent to activities like they advocate, because they cannot adequately appreciate and understand the ramifications of those activities.
Keep in mind that there is technically an age of consent (set somewhere between 14-18, with an average of 16 in North America) and a more severe "sex with a child" line (usually set at less than 12, though sometimes less than 14.)
What you talked about was essentially the latter. The former is a bit trickier...and while people may defend various ages of consents (I personally am most comfortable with 15) the ages of consents are best compared to anti minor tattooing laws.
The law can't stop a minor from getting a tattoo. Nor could it very well stop a minor giving another minor a tattoo. But it could stop someone who is an adult from giving a minor a tattoo. That makes parents feel better, but doesn't necessarily protect the minor from anything in particular.
It can be said that ages of consent set above the 14-16 range are simply there to make parents feel better, and that the 17/18 ages of consent are designed to protect parents, not kids.
I find myself more and more irritated with the idea that, even if a system is approved, then I would still be forced to use it. Seems to me that's not in the best interests of democracy. If I went into the polls one day, saw the machines, I should be able to say "to hell with them...I'll just write my votes on a ballot and give it you people."
I say that one way to improve the system is to lobby state legislatures for the ability to opt-out from using the machines and cast a paper ballot. By always having that option available, security is under stronger examination, since the machines are in competition with paper.
It's been a few years now since I've interviewed for an IT job. Thank god for that.
My background was tech support. Nothing advanced, just lots of software/hardware tech support.
On several occasions a temp agency/IT firm would have me sit down in front of a computer and take a test designed on the computer.
In one instance, I was taking a basic test on how to function in Word. No problem. You were told to do a particular function, and finish it in a certain amount of steps.
The function could include, for instance, printing a document off in landscape form.
Well, one huge issue was that you couldn't use the shortcut keys. None of the shortcuts in this artificial testing environment were enabled. However, if you tried to use them out of habit, they counted against you. Worse, several functions they tested could have been done multiple ways. However, the testing environment had a correct answer that was one particular way (which I may have been familiar with, but didn't use.)
Needless to say, it was entirely possible to know MS Word well, but do poorly on the artificial test.
Another test was a Q+A on Win95. This test was given to me in 1999. It asked me a series of poorly worded questions with even worse answers.
It also asked several questions that would have been best for a test on debugging XT problems in 1985. It made me furious...and consequently I did poorly on the test, though I had an MC Specialist in Win95.
The tech company had no use for me. I wonder whom I should have complained to.
This is a side note...and perhaps I'm being a bit naive here, and that's possible since I love language and speak several of them......but half the shit I buy has both English and French on it (obviously intended to be sold all over North America.) Another 1/3rd of it adds Spanish as well.
Seems to me a particularly innovative individual could put together a book on how to teach yourself French simply by reading boxes of Tide detergent. At the very least, why isn't it that people are looking at the text, and then comparing. Such an easy way to learn new words it seems to me....
I'm fascinated by your argument...and I'll be spending several days thinking about it. The economist in me is amused.
For the most part, humans do think this way, but there is one area we don't: children. The loss of a child's life is amazingly tragic, whereas the loss of an adult's life is less so. This doesn't make much sense, in that the adult had more time on them, and more learning...consider a 30 year old has 30 years of investment for life, whereas a newborn does not, and a newborn is easily replicated using the old fashioned way, with a fairly small time investment.
Now, nobody will give me a refund on this opened DVD. The best I can do is exchange it for... the same DVD.
Fortunately there's ebay. An invention which has made it possible for people to redeem time for other forms of time much more effeciently than ever before.
Microwave power was a great way to provide good-level, affordable-cost power to the citizens of your city.
I ran my city entirely on nuclear with disasters off. However, in order to get unlimited funds, you can enter into the little code 3x and then you'll get an earthquake, which could cause the nuclear plants to explode.
So...I figured out the following
a.) pause city b.) remove power plants c.) get lots of cash d.) unpause city e.) wait for earthquakes f.) once earthquakes are over, rebuild power plants (and anything else destroyed)
Not a bad thing strictly speaking. Even if you have no religious beliefs at all, I would recommend checking out the book Abundance through Reiki. (Ignore the reviews if you've never heard of Reiki...the book really is about the concept of "abundance.")
I'm incidentally an Economics major, and am proud to consider myself a cold hearted, asshole economist.:-)
There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
There are of course proposals, some in action on private tollways, for congestion road pricing--which is what you propose in the later paragraphs.
Having said that, employers have much blame here...they insist on employing all their employees at the same time...forcing everyone on the roads at the same time. It depresses me to think that the roadsystems are designed for twice a day, not most of the time.
