Especially because the entire worth of the domain is in its association with the project. It's not like "pets.com" or "sex.com" or something where people will look for the domain's web site because of the domain's name. The domain name "cyanogenmod.com" has no legitimate value at all except as a link to the project. There is no way to get an revenue out of controlling this domain name other than blackmailing the project or deceiving users.
Actually you make my point. Superpowers don't take kindly to being jerked around by small countries over strategic resources, which is why many small, resource-rich countries end up run by corrupt, compliant regimes. In a cooler-heads-prevail scenario the oil card is a good one to hold in your hand, but we're not talking about a cooler-heads-prevail scenario. We're talking about an alternate-history scenario where hysterical hotheads hijack the state, and they'd be bound to push their luck too far.
Venezuela (which is just a bit larger than Texas) gets away with it because they're just an annoyance. They have no choice but to sell their oil on the international market, so Hugo Chavez can shoot his mouth off all he wants. But if Venezuela actually had some kind of strategic hold over US energy supplies, Chavez would not be in power long.
I'm not signing, out of respect for the 41.4% of Texans who voted for Obama and the fraction of the 57.2% who voted for Romney who aren't loudmouthed fatheads. Together they surely form a majority of Texas voters.
Well the Soviets did it, which shows it *can* be done, albeit perhaps messily.
But even under the best assumptions, it would not be a happy situation for Texans. They'd be dominated militarily and economically by the United States, bottled up in the northwest corner of the Gulf of Mexico with unfriendly states on either side and a burgeoning Hispanic population internally to keep under control.
And the words "fiscal cliff" has nothing to do with this?
The problem is that they're expecting a renewed recession when taxes go up and government spending goes down. The government will be taking more money out of the economy and putting less into it.
Anybody as freaked out by current government borrowing as you describe is simply being hysterical. Sure the deficit at a historical high in absolute terms, but its nowhere near a historical high as percent of GDP. On top of that the government is currently borrowing money at or below the rate of inflation. It'd be insane not to borrow when people are in effect *paying* us to hold onto it for them. Check out the recent ten year treasury rate and compare it to inflation.
No business would worry about borrowing money at an interest rate below what it can earn by holding onto the cash it already has. That's why *every* large business borrows money, even when it's profitable. It's counter-intuitive if you think of business and government budgeting like they were normal household budgeting, but business and governments aren't like typical private households. Even wealthy *individuals* borrow money when the interest rates are favorable. I once had a wealthy young trust fund kid working for me who borrowed money from the bank to buy a yacht. It made no sense for him to liquidate his investments when those investments earned more than the bank's interest rate.
There's a time to worry about government borrowing, and that's in a full economy where dollars in the private sector are creating jobs like crazy. Nobody seems to worry about austerity then, when interest rates are high, but they should. But when interest rates are low, suddenly people freak out about borrowing money. It's hysterical fear, that's all.
Well, I don't know about "extremist", but "alarmist" might be better. "Sloppy" might be best of all.
That climate change has national security implications is kind of a "well, duh" proposition. Of course it has national security implications, through its potentially destabilizing effect on other nations at the very least. Climate change has a huge impact on the military due to its effect on vector borne infectious diseases. Only recently have historians begun to appreciate the huge and possibly decisive impact malaria had on the American Revolution, and to this day the US military has considerable public health efforts to protect the immunologically naive American troops, who grew up in a hygienic temperate environment, deployed in tropical or squalid conditions.
The executive branch has regulatory and monitoring functions assigned to it by Congress, and considerable leeway in implementing policy within the constraints established by legislation. For example it may be tasked with monitoring the spread of agricultural pests -- a topic closely related in several ways to climate change. Within that function it can draft regulations and propose programs which it then submits budget requests to Congress.
So the executive branch has considerable influence on how or even whether the US government responds to the prospect of climate change. It's hardly extreme to suggest the executive branch should have a policy stance toward it. It's just wooly-headed to compare it to terrorism, a totally different kind of security concern with different causes, different effects, and very different planning horizons.
Car analogy time. I have a neighbor who drives a BMW. I drive a Honda Accord. We both like our cars for good reasons. He likes the things he can do with this car. I have no desire to do those things, and I appreciate the simple, well thought-out control layout of the Honda. They're both great cars for different reasons, and they both objectively fit our subjective needs better than the other would.
