Everyone knows what the CPB is. You're being deliberately obtuse to stoke some sort of rightwing fear mongering. Next you'll be telling me that banks are hiding that fact that they're insured by the federal government because they says they're insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
And don't even try to say that because the name contains the word "federal," that shows that it's a government owned corporation, unless you're willing to make the same assertion about Federal Express.
I use Bibdesk on the mac, and I like it. Specifically, I like that it organizes all my PDFs into folders and stores all the data in a Bibtex file. The only problem I have with it, is that it stores the paths and macosx aliases and so instead of getting a nice pathname, you get 1500+ characters long hash. I'd really like a way to convert those back to paths so I could migrate in the future if I need to.
I used Mendeley for about 10 minutes, but I was impressed. It looked really good. It's cross platform, and web based. The only reason why I'm not using it is because I already started with Bibdesk, and it just wasn't quite worth converting over. (Again the pathname issues.), but I'd recommend it.
Anything that doesn't support BibTeX is simply a non-starter.
Jupiter and Saturn are very bright and can easily be located. Both feature things that are instantly recognizable, but invisible with the naked eye. The Gallelian Moons for Jupiter, and the rings for Saturn. I used a cheap 4 inch telescope in high school and it worked perfectly.
I am a consultant to a US company. Our products are made by Chinese companies, to our specifications.
I write all of the code, and it is loaded after the products get to the US.
Well the fear is that it isn't just your code. I don my l33t coolie hacker-spy hat, and basically do this:
if ($data = "something interesting")
do_something_nefarious($data); execute_normal_code($data);
Can't be done? Sure it can. All you have to do is wrap the lowest level API.
Think this is paranoid? Not necessarily. I've worked at places that took security very VERY seriously, because they are honestly the target of spies. The only USB things allowed were keyboards and mice, and everyone one of those was dismantled and examined prior installation.
It's a driftnet approach. You put the malevolent code into every product, hoping that one of them will make its way to someplace interesting.
This seems to be about recommending that ALL jurors refrain from accessing these social networks, etc. But I can't see how it's practical outside of the courtroom or deliberation. They can "instruct" the jurors all they want not to go online for the length of the trial, but that's not going to stop too many people...
The rules aren't any different than the current rules for jurors. You're not allowed to discuss the case, and refrain from news about it. This is just updating the rules for the 21st century.
Only if as a juror you behave as a child, and can't respect the rules of evidence.
These rules have been around for centuries. As a juror, your information about the case you're hearing is to come through testimony given in court. This allows for a fair trail, since both sides can attempt to refute the evidence and testimony. If you go around playing amateur Columbo and CSI, you're going screw up someone's life. You are not an expert. You don't know what you're doing. You're engaging in the CSI effect.
Don't. Just don't. If you do, I'd want you thrown off my jury.
And forget bringing your laptop or iPad into the court room to take notes about what's going on in court, so you can make an accurate decision when it comes time for deliberation.
Exactly. That's why they give you *gasp* a pen and paper!
Folks in China don't seem to have to deal with as many of the "technology is baaaaad" types. I suspect it's because they have far more-recent memories of what it's like to freeze in the dark.
Meanwhile, in the USA, they bailed out the oligarchy that runs the banking system, and then gave money to a bunch of aimless projects that just put band-aids on current infrastructure. There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines") that would have solidly improved the country for the long-term, improve its ability to transact business.
This is exacly what the stimulus is going for. The stimulus isworking. If anything, the stimulus isn't big enough, given the problems this country has.
This whole "Mac goood", "Linux baaad" idea when it comes to interfaces and usability is just mindless propaganda. Most people aren't in a position to check this for themselves because Apple is a closed off product that's not really well suited for casual exploration. You need special hardware just to run their stuff.
Well, anyone can go into an Apple Store, or ask to borrow someone's mac. Also there are plenty of hacks to get MacOSX to boot on non-Apple hardware. So that's really a canard. Anyone can check it out, you just have to want to.
So "Mac Usability" becomes a myth bolstered by fanboys that need to buy into the cult and then justify their choices.
Nice try. Just because someone doesn't bother to take the effort to find out for themselves, doesn't automatically make it a myth. I've never bothered to go to northern Canada and see if the Magnetic North Pole and Geographic North Pole are actually different, but that doesn't make it a myth.
