Those truly in power in the US are not elected. Whether a Democrat or a Republican is in office, the true power is held by the ultra rich. No party that threatens the rich can ever attain power in the US.
The "ultra rich" wield a lot more power and influence than your average Joe, but they don't hold "the true power" either; there are simply too many of them with too many conflicting ideologies and wishes. Even the "ultra rich" are a broad mix of liberals, conservatives, Christians, and libertarians, and most of these people don't even care that much about money anymore and mess with our politics in the (misguided) belief that they are doing some good.
That's because authority in the US is so powerfully entrenched that no amount of satire can hope to damage it. If someone makes fun of the party in power, what are people going to do? Vote for the other party?
If the party in power screws up, vote for the other party. And do that until the other party cleans up its act. That's how our democracy works, and it actually has been doing fairly well keeping both parties in line with mainstream preferences.
Yes, it's not pretty, but parties and politicians are moving in response to popular will. The GOP has shifted significantly on gay marriage over the last few years, and the fact that Chris Christie is worried about the "libertarian wing" of the Republican party suggests that there is movement there as well.
In Europe, you have new parties popping up all the time whenever something seems to call for it; in the US, you have a slow drift of the two existing parties in response to popular will. In the US, political problems often take a decade or more to address at the federal level. And that used to be perfectly fine when much more was decided at the state and local level.
I still think the best way of dealing with many of these issues is to return much more power from the federal government to the states. That won't solve NSA spying, of course, but maybe with less on their hands to do, federal legislators can actually start worrying again about those things they have been elected to worry about.
I use Emacs and R a lot, but I don't think this makes my life easier in its current form. The Ubuntu and Debian packages aren't that much out of date. And mixing Ubuntu and application packages frequently causes problems.
Mind you, I'm not complaining that people are investing time in this. But OS and application packagers need to sit down together and figure out how to make these application-specific package management systems and OS package management systems work together better.
This would have been great 20 years ago. But these days, I can just apt-get install Emacs packages. Of course, on some other platforms, this may still be useful, but on Linux systems with built-in package management, these extra application specific package management systems can cause version conflicts and are best avoided.
There will be many bankruptcies. There will also be many municipalities and states that have avoided these problems. And you have control over it: leave the places that made bad choices and move to the places that made good choices.
NASA is trying to rationalize its existence. Most of the public isn't interested in progress in science, but the promise of money makes us drool.
I'm very interested in progress in science. That's why I'm not sure I support NASA. After decades of wasting money on the shuttle program and joy rides for military pilots, they don't seem to be a good steward of science.
NASA should send out tons of probes and satellites. They shouldn't be in the business of manned space flight or asteroid mining; leave those to commercial enterprises.
I don't think that's such a big problem: you can still have large numbers of small processors that are extremely fast on local data but take a bit more to communicate with each other. There have been plenty of parallel machines like that already. Think Beowulf cluster, just on a much smaller scale.
Every release, the folks at Google decide that some other capability needs to be restricted, and some useful utility breaks. In 4.2, you don't seem to be able to enable airplane mode from third party widgets anymore, for example. Google really needs to introduce a class of trusted privileged applications that can do stuff like that. If Google doesn't do anything about this, I'm going to switch to something else because it is getting really frustrating and annoying.
That is a blog post from 2010 and the actual data is even older. Hence, you just supported my statement "The economy and fiscal situation of California have greatly changed."
I actually have the original citation. Try tracking it down yourself, reading it and understanding it; maybe you'll stop making such a fool of yourself.
LaTeX is quite simple for people to learn. In fact, in my experience, many people find it easier than learning some app because all they really need is a cheat sheet listing the commands. Looking at FidusWriter, it doesn't seem easier to me than Writelatex.
You're citing old numbers, and even those numbers have been in dispute. The economy and fiscal situation of California have greatly changed.
Furthermore, what "Red states" do is irrelevant to this discussion. This isn't a Democrat vs Republican issue. And even 78 cents on the dollar would be too high.
It is your tax dollars, since no matter where you are in the US, you will be bailing out that failing state. And California shows no signs of returning to fiscal sanity either.
Apparently, you can't even understand a simple sentence. I didn't say that it was useless to use artistic works as the basis of further reflection or creation. I said that if an author puts content into a work that takes others decades to decode, then the author did something wrong.
Shakespeare, Clarke, and Kubrick were competent artists, and you can be sure that any meaning they intended you to find in their work, they have made pretty clear. Any meaning that takes you decades to discover is not meaning they put in, it's something you created on your own.
Any symbolic or allegorical content that requires decades to decode is of no interest or relevance to anyone. If that was the intent of the work, it has failed. When all is said and done, 2001 is a generally well-made (for the time) and entertaining SciFi that has some significant plot holes and problems.
There are other examples as well. The idea that we know a complete list of ways in which physical or chemical agents can cause cancer is simply unscientific bullshit.
employers want to bring more people in. If we didn't, people in the STEM fields could demand more money.
No, they couldn't. The jobs would simply get outsourced directly.
The reasonable policy is to make immigration itself a lot easier; that is, largely replace H1B with immediate greencards for skilled immigrants. That way, the people we bring in would be in a better negotiating position and would actually be able to contribute more to society right away.
Slashdot Mirror
The "ultra rich" wield a lot more power and influence than your average Joe, but they don't hold "the true power" either; there are simply too many of them with too many conflicting ideologies and wishes. Even the "ultra rich" are a broad mix of liberals, conservatives, Christians, and libertarians, and most of these people don't even care that much about money anymore and mess with our politics in the (misguided) belief that they are doing some good.
