At the time your nation was founded, keeping people as slaves was just fine. Do you want to go back to that too?
Bullshit. To most Americans, slavery was an evil legacy of European colonialism, feudalism, and imperialism, the very reason they left Europe in the first place.
But Americans knew that if they tried to gain independence and at the same time end slavery, they'd accomplish neither. So, what they did instead was ban the importation of slaves and leave abolition of slavery as a political issue to the new nation. That was a decision born out of pragmatism, not ignorance.
or are you going to allow science and knowledge to take hold and make changes in our policy?
Some of the worst regimes in human history were based on "science and knowledge". Policies should be made by elected politicians, and I prefer them not to be scientists or engineers, and to be highly skeptical of scientific claims.
I also think there are very few issues in government or politics where science should even matter; which legitimate government policies do you think should actually involve science?
The main area where science comes into play is in the legal system, and judges and lawyers already are well versed in using scientific information.
Functionally, C++ compilers are great: type inference, templates, high efficiency, large scale compilations. C++11 fixes some problems. But the language has become hugely bloated, and the way new features are getting added is baroque. As for STL, few people seem to be using more than a small subset of it, and it's pretty much the same subset for everybody. Other things are still not getting fixed, like the use of include files.
C++ needs a major house cleaning. The language could do what some other languages did and support "old" and "new" syntax, sharing the same backend and generating compatible code. But the current incremental modifications to the language will just doom it in the long term.
(The "D" language actually appears to be such a "reboot" of C++, but I haven't used it enough to know whether it could really serve this function.)
The article you link to doesn't describe a "new tax". When legislatures mandated net metering, they arguably imposed new costs on electric grids and companies, and this fee is supposed to compensate for it. It's not a tax because it goes to the utility, and it's part of regulations that otherwise constrain utilities.
Home solar generation provides neither the 24/7 capacity nor the grid that these people rely on, yet they can get their bill all the way to zero if they install enough panels. People who have the land and resources to install solar are so well off that people who don't have the money shouldn't also subsidize the rest of the infrastructure that they rely on like everybody else.
Oh really? Which problem are you saying is common? Having 20 toxic chemicals found in your body?... "My doctor, an internal specialist, found 20 chemicals in my body"
Actually, she said her doctor found "20 chemicals", not "20 toxic chemicals". But be that as it may, we all are full of toxic chemicals, viruses, bacteria, parasites, mutations, necrotic tissue, and other icky and potentially deadly stuff. It's what we have livers, kidneys, and an immune system for, and on average, we survive this for about 80 years. Welcome to your human body.
My central nervous system was messed up. I couldn't hear, and my vision was messed up. My entire body would shake inside. I was vomiting white foam in the mornings.
My guess is she has a combination of hysteria and hyperbole, unpleasant to be sure, but they are caused by lawyers and ignorance, not oil and gas.
They had nosebleeds, vision problems, nausea, rashes, blood pressure issues.
I've had most of those over the last year, and I'm completely healthy. That means she's a human being. If she didn't get any of those, she should be worried, because it would mean she's either a Stepford wife or a space alien.
If TFA describes it correctly, there is not a shred of evidence that their ailments are related to fracking. They have common health problems and simply ascribe them to some cause that seems plausible to them and that lets them sue and blame someone else.
Having said that, I don't believe companies should be drilling for oil within a few hundred feet of existing residential areas, simply because they will get sued for noise, smell, and other nuisances.
The SCADA systems are hundreds of thousands of different platforms/version combinations. Many of them aren't even connected to the Internet, many are based on firmware. Most are easy to secure and restore if they get corrupted/attacked.
"Cyberwarfare" really is a misnomer. In regular warfare, bombs and guns don't have compatibility problems, you permanently destroy infrastructure or occupy it, and you kill people trying to restore it; in "cyberwarfare", the attacks only work against compatible hardware/software, you (usually only) temporarily disable infrastructure, and you have no physical control over it or ways to harm the people restoring it.
"Cyberwarfare" is a tempest in a teapot. It's an attempt by people to get massive amounts of funding for useless programs. The idea that "cyberwarfare" is analogous to warfare is ludicrous.
Maybe in Hollywood, not in the real world. In the real world, you get a nice crater and not much else. The fallout may increase cancer deaths a little over the next half century, that's it.