One thing that Linux has made apparent over the last decade is there doesn't have to be One True Desktop that everyone has to use. I've tried KDE and found that the bells and whistles are intriguing but not something that really makes much of a difference to me. I think part of this is that I no longer live in a totally desktop-centric world, spending considerable time on tablets and smartphones so I appreciate the marginal features of KDE less and the simplicity of XFCE more. Others may have different needs.
That's not to say I don't find occasions where I'd rather be using KDE or Gnome, but by in large I'm happy with my day to day use of XFCE as I am driving my boring but functional Accord. The analogy isn't perfect since the Accord is almost without exception well thought out and XFCE has a few rough spots -- someone else mentioned Thunar and I totally agree it should be better. But you have to judge a desktop environment by its overall effect, and I appreciate XFCE's simplicity, responsiveness, and predictability.
Disclaimer: some of the opinions are based on using Ubuntu, and my opinions no doubt have been shaped by the distro's choices of KDE releases -- to say nothing of Gnome! This may well be another virtue of XFCE, that its focus on producing a simple and conventional desktop rather than a "cutting edge" desktop results in fewer distro-introduced hiccups in the user experience.
The problem is *terroir*. Consider a wine grape from Burgundy. Grow it in Sonoma County and it will produce a different wine, albeit with some similarities. Modern oenology allows mass produced wines to achieve consistency even in "bad" years, so climate change is not going to have much effect on a cheap mass produced table wine, short of total collapse in production. Far before your $20 bottle of chardonnay becomes hard to find, many small craft wineries producing maybe 5000 bottles of high end wine will go out of business. The expertise needed to run them won't necessarily migrate to the new ideal areas for cultivation, if they exist, and even if the expertise does move it won't be producing the same wines.
Similarly you aren't going to see any climate driven change in the taste of a cup of Maxwell House, although prices may rise or fall depending on how climate change affects supply. For example if climate change makes growing arabica beans unprofitable in some regions, those regions might start to plant the hardier and cheaper C. robusta. The result may be cheaper supermarket coffee. Or not.
What you are more likely to lose are certain high end varietal coffees like Ethiopian Harrar (my personal favorite) that are grown in areas which are vulnerable to changes in climate. It is possible (although not certain) that ideal conditions for coffee may appear in other places to compensate for the loss of current varietal coffee plantations, but it will take years, possibly decades to find these places and develop an international market and reputation for their product.
Actually, the job of Congressman is crap; you get egoboo but you're a slave to fundraising and spend as much or more time in shabby political boiler room offices calling around begging for money as you do in your nice government office. It's stunningly degrading, and the average person wouldn't be able to stand it. You probably helps to be a major attention-hound, but it still stinks. It's much better when you get out of Congress and become a lobbyist who can afford to screen his calls.
Well, you don't win elections by having more people wanting to vote for you. You win elections by having more people actually get to the polls and cast a vote for you. GOTV is critical in winning a race unless you're are totally blowing the other guy away, as in CA where Obama got almost 21% more votes than Romney.
Still, there's something in what you say. Obama's margins in the swing states this year weren't landslides, but they were pretty solid in a lot of those states:
NV (6EV): 4.6% IA (6EV): 5.6% CO (9EV): 3.7% WI (10EV): 6.7% VA (13EV): 3% NC (15EV): -2.4% (Romney win) OH (18EV): 1.9% FL (29EV): 0.5%
It's easy to imagine that without Obama's GOTV effort he'd have lost at least FL and OH -- and conceivably (although less likely) in VA and CO. Flipping all four of those states would shift 69 electoral votes, bringing Obama down from 332 to 263 and Romney up from 206 to 275 for a bare win.
It's easy to imagine a better Romney GOTV effort flipping Florida, maybe even Ohio, but that's not enough. He'd have to scare up another 108K Romney voters in VA who stayed at home, and in Colorado another 85K. That seems unlikely, so an improved Romney GOTV operation alone would probably not have changed this election. You'd have to get rid of Obama's GOTV operation, in which case a successful Romney operation might *barely* have flipped this to the Republicans.
What is striking when you look at these swing state numbers is that we're talking about eight states and less than 20% of the total electoral college here. To win, a Republican has to pick up 79 of those 106 electoral votes. A Democrat has to win 32. It's no wonder the math geeks were favoring Obama so early and consistently. Writing off almost the entire Northeast and California, Republicans have to sweep the three largest swing states to win. Things are going to get tougher on the Republicans. This year, even the Cuban-Americans in Fl favored Obama; within a generation demographic changes could flip Texas to the Democrats, unless the Republicans get their act together with Hispanics.