Let me tell you my story. I ran Linux as my primary OS from 1994 to 2005. At no point during those 11 years did I ever have a system that supported all of my hardware. At no point. I used it because, I'm a unix guy. I like the shell. I like scripts. I like that everything is a file. Unix lets me do my work. That said, I am not a sysadmin. I do not like sysadmining. I do not like having to patch my kernel just let get my digital camera to work. (Incremented a hex value in a #define in unusual_devs.h so that my Sony DCF-707 would be mounted as a usb storage device.) I do not enjoy having to manually load a kernel module just to get my printer working, because it fails to be autoloaded. I do not like having a print driver that makes every photo come out pink, and then buy a print driver, only to have the photos still come out pink. (Canon i850. Printed perfectly under windows. The only think I ever used it for, well that and Warcraft III.) I do not like having two(!) different sound systems being installed, and my system still not always have sound. (I loved how I'd get "No ALSA devices found" during boot, but could only adjust my volume through alsamixer.)
Fuck. That. Shit.
I got a 17" Powerbook G4, and all my hardware worked. And you know what? I got a terminal, and X11, and XEmacs, and gcc, and everything else I wanted too. It's quite simply a better unix. (I've since upgraded to a 17" MacBook Pro.)
Linux usability? I'm sorry it sucks. It always sucked. I used GNOME during the 1x days, and it was full of incomprehensible and cutesy options. "Xyzzy Goodness = 0.42," and my personal favorite, "Clock," "Digital Clock," "Another Clock," "Clock with Mail Check." The GNOME folks couldn't say "no," and got a shit. Havoc Pennington and the rest of the GNOME "usability" team, took the message as "no options" instead of "too many options," and subsequently removed everything from the 2.x tree, in the quixotic quest to make it simple for people that have never used a computer before. (It's now 2010. It was 2001 when they started that quest. Even tribes deep in the Amazon and New Guinea had computers then. These folks simple no longer existed.) It still sucks, only now it sucks because you simply can't do the things you used to be able to. KDE? Well KDE4 is quite simply a clusterfuck
The reason why Linux usability sucks, is two fold.
1. It's hard. It's hard to do it right. It takes resources. It takes time. It takes expertise. Linux doesn't have the resources when it comes to interfaces, and everyday office software. It just doesn't. Sun is dead. Novel, never had much resources devoted to it. Usability isn't really something you can do right one weekend a m
Or it could just be people that are assholes that just couldn't be bothered. Especially given that your liability is explicitly limited. But hey, sucks to their asthmar right?
Allow me to quote the relevant part of the article:
The bill by Democratic Assemblyman Pedro Nava of Santa Barbara follows the October gang rape of a 16-year-old girl outside Richmond High School's homecoming dance. Investigators believe as many as 10 people participated while another 20 or so watched without calling police.
Yeah, I'm really sure that girl and her family would have sued anyone there for calling the cops.
As the guy said "If the reason you want to switch workspaces individually is that you don't have enough flexibility in your workspaces (like you only have four per monitor), then you're solving the wrong problem."
Like this guy said, just mark the app that has to be everywhere as "viewable on all desktops" and be done with it. That can be done today with any decent pager.
Honestly, I think the OP just fixated on a solution instead of what behavior he wanted. Just mark something as viewable as everywhere, and be done with it. Or perhaps just have hot keys set up to switch between apps, but his proposed solution, just doesn't exist. There are other ways to get similar behavior.
What is you want to do. Running some exotic X config isn't a goal, it's a very specific tactic. The fact that you haven't found anything like this, but stuff that is close, but not close enough, should make you pause.
What's your use case? Is it this: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528666&cid=30942320 Forget the "multiple X sessions." Again, that's a tactic. What behavior are you looking for? It sounds like you just want a virtual desktop pager for each monitor.
It's been a while, but I imagine you could hack something like Sawfish and Sawfish-Pager to do what you want. You just have to hack up some lisp, which would be good for you.;)
I'm sorry, but I see the same thing happening with this whole Environmental and Global Warming thing. Are there real problems out there? Should be trying not to pollute? Yes. But the tactics these people are using remind me too much of what I saw from the Defense industry.
And if people with money were pushing this, you'd have a point, but they're not. They're denying it.