Too dumb to read? OECD average for science is 501, United States is 497. That makes the US "about average" even if you erroneously use PISA for the comparison, don't understand demographics, think that "Shanghai" and "Macao" are countries, and believe that PISA members represent "the industrialized world".
Very few of the "scientists" opining about climate change have that as their specialty. And even bona fide climate scientists often talk about areas they know next to nothing about (e.g., climatologists talking about statistics).
In most cases, "consensus" means that a couple of people did an experiment, a few more people were on a couple of papers, and the rest of the community just thinks the results are plausible but has no independent evidence to support them.
The US is in the grip of Corporate America, and its people are paying for it.
Quite right.
The best that could be done under the circumstances is the flawed legislation President Obama managed to force past the utterly-recalcitrant Republican Party
No. Obama's health care act is a gigantic handout to the insurance industry. Mind you, the Republicans are also in bed with corporate American, but Obama has really taken this to new heights.
The only fleecing going on is perpetrated upon slack-jawed, pig-ignorant conservatives by their intellectual superiors
Yes, totally agreed: the high-IQ Obama and his high-IQ political and corporate buddies are ripping off the country. They don't call that kind of governing class the "intelligentsia" for nothing.
Those of us who live in civilized countries
If Europe or Canada are "civilized", I prefer not to be civilized, thank you very much.
The reason mixing bleach and ammonia is bad is because it produces large amounts of chloramine as gas, which is harmful. In the bleach, the chlorine is bound in a liquid and hence you'd have to drink it in order to hurt yourself.
Yes, and upper middle class at that. "Stick it to the upper middle class, but protect the rich and powerful" ought the be the rallying cry of socialists and fascists everywhere, because that's what you people do.
All the super-rich crooks were actually still living it up in England, their own property safely protected from democracy through the House of Lords. And the British voter himself? He generally approved of and participating in the raping and pillaging of the world as part of British imperialism and colonialism.
That was Madison's view, expressed in one of his speeches. Where is that view represented in the modern US Constitution? The US ended up protecting property rights by other means than restricting voting to land owners.
The comparison with England makes little sense, because England simply gave wealthy land owners power through non-democratic means until the 20th century. More classes could vote, but it didn't make any difference.
You seem to think that a society or a "democracy" should allow the majority to take away property from a wealthier minority. Sorry, that's not a democracy, that's mob rule; it's not even a question of justice, it just does not work.
What kind of idiot fails to understand that all those nasty government regulations came about because people were getting fleeced left right and centre by quacks, confidence men, grifters, Republicans and other thieves.?
Quite right, that's why they came about. And now, instead of just a small number of stupid people getting fleeced because they believed some snake oil salesman, the entire nation gets fleeced, and it gets fleeced by many of the same companies. And the irony is: the regulations don't even work. That's what Democrats do: they make getting fleeced by corporations mandatory.
Yeah, face the real world: in the real world, we have things like books and libraries. They are full of ways describing how to build things you can use to hurt yourself. If you build those things and hurt yourself, it's your problem.
George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms." Phillips says that it wasn't until the 1790' s - a generation after the War of Independence - that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today's dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.
The power of Google and Facebook derives from people using them, clicking on their ads, buying their products, and buying their shares. You don't like what they do? Use a different company. If enough people feel that way, they will disappear.
Since you failed to grasp why Americans resist federal power so much, I gave you an analogy: originally, it was intended like the relationship between the EU member states and the EU, mostly a free trade zone with independent local control.
In response, you write:
There is a fundamental difference between how the UK relates to the EU and how US states relate to the US government: The UK issues it's own currency.
And what do you know, even if that mattered, for about a century, individual states did issue their own currency. Of course, it doesn't even matter, since the fact that the UK doesn't have the Euro isn't the result of great autonomy, it's a specific exemption.
Now you write:
while not understanding the significance of a constitution being written "by land owners for land owners" while the common modern interpretation is that it is "by the people for the people".
I clearly understand that there are stupid, uneducated people see a contradiction there. I don't see a contradiction. Constitutions are written by all sorts of groups; you have to evaluate them on their merits. So, what unfair bias or problem or rent seeking do you see in the US Constitution for land owners? I see none. If you accuse the Founders of nefarious purposes, be clear what you accuse them of and show evidence of their misdeeds.