As for making "buying roadspace more expensive" that's been taking care of by the huge increase in cost for public right of way to build new roads/expand new roads. ROW is very expensive these days, and eminent domain a much slower process than it once was. The Ohio Turnpike was built on farmland in 24 months (230+ miles) and land was acquired pennies on the dollar, in comparison to land acquisition costs today (even for farmland, which the Ohio turnpike isn't on so much anymore.) There are certain traffic areas where roads can't be built simply because ROW is impossible to obtain.
I bet Finland gets even colder than most parts of USA does, yet diesel-cars are pretty common in here. Yes, we do plug them in to electrical sockets at night, but we do the same for gasoline-cars as well. People use diesel-cars jus t fine in here even when the temperature drops to about -40C.
Ahh yes, but in Finland it gets so cold that everyone plugs their cars in, no matter if its diesel or gasoline. So there is no advantage to having a gasoline car.
Here (and I'm from the great lakes area) people with diesel have to plug in, and those with gasoline don't (it's not that cold yet.) So plugs are not easy to find....
Over here in Europe, most of our "reasonably efficient" cars average 40 - 45MPG. At the moment, mine is averaging 49MPG.
That's because diesel is a lot more popular in Europe. Diesel cars are much more energy efficient than gasoline (and with today's technology, there is little performance compromise.) Indeed, diesel has some amazing torque qualities, which is why big trucks always run on them.
Only Volkswagen sells diesel vehicles in the US, and it's not that many. (I don't believe even Mercedes sells diesels in the US anymore.)
Indeed, we used to have a lot more diesels...but..
a.) Pollution control became more important to us much faster than it did in Europe. The technology to keep diesel emissions low are relatively new...by the time they came around, no one in California has had a diesel car for ten years.
b.) Much of the US gets colder than it does in Europe. The technological innovations to deal with cold weather also came a bit too late...people were tired of always needing to plug their diesel cars in to an electrical socket when they park so that the oil wouldn't freeze. That had a pretty negative effect on diesel for the northeast/great lakes (where large populations of Americans live.)
c.) By the time a.) and b.) were solved, we already gave up on diesels, and then it became even harder to find gas stations that sell diesel. (Though if you got some big gas stations nearby, you're usually fine. I know of several I can go to that have diesel.)
d.) American automakers have no particular reason to create diesel engines for US consumers unless they think they'll start buying em. Same for the Japanese. (who build different cars for europe) And the europeans don't think it's worth exporting them (since they are almost all premium brands that don't sell that many cars anyway) except for VW, who is the only automaker who sells enough diesels in the US to justify exporting them in.
But in contrast (from what I recall) 4/5 new cars sold in Europe are diesel.
Slashdot Mirror
I would much rather it go the other way -- singular conjugations could de-ambigouize the singular they.
A very sensible idea, but regrettably one which wouldn't work for English. The history of English is that it is running away from (verbal) inflections. If anything, I could see "they" becoming a very well accepted 3rd person singular pronoun, and then that causing the "-s" ending on 3rd person singular present tense verbs to start disappearing, so all the present tense, regular verbs would be the same. If this were Russian, a highly inflected language that Russians like to sit around all day re-inflecting, then perhaps your idea could work....
We still do have a healthy set of inflections for nouns from singular to plural (which are innovations stemming from somewhere else.)
box>>boxen (admittedly something from the computing world...but it's the one I can think of.)
It's about time this is fixed. Imagine if the government allowed TV to develop this way.
If you see the history of color television, you will find that the government attempted to mandate a standard that would have stranded lots of people into those who could see color programs, and those who could not. (The FCC chose the CBS color TV system, which was incompatible with the b+w we were using. They made the choice early enough and few people had TV's at that time anyway...but RCA sued, delaying the final decision, which was made about 1953 for the CBS system anyway. By that time, too many people had b+w televisions which wouldn't view programs on the CBS system (which had, I may add, two fucking spinning color disks.) Therefore the color TV standard was locked out of the market.
Eventually, the color system we adopted was the RCA system, and is now known as NTSC (and had the big advantage of being viewable on older b+w sets. Incidentally, this was not the case in PAL/SECAM countries, I think TV's there needed a converter...b+w programming on BBC1 was 425 lines, but color programming on BBC2 was 625 lines.) RCA owned NBC, so NBC started color programming very early on (as early as 1953.) However, CBS was still pissed off about losing the color TV war, even though they won FCC approval, so they wouldn't touch color, and ABC had no reason to produce color programming, since that would have just sold RCA sets anyway. In the mid 1960's, ABC started color programming, and that's when color TV took off.
I'm a driver's license privacy activist/specialist/expert. Right now, the big fight is/will be, in Jersey.