None of these models can even begin to take into account uncertainty. What happens if there is a massive Krakatoa type eruption in the next 50 years? Or in this case, the next 350 years? What if there continues to be a lack of sun spot activity for the next 350 years.
And Jesus can come, or an astroid can hit us, or aliens nuke us from orbit. You're right. As Joe Strummer said, "The future is unwritten." So let's all raise a big middle finger to Al Roker and his "prediction" of "snow" and go outside wearing our bathing suits because, hey a massive solar flare might happen!
It's happened before. Oh wait, the Little Ice Age was just a fluke right? We'd better adjust our data and pretend that it and the Medieval warm period never happened according to our models.
Or recognize a highly localized event for exactly what it was, and ignore the fact that during this anomaly, that the global temperature was actually 0.03 degrees Celsius cooler than average.
And when you've been over the same territory 20 times, and the basis of the arguments have a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics, or physics, or the actual conclusions?
Can someone please tell me why we just don't move to a simple flat tax rate? You make minimum wage? You pay X%. You're lower middle class? You pay the same X%. You're upper class? You pay the sam X%. You're the CEO of a fortune 500 company? You pay the same X%.
Easy. A flat tax is regressive. Money, like most things in this world, is subject to diminishing returns. Taking 15% of income from someone that doesn't have much money effects them disprotionately more than someone that's rich. The wealthy can simply absorb more of a hit and remain effectively unscathed than those with less money. If you have to pay for a war, or to raise revenue to get out of debt, why should you take food off the plates of the poor, or make granny have to chose between food and medicine, when Uncle Moneybags tips his hookers half the amount you need?
The flat tax is a canard used for those that want to cut taxes to dismantel government, because both taxes and government are axiomatically bad. (Reagan domestic policy advisor, and supply-side economics proponent, Bruce Bartlett recently called these ideas "not realistic." ) The "confusion" is also a canard, because quite simply, the vast majority of wage earners in this country file a 1040-EZ and take the standard deduction. It's add and subtract. There's nothing to it.
When you see someone arguing for this, you have to ask yourself what is they have to gain from it? In the case of "flat tax" proponents, it's an across the board tax cut. It's a complete restructuring of the tax base in order to benefit them. It's a decrease in government revenues, and thus the leading of more deficit spendings. (Witness California.)
Yet another "solution" to the Gordian Knot. This fails because:
(x) Everyone needs to hit tab and not space (x) Everyone's editor must be configured to insert tabs rather than spaces when the tab key is pressed (x) Uses an editor specific trick (x) Has been tried before: __settable_tab_stops__
People are a lazy and dumb. In 50 years of programming, neither of these conditions have ever been met anywhere.
I'm thinking my school got in some sort of crap legal trouble and that's why the message is there.
Or their merely being helpful, given that all universities have a disability resource center that provide things like sign language interpreters, and special testing sessions for those with learning disabilities.
Seriously, why are you so bent out of shape out of 12 words printed at the bottom of a page?
I've been in class with blind student. He'd bring his guide dog. The TA would make ball and peg models of whatever chemical were discussing at the time (it was chem 101), and would give it to him so he could "see" what she was talking about. How he took tests, I don't know. I guess someone would read him the questions, or translate the test into braille or something. He never took tests with the rest of us.
Because books can be in braille. If you only offer eReaders, you've severely hampered the blind from the educational experience.
And text-to-speech technology sucks. It's slow, and all too often, wrong. (e.g. My GPS always says, "Exit right towards San Wasette continue for 26 miles to Sangria." None of these locations exist. It's San Jose and Santa Cruz, TomTom.) Also, you can't very well skim through an audio track like you can a book. It's just awkward.
How many have you met, out of 1.2 billion, that you can speak for the Chinese people? Have you met those in prisons or those who can't get jobs because of their political beliefs? What about those who can't practice their religion? What about those who censor their beliefs so they can keep their jobs? What about those in Tibet? In Xinjiang? What about those protesting against the government all over China, because their rights are ignored and trampled by a political establishment which has no responsibility to the people (because they can't be voted out of office)? Why must the Communist Party jail democracy advocates and censor the Internet, if their people don't want it?