So blame Romney's shortcomings as a candidate if you like. Blame his GOTV effort. Blame Karl Rove, Nate Silver, or even the 47%. But don't forget to blame the Southern Strategy. It gave the Republicans a good ride for a few decades, but change is turning it into a strategic millstone around Republicans' necks. Since George H. W. Bush vs. Mike Dukakis there have been six elections, of which the Republicans have won two but *barely*. Even with Obama's economic vulnerabilities, his 332-206 win over Romney eclipses the Republicans' strongest electoral college victory in the last twenty years (286 Bush to 251 Kerry).
Well, I have to agree with you, in that you're making a statement in a form that can't be refuted without proving a negative by example. But it's a straw man argument. The question is whether certain recreational drugs can improve programmer performance -- not whether programmer performance can be improved without drugs. Of course it can. Getting a good night's sleep on a regular basis probably would beat any kind of mind enhancing drug, at least for people with poor sleep habits.
There's a difference between pillorying somebody for something they actually did and doing it for something you imagined they did. Seriously, death panels? Birtherism? Being a secret Muslim? Plotting to take away everyone's guns? It's not only contemptible, it's alarmingly paranoid. This kind of shaky grip on reality goes all the way back to the notion that the Clintons plotted to have people murdered in Arkansas.
Not that there weren't cheap shots taken at George W. -- like painting him as stupid, which he wasn't. Or rumors that he was back in the bottle. But the real gripes people had with Bush was that he invaded Iraq under false pretenses and that his administration's response to Katrina was incompetent and his personal response was almost incredibly tin-eared. Those are things that unquestionably happened. The biggest gripe people had was that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 occurred on his watch, which is unquestionably true, although it had been brewing for some time and other players (Alan Greenspan, Wall Street in general) had a big role in creating it. Still, the perception was that the crisis occurred because of regulatory policies that were consistent with Bush's philosophy of government, and I think there is some justice in this. He should have, by his own philosophy, let the banks fail; but he was unprepared for that eventuality and didn't have the stomach to let the economy collapse in order to maintain his laissez-faire principles.
In this election, the Republicans have only themselves for the failure of their ambitions to capture the White House and the Senate. It was their *own* BS, not other people's BS that sank them. Akin and Mourdock torpedoed their own senate campaigns by making remarks only someone who is unaccustomed to talking within earshot of people who disagree with him could make. I'm not one who usually criticizes people for changing their minds, which in moderation is an admirable thing, but Mitt Romney's rapid and radical shifts in position were so clearly motivated by expediency he handed Obama a trump card in this election. Romney played the economic discontent card, and Obama played the "can you really trust this guy?" card. That might not be pretty, but anyone with any sense would play that card if their opponent was foolish enough to hand it to them.
"Balance" means giving equal scrutiny to *facts* on either side of an issue, not equal scrutiny to conclusions. That's not balance, it's false equivalence. You can decry pettiness on both sides -- and I'm with you. Liberals have just as much capacity for hypocrisy when they smell blood in the water as conservatives. I got myself pilloried on DailyKos a few years back for objecting to the sexist treatment of Carrie Prejean there, so I've experienced it firsthand. Hypocrisy is something it takes more integrity to guard against than most people have. But just because all sides engage in it doesn't mean that all politicians are equally good or bad, or that all criticisms of politicians are equally unfounded.
I agree with this. Many of the tasks affected by the law are easy ones -- if you can figure out that they need to be done.
The most common engine repair is replacing a bad O2 sensor -- accounting for over 9% of all engine repairs. That's an easy fix, but increasingly these days requires a specialized tool for no purpose other than making the job hard for a DIY'er. Also accounting for over 9% of engine repairs is a bad seal on fuel filler caps, which cause the "check engine" light to go on. Fixing that is surely a DIY project, if you can read the fault code from the car's computer.
Doesn't that state also have a bunch of local ordinances that prohibit working on your car in your driveway or parked on the street?
-jcr
Nope. Not as far as I know.