As a pollworker in Columbus (actually I work in Dublin, but it's still Franklin County) I can say with confidence that counting the 80-300 ballots (per precinct) would be just as labor intensive (and perhaps less so) than dealing with the Shouptronic machines (which have a fairly cumbersome closing down procedure, and are heavy as all hell.)
:-)
Municipal races are in odd years, state/federal in even (all over Ohio), so that keeps ballots from getting too big.
Columbus, OH where I live often has problems finding enough poll workers
a.) no need to add the "Ohio" tag. we're the biggest, so let people assume it
b.) the problem is slightly exaggerated
c.) well if you're not a poll worker already, go volunteer
I still got CO as a fingerprinting state. (Not that I'm disagreeing with your experience...I'm also trying to get to the bottom of it.)
d f/drvrbook-1.pdf
:-)
Page 3 of this doc (which is Part 1 of the driver's handbook) still mentions fingerprinting.
http://www.mv.state.co.us/formsp
It's also mentioned on the FAQ for CO licenses
http://www.mv.state.co.us/faqdrli.html
While I have no new info on this, perhaps they removed the fingerprinting for facial recognition...I know that CO was considering that.
Please check on it and get back with me
How much less credit card fraud would there be if you had to verify not by signiature, but by fingerprint?
Probably not a lot, since a good 80-90% of credit card fraud is online. (Mastercard statistic.)
Using a credit card typically requires a signature to match against the one on the card's back
Which is false security. The main defense against credit card fraud is people being able to cancel the card if its lost/stolen. The signature is semi-worthless...and you can fool people with photo ID cards in ways that are pretty damn scary.
The addition of the signature is somewhat new. But its interesting to note, credit card companies rather just absorb credit card fraud (which is on a decline, and the majority of which is online fraud, where no card is presented anyway) than pursue even holder's photos on the cards (which comes up every few years and then is abandoned. I've always maintained, incidentally, if you're gonna counterfeit a credit card, put your photo on it, fools em every time.) The main system of cancelling the card works, and works pretty well.
Carjacker + knife + need for your finger = not a pretty scene
Actually, while that is a worst case scenario, much more likely is someone dusting the car for the owner's thumbprint (after all...it seems impossible that the owner wouldn't have touched his own car) and then casting an image to fool the scanner (and then applying the cast to a current thumbprint, or just doing whatever it takes to mimic a thumbprint in the way the scanner requires.)
CA, TX, HI, GA, CO and it's optional in WV.
And they don't do a damn thing (I maintain that it makes things worse, because people believe it's useful when its not, thereby increasing fraud.) In no state are they even remotely forensic quality.
So you called the TV repairman and he would come out, open up the back of the set, see which tube wasn't working, and replace it.
As you pointed out, your dad fixed the TV. Most of the tube blowing issues could be fixed by the TV owner.
One need for the repairman was initial installation. Tuning was much more an art at that time period (hence the reason for test cards (UK)/test patterns (US)...the card allowed the repairman/installer to figure out if he got the tuning right.)
All of this explains a label found on many electronics (though less these days) that never made any sense to me.
No user-serviceable parts inside
It never made sense to me because the idea of someone opening up an electronics product and fixing it was absurd. But at another time in history it made more sense. My step-father has a 1970's Panasonic sound system and the no user serviceable parts label is gigantic...they were just coming off tubes.
Don't let them meet online people in real life except in a public place when you are present.
That's an outstanding rule. Peeps meet other peeps on the internet all the time, and, as you noted, it's normally a very safe thing to do. (As they get older, your presence may no longer be necessary...but always do it in public.)
My experience has been that teens who would not be allowed to meet someone off the net by their parents then end up sneaking around to do it...and that dramatically raises the chances it'll be done at a bad time of the day in a bad (private) place.
My parents were very laissez faire. I was allowed to meet a girl off the net when I was 14...that required me to fly to Maryland (flew in morning, left in evening, fares were really cheap then.)Girl was 13...her father picked us up...the three of us chilled.
Isn't this something that Slashdot should not be attempting to answer?
It's actually an interesting question, and a lot of the posts actually answered it in a very technical way, which seems to be a good fit for slashdot. The rest of the posts did of course discuss opinion's on parenting.
Slashdot is a great place to go if you happen to have children who are geeks. There are unique issues involved that parents may not be aware of.