Let me answer your self-righteous question with another self-righteous question. Of these trampled down masses that are protesting the government, how many have you met? Are they not capable for speaking for themselves? Hare dare you engage in the soft bigotry of ascribing your own motivations to the actions of the oppressed!/sarcasm
But seriously, are the Tibetans that yearn to be free of Beijing, yearning for a democracy, or merely the return to the theocratic feudal state and their god-king that ruled Tibet for millennia?
Are the religious minorities calling for elections, or are they merely wanting to be left alone?
Are the Uyghurs calling for elections, or the end of a government policy of encouraging the migration of Han from the populous east to the less populous west?
Are the Chinese government protests calling for democracy, or merely an end of corruption?
But the facts are overwhelming: Democracy and freedom are desires and values universal to humanity.
And yet authoritarianism is on the rise across the middle east. Do you truly believe that if the Saudi family were toppled today, and election was held, that anything like a Jeffersonian democracy would spring forth, or would it merely be another Iran or worse?
And speaking of Iran, here is a country that not only toppled one dictator, the Shah, but then sought to install a shill democracy, the Islamic Republic. Even now would the Ayatollahs be under threat if they just counted the votes? I think not. And if Ahmadinejad were somehow replaced, would the protest continue, or would they be diminished? An interesting question that neither of us can answer.
The people of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and others, representing almost every other non-Western culture, have adopted it with great success. Only those who are forcibly repressed by their government are denied it. And all over the world, nearly 100% of the most prosperous, stable countries are democracies.
Account for Russia then? It's 6th in GDP by Purchasing Power Parity, yet is only nominally a democracy. Not only have they moved backwards from the joyous day in 1991, they have positively skipped happily back towards oligarchy and totalitarianism. Putin is wildly popular in that country, and yet he has done all he could to dismantle the democratic process.
Turkey is a country that has a history of military coups, including a plot this past year, and threatened one back in 2007. Hardly shining example.
To say the people of China lack the motivation or ability to seize it for themselves is patronizing and insulting.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows what the CPB is. You're being deliberately obtuse to stoke some sort of rightwing fear mongering. Next you'll be telling me that banks are hiding that fact that they're insured by the federal government because they says they're insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
And don't even try to say that because the name contains the word "federal," that shows that it's a government owned corporation, unless you're willing to make the same assertion about Federal Express.
I use Bibdesk on the mac, and I like it. Specifically, I like that it organizes all my PDFs into folders and stores all the data in a Bibtex file. The only problem I have with it, is that it stores the paths and macosx aliases and so instead of getting a nice pathname, you get 1500+ characters long hash. I'd really like a way to convert those back to paths so I could migrate in the future if I need to.
I used Mendeley for about 10 minutes, but I was impressed. It looked really good. It's cross platform, and web based. The only reason why I'm not using it is because I already started with Bibdesk, and it just wasn't quite worth converting over. (Again the pathname issues.), but I'd recommend it.
Anything that doesn't support BibTeX is simply a non-starter.
Jupiter and Saturn are very bright and can easily be located. Both feature things that are instantly recognizable, but invisible with the naked eye. The Gallelian Moons for Jupiter, and the rings for Saturn. I used a cheap 4 inch telescope in high school and it worked perfectly.
I am a consultant to a US company. Our products are made by Chinese companies, to our specifications.
I write all of the code, and it is loaded after the products get to the US.
Well the fear is that it isn't just your code. I don my l33t coolie hacker-spy hat, and basically do this:
if ($data = "something interesting")
do_something_nefarious($data);
execute_normal_code($data);
Can't be done? Sure it can. All you have to do is wrap the lowest level API.
Think this is paranoid? Not necessarily. I've worked at places that took security very VERY seriously, because they are honestly the target of spies. The only USB things allowed were keyboards and mice, and everyone one of those was dismantled and examined prior installation.
It's a driftnet approach. You put the malevolent code into every product, hoping that one of them will make its way to someplace interesting.
Taiwan is not China. Nor is New Zealand, Australia.
This seems to be about recommending that ALL jurors refrain from accessing these social networks, etc. But I can't see how it's practical outside of the courtroom or deliberation. They can "instruct" the jurors all they want not to go online for the length of the trial, but that's not going to stop too many people...
The rules aren't any different than the current rules for jurors. You're not allowed to discuss the case, and refrain from news about it. This is just updating the rules for the 21st century.