This is the first I've ever heard of that and I've lived in Massachusetts all my life. I've worked on my car in the street with no complaints, and see others do it all the time. I don't see how you could ban *all* working on cars. If you've got a flat tire or a bad headlight, what would you be supposed to do? I could understand some communities banning oil changing on the street given the convenient storm drains for illegally dumping your waste oil, but I don't know of any that have. It's easy to dispose of used oil. Any store that sells oil is required to accept used oil for recycling, which I suppose is probably the national norm.
In any case, on-street repairs are not practical much of the year due to lousy weather. Most people would prefer to do the work in their garage if they have one.
Well, I've voted in Presidential elections since 1980, and this one doesn't seem more divisive than normal. If anything, it might be less so because of a general lack of enthusiasm for Romney in the Republican camp.
What Obama has to deal with is an unwillingness of many Republicans to accept the legitimacy of his presidency, no matter how strong his popular or electoral college wins are. We saw that with the ridiculous kerfluffle over the Chief Justice's administration of the oath of office (with some even claiming there should be no do-overs!). We see that in the continued birtherism in Republican ranks. What will happen is that support for the president will fall along partisan lines, with the Republicans fairly solidly against him and the Democrats behind him, but not reliably so. That's purely a matter of party character, not anything special about this election.
So a lot depends on the down-ballot elections. It's the sheer number of Republicans in each house that creates problems for Obama, not election-mojo. As it stands the Democrats will *probably* retain their majority in the Senate and the Republicans will *certainly* retain their majority in the House. If one party were to do significantly better than expected in both houses, signaling some kind of change in momentum, it is possible there might be some kind of election mojo effect. But I don't expect that to happen. I expect at least two more years of the same kind of politics we've had for the last two years, with Democrats holding on to a razor thin majority in the Senate and the Republicans maintaining a strong gerrymandering-secured lead in the House.
Check out the image to conventional portrait of Curiosity in the Wikipedia entry. You'll see there is a robotic arm mounted on the front of the rover that does not appear in the self portrait.
If you think of the robotic arm as analogous to a human arm, it has a pair of motors at the "shoulder" (for two axes of motion), one at the "elbow" and another pair at the "wrist". In the self portrait only the "shoulder" of the arm is visible -- you can see one of the motors (which looks like a pair of stacked black cylinders) adjacent to the nearest wheel at roughly the ten o'clock position. The arm itself would be on the other side of the joint from that motor, but it is replaced in the composite shot by a picture of the ground behind where it would be taken when the arm was in a different position.
It took a clever bit of planning to make this image.
Well, when the Ford Model T was introduced in 1908 at $850 ($ in current dollars), the next cheapest automobile you could buy cost over $3000, which is roughly $74K in 2012 dollars. Take the cheapest car you can buy today, say a Nissan Verso at $11,000 list. Cheap as it is, that car probably cost millions to develop, and if it were sold in the quantities that pre-Model T cars were sold it might well cost north of $50,000, just to amortize the engineering costs.
By 1908 standards, the Verso would be a marvel of engineering, yet it's $11K price tag when adjusted to 1908 dollars is only $446. That's far cheaper than the $850 price tag of the Model T. Two things make this amazingly low price: a century of experience in how to design and manufacture internal combustion engine vehicles, and huge sales volumes.
An early adopter for any technological innovation pays a steep premium. It's not range that has held back the electric car -- not in a society where four-car families is common. It's the early adopter premium you pay for new technology. That comes from having to figure out how to do so many new things (or get around limitations of current technology), and the small number of people who are willing to take the plunge with an immature technology.
It's not a case of the management at Tesla sitting down and saying to themselves, "What would be a good price for this car? How about $78,500?" $78,500 is no doubt the profit maximizing price. When the technology matures, they can *also* obtain economies of scale they can't get now. Economies of scale offered by lower prices would be overwhelmed by lack of technological know-how. This is why Tesla is focusing on the exotic car segment. Exotic cars are expected to be expensive and not entirely practical. They've produced a car which is expensive and lacks the full range of practicality of current ICE (i.e., no cross-country road trips). That's a canny way to bootstrap the development of a future model that will be the Model T of electric cars.
Your argument isn't internally self-consistent. You can't cite a history of unrest, civil war, and warlordism as proof of an inherent tendency toward orderliness and complacency in the Chinese character. Neither Buddhism nor Taoism (or Islam for that matter - there are many Chinese Muslims) has stopped people from being revolutionaries in the past. So what accounts for Chinese the current complacency toward the government?