Furthermore, the majority of Americans are land owners (we call them "home owners these days), and although the US Constitution doesn't favor land owners, federal, state, and local laws enacted by modern "we the people" most certainly do, because home owners are a powerful voting bloc and actually in the majority. Even in the UK, by the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. To most Americans, slavery was an evil legacy of European colonialism, feudalism, and imperialism, the very reason they left Europe in the first place.
But Americans knew that if they tried to gain independence and at the same time end slavery, they'd accomplish neither. So, what they did instead was ban the importation of slaves and leave abolition of slavery as a political issue to the new nation. That was a decision born out of pragmatism, not ignorance.
Some of the worst regimes in human history were based on "science and knowledge". Policies should be made by elected politicians, and I prefer them not to be scientists or engineers, and to be highly skeptical of scientific claims.
I also think there are very few issues in government or politics where science should even matter; which legitimate government policies do you think should actually involve science?
The main area where science comes into play is in the legal system, and judges and lawyers already are well versed in using scientific information.
Functionally, C++ compilers are great: type inference, templates, high efficiency, large scale compilations. C++11 fixes some problems. But the language has become hugely bloated, and the way new features are getting added is baroque. As for STL, few people seem to be using more than a small subset of it, and it's pretty much the same subset for everybody. Other things are still not getting fixed, like the use of include files.
C++ needs a major house cleaning. The language could do what some other languages did and support "old" and "new" syntax, sharing the same backend and generating compatible code. But the current incremental modifications to the language will just doom it in the long term.
(The "D" language actually appears to be such a "reboot" of C++, but I haven't used it enough to know whether it could really serve this function.)
The article you link to doesn't describe a "new tax". When legislatures mandated net metering, they arguably imposed new costs on electric grids and companies, and this fee is supposed to compensate for it. It's not a tax because it goes to the utility, and it's part of regulations that otherwise constrain utilities.
Home solar generation provides neither the 24/7 capacity nor the grid that these people rely on, yet they can get their bill all the way to zero if they install enough panels. People who have the land and resources to install solar are so well off that people who don't have the money shouldn't also subsidize the rest of the infrastructure that they rely on like everybody else.
I discounted that as a lie. The only way that happens is if you drink detergent; it certainly is not caused by anything related to fracking.
Actually, she said her doctor found "20 chemicals", not "20 toxic chemicals". But be that as it may, we all are full of toxic chemicals, viruses, bacteria, parasites, mutations, necrotic tissue, and other icky and potentially deadly stuff. It's what we have livers, kidneys, and an immune system for, and on average, we survive this for about 80 years. Welcome to your human body.
My guess is she has a combination of hysteria and hyperbole, unpleasant to be sure, but they are caused by lawyers and ignorance, not oil and gas.
I've had most of those over the last year, and I'm completely healthy. That means she's a human being. If she didn't get any of those, she should be worried, because it would mean she's either a Stepford wife or a space alien.
If TFA describes it correctly, there is not a shred of evidence that their ailments are related to fracking. They have common health problems and simply ascribe them to some cause that seems plausible to them and that lets them sue and blame someone else.
Having said that, I don't believe companies should be drilling for oil within a few hundred feet of existing residential areas, simply because they will get sued for noise, smell, and other nuisances.
The SCADA systems are hundreds of thousands of different platforms/version combinations. Many of them aren't even connected to the Internet, many are based on firmware. Most are easy to secure and restore if they get corrupted/attacked.
"Cyberwarfare" really is a misnomer. In regular warfare, bombs and guns don't have compatibility problems, you permanently destroy infrastructure or occupy it, and you kill people trying to restore it; in "cyberwarfare", the attacks only work against compatible hardware/software, you (usually only) temporarily disable infrastructure, and you have no physical control over it or ways to harm the people restoring it.
"Cyberwarfare" is a tempest in a teapot. It's an attempt by people to get massive amounts of funding for useless programs. The idea that "cyberwarfare" is analogous to warfare is ludicrous.
I can't tell whether you're being serious or sarcastic.
Instead of global thermonuclear war, we now have to worry about WoW going down. Seems like a good tradeoff to me.
Maybe in Hollywood, not in the real world. In the real world, you get a nice crater and not much else. The fallout may increase cancer deaths a little over the next half century, that's it.