I guess courts treat jurors like children.
Only if as a juror you behave as a child, and can't respect the rules of evidence.
These rules have been around for centuries. As a juror, your information about the case you're hearing is to come through testimony given in court. This allows for a fair trail, since both sides can attempt to refute the evidence and testimony. If you go around playing amateur Columbo and CSI, you're going screw up someone's life. You are not an expert. You don't know what you're doing. You're engaging in the CSI effect.
Don't. Just don't. If you do, I'd want you thrown off my jury.
And forget bringing your laptop or iPad into the court room to take notes about what's going on in court, so you can make an accurate decision when it comes time for deliberation.
Exactly. That's why they give you *gasp* a pen and paper!
Folks in China don't seem to have to deal with as many of the "technology is baaaaad" types.
I suspect it's because they have far more-recent memories of what it's like to freeze in the dark.
That, or they have a wantonly corrupt legal system.
Meanwhile, in the USA, they bailed out the oligarchy that runs the banking system, and then gave money to a bunch of aimless projects that just put band-aids on current infrastructure. There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines") that would have solidly improved the country for the long-term, improve its ability to transact business.
High Speed Rail? Check
Smart grid? Check
This is exacly what the stimulus is going for. The stimulus is working. If anything, the stimulus isn't big enough, given the problems this country has.
Economics isn't like a foot race.
Right, there are no winners and losers.
This whole "Mac goood", "Linux baaad" idea when it comes to interfaces and usability is just mindless propaganda. Most people aren't in a position to check this for themselves because Apple is a closed off product that's not really well suited for casual exploration. You need special hardware just to run their stuff.
Well, anyone can go into an Apple Store, or ask to borrow someone's mac. Also there are plenty of hacks to get MacOSX to boot on non-Apple hardware. So that's really a canard. Anyone can check it out, you just have to want to.
So "Mac Usability" becomes a myth bolstered by fanboys that need to buy into the cult and then justify their choices.
Nice try. Just because someone doesn't bother to take the effort to find out for themselves, doesn't automatically make it a myth. I've never bothered to go to northern Canada and see if the Magnetic North Pole and Geographic North Pole are actually different, but that doesn't make it a myth.
Let me tell you my story. I ran Linux as my primary OS from 1994 to 2005. At no point during those 11 years did I ever have a system that supported all of my hardware. At no point. I used it because, I'm a unix guy. I like the shell. I like scripts. I like that everything is a file. Unix lets me do my work. That said, I am not a sysadmin. I do not like sysadmining. I do not like having to patch my kernel just let get my digital camera to work. (Incremented a hex value in a #define in unusual_devs.h so that my Sony DCF-707 would be mounted as a usb storage device.) I do not enjoy having to manually load a kernel module just to get my printer working, because it fails to be autoloaded. I do not like having a print driver that makes every photo come out pink, and then buy a print driver, only to have the photos still come out pink. (Canon i850. Printed perfectly under windows. The only think I ever used it for, well that and Warcraft III.) I do not like having two(!) different sound systems being installed, and my system still not always have sound. (I loved how I'd get "No ALSA devices found" during boot, but could only adjust my volume through alsamixer.)
Fuck. That. Shit.
I got a 17" Powerbook G4, and all my hardware worked. And you know what? I got a terminal, and X11, and XEmacs, and gcc, and everything else I wanted too. It's quite simply a better unix. (I've since upgraded to a 17" MacBook Pro.)
Linux usability? I'm sorry it sucks. It always sucked. I used GNOME during the 1x days, and it was full of incomprehensible and cutesy options. "Xyzzy Goodness = 0.42," and my personal favorite, "Clock," "Digital Clock," "Another Clock," "Clock with Mail Check." The GNOME folks couldn't say "no," and got a shit. Havoc Pennington and the rest of the GNOME "usability" team, took the message as "no options" instead of "too many options," and subsequently removed everything from the 2.x tree, in the quixotic quest to make it simple for people that have never used a computer before. (It's now 2010. It was 2001 when they started that quest. Even tribes deep in the Amazon and New Guinea had computers then. These folks simple no longer existed.) It still sucks, only now it sucks because you simply can't do the things you used to be able to. KDE? Well KDE4 is quite simply a clusterfuck
The reason why Linux usability sucks, is two fold.