The history of China is a history of bureaucratic inertia, court infighting and official corruption squandering China's abundant native resolution and ingenuity. Officials have always tried to hide bad news, either from their superiors or from the people, and the communist party is simply practicing more of the same. They get away with it for now because over the last generation the material welfare of most people in China has gotten better. People don't overthrow regimes when they feel like there is progress, even if the regimes are somewhat corrupt and self-serving. At present people badly served by the party can be marginalized -- rural provincials, Uyghurs, religious minorities -- all can be swept under the rug of up-and-coming urban masses. At present.
The Communists have had control of China for just over 60 years now. That's not very long in the history of China. When the party faces a serious crisis of confidence, you'll see exactly how complacent the Chinese people are. If there were a society where everyone was always on time, that society wouldn't have a word for "punctuality". In a world where nobody lied, "honesty" wouldn't be in the dictionary. The fact that "stability" is such an important part of the Chinese political lexicon should tell you something.
So, this is the same UN who keeps batting around the idea of making blasphemy universally illegal. Great! Can't wait to have them handling my internet traffic!
You make the UN is sound pretty good. Most of the nations of the world have representation in the UN, so all kinds of minority viewpoint proposals are bound to be floated, some on a regular basis. These proposals never go anywhere because they are unpopular. Altogether that sounds like a system that's quite reasonable: unpopular ideas are not quashed, but they aren't forced on everyone either.
Several things about this storm make it "huge", but the most important is that it is, literally, *huge*. The wind speed may not be high compared to hurricanes that routinely cut across Florida, but the sheer geographic scope of the thing is astonishing -- nearly a *thousand* miles across. You could line up two Floridas on a line from the Keys to the Panhandle and *two* would fit in the diameter of this storm. What this means is that many places that might have dodged the bullet of past hurricanes moving up the East Coast are facing something more like a cluster bomb. An individual bomblet might not be as lethal as a well placed bullet, but the whole package is far more deadly.
The second things about the storm is that it is moving slowly. This means places will endure the winds and rain longer, and many coastal areas will be facing *two* near-record storm surges. Astonishing quantities of precipitation are going to fall over the storm's thousand mile swath. There are are places inland that are projected to get four feet of snow.
The third thing about this storm is that it isn't petering out. It is interacting with other weather systems and actually becoming slightly more energetic where a normal storm would be dying. This means it's going to retain high tropical force winds much farther north than normally felt. There will be a lot of vulnerable structures that have not been tested by such strong winds recently, if ever. Same for trees. There are going to be power outages on tremendous scales and it'll be the death of a thousand cuts by falling tree limbs. The storm is just getting into swing here in Massachusetts, and already we've got over fifty thousand homes without electricity.
So this is the real deal -- a bona-fide super-storm like the Blizzard of '78 or the Halloween Northeaster/Perfect Storm of '91. There have been larger storms, and there have been storms with far more spot destructive power, but few that spread destructive power over such a large area for so long.
I think "freedom of speech" is misnamed. Freedom of speech is meaningless unless it is accompanied by a corresponding "freedom to hear". Both freedom to speak and freedom to hear unpopular speech are necessary for a citizenry to be well-informed and to engage in intelligent debate on maters of public policy.
The government deprives US citizens of the right to hear independent viewpoints when it harasses foreign visitors for disagreeing with US policies.
Just because the job takes place in public, doesn't make everything a public act.
Err... At least in most of the US, you've got this exactly wrong. Something that happens in a public place is necessarily a public act -- note that "public place" includes private property where the public is allowed to enter freely. There is no expectation of privacy for acts that take place in plain sight in public, although using things like listening devices to record a private conversation taking place in a public place is a no-no. There was a landmark case a few years ago involving the recording of paramedics; video footage was OK because they were working in public areas where anyone could see, but putting a microphone on the EMTs violated the patient's expectation of privacy because while bystanders could normally *see* the paramedics at work, they couldn't normally hear the conversation with the patients.
There's a big difference between a random joe and a journalist in a civilized society.
Again not true. Journalists aren't licensed or given special investigatory powers. They have no more or less legal power to investigate than any other private citizen. Journalists are issued credentials by private parties, which is a private license -- like an invitation to a party. It allows the journalist to attend restricted events, to use special areas set aside for media etc. Others who have business at an event can record and publish their impressions too, even if they have been denied credentials (as sometimes happens when the event organizer expects negative coverage).