Each child is different of course, and you'll just have to figure out what's best for yours. Slashdotters, when they were kids/teens, needed lots of freedom, could make sophisticated decisions at an early age, and had no problems taking on responsibility. They all resented encroachment. So you'll find lots of posts on here blasting parental interference in teenager's lives. On the other hand, there are lots of teens out there who do need much stronger direction than your average geek (and there are a good amount of posts advocating strong parenting, though, (and this is just my opinion, though I had very laissez faire parents) that they were just raised in a very strict environment, and because of that, believe it's the right thing to do (and of course, others strongly rebel from it.)
It's that simple. You must let the child know.
1. I run shit around here!
I don't disagree with you...but I have this to add:
a friend of mine (with two children...one of them 13) said to me that you have to parent a teenager assuming that they hate you with ever fiber of their body (which may or may not be true.)
With that in mind, you may have to adjust your parenting style accordingly. A very strict system can work with lots of respect, but honestly, if they hate you with every fiber of their body, a strict parenting style, as suggested in your post, may turn your home into a mini Israeli-Palestinian conflict (that, or as other posts have indicated, you would have rampant lying...which is often the case when authority is disrespected/hated. This is no different from a hated government or a detested boss.)
I know legally you are required to be 18 to look at porn
I admit I've never actually looked at the law...but I suspect this is not the case. It may be illegal to *supply* porn to someone under 18, but I don't believe that there is actually a law providing for punishment for someone under 18 looking at porn.
I also wonder if that may be affected by age of consent laws. In my Ohio, 16 is the legal age of consent...so a 16 year old could view a naked adult through the process of sex, so it would seem slightly irrational to then not allow them to see porn.
Admittedly, I can have sex with a 16 year old (thereby seeing them naked) but I can't view pictures of a 16 year old naked. So irrationality is just part and parcel of the system.
That, my friend, is the difference between a consenting adult and a minor child. Why is there an age of consent? It's because younger children and teens generally don't have the ability, breadth of experience, or perspective to assent to certain activities. This is why slime like NAMBLA are so fundamentally wrong. A child cannot consent to activities like they advocate, because they cannot adequately appreciate and understand the ramifications of those activities.
Keep in mind that there is technically an age of consent (set somewhere between 14-18, with an average of 16 in North America) and a more severe "sex with a child" line (usually set at less than 12, though sometimes less than 14.)
What you talked about was essentially the latter. The former is a bit trickier...and while people may defend various ages of consents (I personally am most comfortable with 15) the ages of consents are best compared to anti minor tattooing laws.
The law can't stop a minor from getting a tattoo. Nor could it very well stop a minor giving another minor a tattoo. But it could stop someone who is an adult from giving a minor a tattoo. That makes parents feel better, but doesn't necessarily protect the minor from anything in particular.
It can be said that ages of consent set above the 14-16 range are simply there to make parents feel better, and that the 17/18 ages of consent are designed to protect parents, not kids.
Disclosure: I'm a precinct poll-worker.
I find myself more and more irritated with the idea that, even if a system is approved, then I would still be forced to use it. Seems to me that's not in the best interests of democracy. If I went into the polls one day, saw the machines, I should be able to say "to hell with them...I'll just write my votes on a ballot and give it you people."
I say that one way to improve the system is to lobby state legislatures for the ability to opt-out from using the machines and cast a paper ballot. By always having that option available, security is under stronger examination, since the machines are in competition with paper.
It's been a few years now since I've interviewed for an IT job. Thank god for that.
My background was tech support. Nothing advanced, just lots of software/hardware tech support.
On several occasions a temp agency/IT firm would have me sit down in front of a computer and take a test designed on the computer.
In one instance, I was taking a basic test on how to function in Word. No problem. You were told to do a particular function, and finish it in a certain amount of steps.
The function could include, for instance, printing a document off in landscape form.
Well, one huge issue was that you couldn't use the shortcut keys. None of the shortcuts in this artificial testing environment were enabled. However, if you tried to use them out of habit, they counted against you. Worse, several functions they tested could have been done multiple ways. However, the testing environment had a correct answer that was one particular way (which I may have been familiar with, but didn't use.)
Needless to say, it was entirely possible to know MS Word well, but do poorly on the artificial test.
Another test was a Q+A on Win95. This test was given to me in 1999. It asked me a series of poorly worded questions with even worse answers.
It also asked several questions that would have been best for a test on debugging XT problems in 1985. It made me furious...and consequently I did poorly on the test, though I had an MC Specialist in Win95.
The tech company had no use for me. I wonder whom I should have complained to.
Fortunately, I'm out of that industry.
This is a side note...and perhaps I'm being a bit naive here, and that's possible since I love language and speak several of them... ...but half the shit I buy has both English and French on it (obviously intended to be sold all over North America.) Another 1/3rd of it adds Spanish as well.