1. It's hard. It's hard to do it right. It takes resources. It takes time. It takes expertise. Linux doesn't have the resources when it comes to interfaces, and everyday office software. It just doesn't. Sun is dead. Novel, never had much resources devoted to it. Usability isn't really something you can do right one weekend a m
Or it could just be people that are assholes that just couldn't be bothered. Especially given that your liability is explicitly limited. But hey, sucks to their asthmar right?
Allow me to quote the relevant part of the article:
The bill by Democratic Assemblyman Pedro Nava of Santa Barbara follows the October gang rape of a 16-year-old girl outside Richmond High School's homecoming dance. Investigators believe as many as 10 people participated while another 20 or so watched without calling police.
Yeah, I'm really sure that girl and her family would have sued anyone there for calling the cops.
Thanks for the links.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528666&cid=30940992
As the guy said "If the reason you want to switch workspaces individually is that you don't have enough flexibility in your workspaces (like you only have four per monitor), then you're solving the wrong problem."
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528666&cid=3094273
Like this guy said, just mark the app that has to be everywhere as "viewable on all desktops" and be done with it. That can be done today with any decent pager.
Honestly, I think the OP just fixated on a solution instead of what behavior he wanted. Just mark something as viewable as everywhere, and be done with it. Or perhaps just have hot keys set up to switch between apps, but his proposed solution, just doesn't exist. There are other ways to get similar behavior.
What is you want to do. Running some exotic X config isn't a goal, it's a very specific tactic. The fact that you haven't found anything like this, but stuff that is close, but not close enough, should make you pause.
What's your use case? Is it this: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528666&cid=30942320
Forget the "multiple X sessions." Again, that's a tactic. What behavior are you looking for? It sounds like you just want a virtual desktop pager for each monitor.
It's been a while, but I imagine you could hack something like Sawfish and Sawfish-Pager to do what you want. You just have to hack up some lisp, which would be good for you. ;)
I'm sorry, but I see the same thing happening with this whole Environmental and Global Warming thing. Are there real problems out there? Should be trying not to pollute? Yes. But the tactics these people are using remind me too much of what I saw from the Defense industry.
And if people with money were pushing this, you'd have a point, but they're not. They're denying it.
None of these models can even begin to take into account uncertainty. What happens if there is a massive Krakatoa type eruption in the next 50 years? Or in this case, the next 350 years? What if there continues to be a lack of sun spot activity for the next 350 years.
And Jesus can come, or an astroid can hit us, or aliens nuke us from orbit. You're right. As Joe Strummer said, "The future is unwritten." So let's all raise a big middle finger to Al Roker and his "prediction" of "snow" and go outside wearing our bathing suits because, hey a massive solar flare might happen!
It's happened before. Oh wait, the Little Ice Age was just a fluke right? We'd better adjust our data and pretend that it and the Medieval warm period never happened according to our models.
Or recognize a highly localized event for exactly what it was, and ignore the fact that during this anomaly, that the global temperature was actually 0.03 degrees Celsius cooler than average.
So in conclusion: Fuck science.
And when you've been over the same territory 20 times, and the basis of the arguments have a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics, or physics, or the actual conclusions?
Easy. A flat tax is regressive. Money, like most things in this world, is subject to diminishing returns. Taking 15% of income from someone that doesn't have much money effects them disprotionately more than someone that's rich. The wealthy can simply absorb more of a hit and remain effectively unscathed than those with less money. If you have to pay for a war, or to raise revenue to get out of debt, why should you take food off the plates of the poor, or make granny have to chose between food and medicine, when Uncle Moneybags tips his hookers half the amount you need?
The flat tax is a canard used for those that want to cut taxes to dismantel government, because both taxes and government are axiomatically bad. (Reagan domestic policy advisor, and supply-side economics proponent, Bruce Bartlett recently called these ideas "not realistic." ) The "confusion" is also a canard, because quite simply, the vast majority of wage earners in this country file a 1040-EZ and take the standard deduction. It's add and subtract. There's nothing to it.
When you see someone arguing for this, you have to ask yourself what is they have to gain from it? In the case of "flat tax" proponents, it's an across the board tax cut. It's a complete restructuring of the tax base in order to benefit them. It's a decrease in government revenues, and thus the leading of more deficit spendings. (Witness California.)