If the party in power screws up, vote for the other party. And do that until the other party cleans up its act. That's how our democracy works, and it actually has been doing fairly well keeping both parties in line with mainstream preferences.
Yes, it's not pretty, but parties and politicians are moving in response to popular will. The GOP has shifted significantly on gay marriage over the last few years, and the fact that Chris Christie is worried about the "libertarian wing" of the Republican party suggests that there is movement there as well.
In Europe, you have new parties popping up all the time whenever something seems to call for it; in the US, you have a slow drift of the two existing parties in response to popular will. In the US, political problems often take a decade or more to address at the federal level. And that used to be perfectly fine when much more was decided at the state and local level.
I still think the best way of dealing with many of these issues is to return much more power from the federal government to the states. That won't solve NSA spying, of course, but maybe with less on their hands to do, federal legislators can actually start worrying again about those things they have been elected to worry about.
I use Emacs and R a lot, but I don't think this makes my life easier in its current form. The Ubuntu and Debian packages aren't that much out of date. And mixing Ubuntu and application packages frequently causes problems.
Mind you, I'm not complaining that people are investing time in this. But OS and application packagers need to sit down together and figure out how to make these application-specific package management systems and OS package management systems work together better.
This would have been great 20 years ago. But these days, I can just apt-get install Emacs packages. Of course, on some other platforms, this may still be useful, but on Linux systems with built-in package management, these extra application specific package management systems can cause version conflicts and are best avoided.
There will be many bankruptcies. There will also be many municipalities and states that have avoided these problems. And you have control over it: leave the places that made bad choices and move to the places that made good choices.
I'm very interested in progress in science. That's why I'm not sure I support NASA. After decades of wasting money on the shuttle program and joy rides for military pilots, they don't seem to be a good steward of science.
NASA should send out tons of probes and satellites. They shouldn't be in the business of manned space flight or asteroid mining; leave those to commercial enterprises.
And machines can't have souls because... ?
I don't think that's such a big problem: you can still have large numbers of small processors that are extremely fast on local data but take a bit more to communicate with each other. There have been plenty of parallel machines like that already. Think Beowulf cluster, just on a much smaller scale.
Every release, the folks at Google decide that some other capability needs to be restricted, and some useful utility breaks. In 4.2, you don't seem to be able to enable airplane mode from third party widgets anymore, for example. Google really needs to introduce a class of trusted privileged applications that can do stuff like that. If Google doesn't do anything about this, I'm going to switch to something else because it is getting really frustrating and annoying.
That is a blog post from 2010 and the actual data is even older. Hence, you just supported my statement "The economy and fiscal situation of California have greatly changed."
I actually have the original citation. Try tracking it down yourself, reading it and understanding it; maybe you'll stop making such a fool of yourself.
Yes, indeed, you needed to provide a citation.
LaTeX is quite simple for people to learn. In fact, in my experience, many people find it easier than learning some app because all they really need is a cheat sheet listing the commands. Looking at FidusWriter, it doesn't seem easier to me than Writelatex.
You're citing old numbers, and even those numbers have been in dispute. The economy and fiscal situation of California have greatly changed.
Furthermore, what "Red states" do is irrelevant to this discussion. This isn't a Democrat vs Republican issue. And even 78 cents on the dollar would be too high.
It's already getting bailed out, at the same time getting spared the embarrassment of having it called that.
True, but decoding Shakespeare or 2001 doesn't mean that everbody decodes it quickly, it means that some people decode it quickly.
It is your tax dollars, since no matter where you are in the US, you will be bailing out that failing state. And California shows no signs of returning to fiscal sanity either.
Apparently, you can't even understand a simple sentence. I didn't say that it was useless to use artistic works as the basis of further reflection or creation. I said that if an author puts content into a work that takes others decades to decode, then the author did something wrong.
Shakespeare, Clarke, and Kubrick were competent artists, and you can be sure that any meaning they intended you to find in their work, they have made pretty clear. Any meaning that takes you decades to discover is not meaning they put in, it's something you created on your own.
There were plenty of alternatives; you simply sat on your ass until the alternatives had effectively been whittled down to two.
Any symbolic or allegorical content that requires decades to decode is of no interest or relevance to anyone. If that was the intent of the work, it has failed. When all is said and done, 2001 is a generally well-made (for the time) and entertaining SciFi that has some significant plot holes and problems.
Neither does asbestos, yet it still causes cancer.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1567531/
There are other examples as well. The idea that we know a complete list of ways in which physical or chemical agents can cause cancer is simply unscientific bullshit.
Yeah, specifically your fail.
http://www.ehow.com/about_6595401_phlebotomy-injuries.html
You would design the hardware not even to be capable of that.
And the way you know that the only mechanisms for cancer are ionizing radiation and heating is... what exactly?
The problem with generics in Java is their piss-poor implementation in the JVM. Scala's generics are just as bad because they use the same JVM.
The basics still are wrong: generics still are slow and poorly implemented and Java still is bad for numerical apps.
No, they couldn't. The jobs would simply get outsourced directly.
The reasonable policy is to make immigration itself a lot easier; that is, largely replace H1B with immediate greencards for skilled immigrants. That way, the people we bring in would be in a better negotiating position and would actually be able to contribute more to society right away.