I'm so tired of this stupid negativity. Hunger, poverty, wars, and violence are at an all time low in human history. Technology is flourishing.
Yes, we will "get off this dirtball" despite spoiled brats like you constantly whining and complaining.
Too dumb to read? OECD average for science is 501, United States is 497. That makes the US "about average" even if you erroneously use PISA for the comparison, don't understand demographics, think that "Shanghai" and "Macao" are countries, and believe that PISA members represent "the industrialized world".
Very few of the "scientists" opining about climate change have that as their specialty. And even bona fide climate scientists often talk about areas they know next to nothing about (e.g., climatologists talking about statistics).
In most cases, "consensus" means that a couple of people did an experiment, a few more people were on a couple of papers, and the rest of the community just thinks the results are plausible but has no independent evidence to support them.
Utter bullshit. At the secondary level, US science education is about average, and post-secondary, it is second to none.
Perhaps the real problem is that we are trying to impose a "system of education" at all, instead of letting people make their own choices.
Quite right.
No. Obama's health care act is a gigantic handout to the insurance industry. Mind you, the Republicans are also in bed with corporate American, but Obama has really taken this to new heights.
Yes, totally agreed: the high-IQ Obama and his high-IQ political and corporate buddies are ripping off the country. They don't call that kind of governing class the "intelligentsia" for nothing.
If Europe or Canada are "civilized", I prefer not to be civilized, thank you very much.
Yes, that's a common process.
The reason mixing bleach and ammonia is bad is because it produces large amounts of chloramine as gas, which is harmful. In the bleach, the chlorine is bound in a liquid and hence you'd have to drink it in order to hurt yourself.
Yes, and upper middle class at that. "Stick it to the upper middle class, but protect the rich and powerful" ought the be the rallying cry of socialists and fascists everywhere, because that's what you people do.
All the super-rich crooks were actually still living it up in England, their own property safely protected from democracy through the House of Lords. And the British voter himself? He generally approved of and participating in the raping and pillaging of the world as part of British imperialism and colonialism.
That was Madison's view, expressed in one of his speeches. Where is that view represented in the modern US Constitution? The US ended up protecting property rights by other means than restricting voting to land owners.
The comparison with England makes little sense, because England simply gave wealthy land owners power through non-democratic means until the 20th century. More classes could vote, but it didn't make any difference.
You seem to think that a society or a "democracy" should allow the majority to take away property from a wealthier minority. Sorry, that's not a democracy, that's mob rule; it's not even a question of justice, it just does not work.
Quite right, that's why they came about. And now, instead of just a small number of stupid people getting fleeced because they believed some snake oil salesman, the entire nation gets fleeced, and it gets fleeced by many of the same companies. And the irony is: the regulations don't even work. That's what Democrats do: they make getting fleeced by corporations mandatory.
Yeah, face the real world: in the real world, we have things like books and libraries. They are full of ways describing how to build things you can use to hurt yourself. If you build those things and hurt yourself, it's your problem.
"Sunk costs"... you're not using it right. Perhaps you mean "hidden costs" or "unaccounted for costs".
FYI:
Kevin Philips, Wealth and Democracy
The power of Google and Facebook derives from people using them, clicking on their ads, buying their products, and buying their shares. You don't like what they do? Use a different company. If enough people feel that way, they will disappear.
Since you failed to grasp why Americans resist federal power so much, I gave you an analogy: originally, it was intended like the relationship between the EU member states and the EU, mostly a free trade zone with independent local control.
In response, you write:
And what do you know, even if that mattered, for about a century, individual states did issue their own currency. Of course, it doesn't even matter, since the fact that the UK doesn't have the Euro isn't the result of great autonomy, it's a specific exemption.
Now you write :
I clearly understand that there are stupid, uneducated people see a contradiction there. I don't see a contradiction. Constitutions are written by all sorts of groups; you have to evaluate them on their merits. So, what unfair bias or problem or rent seeking do you see in the US Constitution for land owners? I see none. If you accuse the Founders of nefarious purposes, be clear what you accuse them of and show evidence of their misdeeds.
Furthermore, the majority of Americans are land owners (we call them "home owners these days), and although the US Constitution doesn't favor land owners, federal, state, and local laws enacted by modern "we the people" most certainly do, because home owners are a powerful voting bloc and actually in the majority. Even in the UK, by the way.