Pfft. Wingdings or nothing.
Yet another "solution" to the Gordian Knot. This fails because:
(x) Everyone needs to hit tab and not space
(x) Everyone's editor must be configured to insert tabs rather than spaces when the tab key is pressed
(x) Uses an editor specific trick
(x) Has been tried before: __settable_tab_stops__
People are a lazy and dumb. In 50 years of programming, neither of these conditions have ever been met anywhere.
What makes this idea any different?
Is her name "8 x 10"? ;)
I can only hope the googles serve you better than they did Rainier Wolfcastle.
Honestly, what do you have against educating the blind?
I'm thinking my school got in some sort of crap legal trouble and that's why the message is there.
Or their merely being helpful, given that all universities have a disability resource center that provide things like sign language interpreters, and special testing sessions for those with learning disabilities.
Seriously, why are you so bent out of shape out of 12 words printed at the bottom of a page?
I've been in class with blind student. He'd bring his guide dog. The TA would make ball and peg models of whatever chemical were discussing at the time (it was chem 101), and would give it to him so he could "see" what she was talking about. How he took tests, I don't know. I guess someone would read him the questions, or translate the test into braille or something. He never took tests with the rest of us.
Because books can be in braille. If you only offer eReaders, you've severely hampered the blind from the educational experience.
And text-to-speech technology sucks. It's slow, and all too often, wrong. (e.g. My GPS always says, "Exit right towards San Wasette continue for 26 miles to Sangria." None of these locations exist. It's San Jose and Santa Cruz, TomTom.) Also, you can't very well skim through an audio track like you can a book. It's just awkward.
If you're fromt the PRC, how come you're not using pinyin to spell "Tiananmen"? There's no "-ien" final in pinyin.
How many have you met, out of 1.2 billion, that you can speak for the Chinese people? Have you met those in prisons or those who can't get jobs because of their political beliefs? What about those who can't practice their religion? What about those who censor their beliefs so they can keep their jobs? What about those in Tibet? In Xinjiang? What about those protesting against the government all over China, because their rights are ignored and trampled by a political establishment which has no responsibility to the people (because they can't be voted out of office)? Why must the Communist Party jail democracy advocates and censor the Internet, if their people don't want it?
Let me answer your self-righteous question with another self-righteous question. Of these trampled down masses that are protesting the government, how many have you met? Are they not capable for speaking for themselves? Hare dare you engage in the soft bigotry of ascribing your own motivations to the actions of the oppressed! /sarcasm
But seriously, are the Tibetans that yearn to be free of Beijing, yearning for a democracy, or merely the return to the theocratic feudal state and their god-king that ruled Tibet for millennia?
Are the religious minorities calling for elections, or are they merely wanting to be left alone?
Are the Uyghurs calling for elections, or the end of a government policy of encouraging the migration of Han from the populous east to the less populous west?
Are the Chinese government protests calling for democracy, or merely an end of corruption?
But the facts are overwhelming: Democracy and freedom are desires and values universal to humanity.
And yet authoritarianism is on the rise across the middle east. Do you truly believe that if the Saudi family were toppled today, and election was held, that anything like a Jeffersonian democracy would spring forth, or would it merely be another Iran or worse?
And speaking of Iran, here is a country that not only toppled one dictator, the Shah, but then sought to install a shill democracy, the Islamic Republic. Even now would the Ayatollahs be under threat if they just counted the votes? I think not. And if Ahmadinejad were somehow replaced, would the protest continue, or would they be diminished? An interesting question that neither of us can answer.
The people of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and others, representing almost every other non-Western culture, have adopted it with great success. Only those who are forcibly repressed by their government are denied it. And all over the world, nearly 100% of the most prosperous, stable countries are democracies.
Account for Russia then? It's 6th in GDP by Purchasing Power Parity, yet is only nominally a democracy. Not only have they moved backwards from the joyous day in 1991, they have positively skipped happily back towards oligarchy and totalitarianism. Putin is wildly popular in that country, and yet he has done all he could to dismantle the democratic process.
Turkey is a country that has a history of military coups, including a plot this past year, and threatened one back in 2007. Hardly shining example.
To say the people of China lack the motivation or ability to seize it for themselves is patronizing and insulting.
Nice try.