Seems to me a particularly innovative individual could put together a book on how to teach yourself French simply by reading boxes of Tide detergent. At the very least, why isn't it that people are looking at the text, and then comparing. Such an easy way to learn new words it seems to me....
I'm fascinated by your argument...and I'll be spending several days thinking about it. The economist in me is amused.
... the same DVD.
For the most part, humans do think this way, but there is one area we don't: children. The loss of a child's life is amazingly tragic, whereas the loss of an adult's life is less so. This doesn't make much sense, in that the adult had more time on them, and more learning...consider a 30 year old has 30 years of investment for life, whereas a newborn does not, and a newborn is easily replicated using the old fashioned way, with a fairly small time investment.
Now, nobody will give me a refund on this opened DVD. The best I can do is exchange it for
Fortunately there's ebay. An invention which has made it possible for people to redeem time for other forms of time much more effeciently than ever before.
Microwave power was a great way to provide good-level, affordable-cost power to the citizens of your city.
I ran my city entirely on nuclear with disasters off. However, in order to get unlimited funds, you can enter into the little code 3x and then you'll get an earthquake, which could cause the nuclear plants to explode.
So...I figured out the following
a.) pause city
b.) remove power plants
c.) get lots of cash
d.) unpause city
e.) wait for earthquakes
f.) once earthquakes are over, rebuild power plants (and anything else destroyed)
Not a bad thing strictly speaking. Even if you have no religious beliefs at all, I would recommend checking out the book Abundance through Reiki. (Ignore the reviews if you've never heard of Reiki...the book really is about the concept of "abundance.")
:-)
I'm incidentally an Economics major, and am proud to consider myself a cold hearted, asshole economist.
what's the one called for studying abundance?
Religion.
(or, perhaps more accurately--Faith.)
There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
There are of course proposals, some in action on private tollways, for congestion road pricing--which is what you propose in the later paragraphs.
Having said that, employers have much blame here...they insist on employing all their employees at the same time...forcing everyone on the roads at the same time. It depresses me to think that the roadsystems are designed for twice a day, not most of the time.
As for making "buying roadspace more expensive" that's been taking care of by the huge increase in cost for public right of way to build new roads/expand new roads. ROW is very expensive these days, and eminent domain a much slower process than it once was. The Ohio Turnpike was built on farmland in 24 months (230+ miles) and land was acquired pennies on the dollar, in comparison to land acquisition costs today (even for farmland, which the Ohio turnpike isn't on so much anymore.) There are certain traffic areas where roads can't be built simply because ROW is impossible to obtain.
I bet Finland gets even colder than most parts of USA does, yet diesel-cars are pretty common in here. Yes, we do plug them in to electrical sockets at night, but we do the same for gasoline-cars as well. People use diesel-cars jus t fine in here even when the temperature drops to about -40C.
Ahh yes, but in Finland it gets so cold that everyone plugs their cars in, no matter if its diesel or gasoline. So there is no advantage to having a gasoline car.
Here (and I'm from the great lakes area) people with diesel have to plug in, and those with gasoline don't (it's not that cold yet.) So plugs are not easy to find....
Over here in Europe, most of our "reasonably efficient" cars average 40 - 45MPG. At the moment, mine is averaging 49MPG.
That's because diesel is a lot more popular in Europe. Diesel cars are much more energy efficient than gasoline (and with today's technology, there is little performance compromise.) Indeed, diesel has some amazing torque qualities, which is why big trucks always run on them.
Only Volkswagen sells diesel vehicles in the US, and it's not that many. (I don't believe even Mercedes sells diesels in the US anymore.)
Indeed, we used to have a lot more diesels...but..
a.) Pollution control became more important to us much faster than it did in Europe. The technology to keep diesel emissions low are relatively new...by the time they came around, no one in California has had a diesel car for ten years.
b.) Much of the US gets colder than it does in Europe. The technological innovations to deal with cold weather also came a bit too late...people were tired of always needing to plug their diesel cars in to an electrical socket when they park so that the oil wouldn't freeze. That had a pretty negative effect on diesel for the northeast/great lakes (where large populations of Americans live.)
c.) By the time a.) and b.) were solved, we already gave up on diesels, and then it became even harder to find gas stations that sell diesel. (Though if you got some big gas stations nearby, you're usually fine. I know of several I can go to that have diesel.)
d.) American automakers have no particular reason to create diesel engines for US consumers unless they think they'll start buying em. Same for the Japanese. (who build different cars for europe) And the europeans don't think it's worth exporting them (since they are almost all premium brands that don't sell that many cars anyway) except for VW, who is the only automaker who sells enough diesels in the US to justify exporting them in.
But in contrast (from what I recall) 4/5 new cars sold in Europe are diesel.