I'm sure he'd have liked to get the perfect photograph by lying on the ground beneath the arrest, "not touching you, not touching you!"
And what if the mall cops dragged the guy they were arresting to the local TV station and beaten the crap out of him in front of the cameras broadcasting the 6 PM news? Can't see the relevancy of that scenario? Of course you can't, because it has nothing to do with what actually happened. Just like your scenario.
The arguments you give are either unsupported (he has no right to take photos -- citations please?), wrong (reporters have special investigatory powers -- what law says that?), weak (photographing the security guards causes the security guards distressed -- is that a general rule then? You aren't allowed to do things that cause others distress?) or totally irrelevant (if he'd lain down on the ground beneath the arrest he'd have been interfering -- except he didn't do that).
The owner of the mall is a giant retail conglomerate called "Ivanhoé Cambridge", headquartered in Montreal with properties in Canada, the US, Europe and South America.
You can see if they have a property close to you that you can boycott on their website. Then you can inform them via their contact page.
No problem. I read TFA too and I figured you'd just misread it. You're right about the shortness of the gap, but I took the poster's intent as being that the government shouldn't provide weather data at all, leaving that to the private sector. I was addressing that scenario (the government gets out of the weather data business) rather than the gap scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a real asshole.
Especially because the entire worth of the domain is in its association with the project. It's not like "pets.com" or "sex.com" or something where people will look for the domain's web site because of the domain's name. The domain name "cyanogenmod.com" has no legitimate value at all except as a link to the project. There is no way to get an revenue out of controlling this domain name other than blackmailing the project or deceiving users.
Actually you make my point. Superpowers don't take kindly to being jerked around by small countries over strategic resources, which is why many small, resource-rich countries end up run by corrupt, compliant regimes. In a cooler-heads-prevail scenario the oil card is a good one to hold in your hand, but we're not talking about a cooler-heads-prevail scenario. We're talking about an alternate-history scenario where hysterical hotheads hijack the state, and they'd be bound to push their luck too far.
Venezuela (which is just a bit larger than Texas) gets away with it because they're just an annoyance. They have no choice but to sell their oil on the international market, so Hugo Chavez can shoot his mouth off all he wants. But if Venezuela actually had some kind of strategic hold over US energy supplies, Chavez would not be in power long.
I'm not signing, out of respect for the 41.4% of Texans who voted for Obama and the fraction of the 57.2% who voted for Romney who aren't loudmouthed fatheads. Together they surely form a majority of Texas voters.
Well the Soviets did it, which shows it *can* be done, albeit perhaps messily.
But even under the best assumptions, it would not be a happy situation for Texans. They'd be dominated militarily and economically by the United States, bottled up in the northwest corner of the Gulf of Mexico with unfriendly states on either side and a burgeoning Hispanic population internally to keep under control.
And the words "fiscal cliff" has nothing to do with this?
The problem is that they're expecting a renewed recession when taxes go up and government spending goes down. The government will be taking more money out of the economy and putting less into it.
Anybody as freaked out by current government borrowing as you describe is simply being hysterical. Sure the deficit at a historical high in absolute terms, but its nowhere near a historical high as percent of GDP. On top of that the government is currently borrowing money at or below the rate of inflation. It'd be insane not to borrow when people are in effect *paying* us to hold onto it for them. Check out the recent ten year treasury rate and compare it to inflation.
No business would worry about borrowing money at an interest rate below what it can earn by holding onto the cash it already has. That's why *every* large business borrows money, even when it's profitable. It's counter-intuitive if you think of business and government budgeting like they were normal household budgeting, but business and governments aren't like typical private households. Even wealthy *individuals* borrow money when the interest rates are favorable. I once had a wealthy young trust fund kid working for me who borrowed money from the bank to buy a yacht. It made no sense for him to liquidate his investments when those investments earned more than the bank's interest rate.
There's a time to worry about government borrowing, and that's in a full economy where dollars in the private sector are creating jobs like crazy. Nobody seems to worry about austerity then, when interest rates are high, but they should. But when interest rates are low, suddenly people freak out about borrowing money. It's hysterical fear, that's all.
Well, I don't know about "extremist", but "alarmist" might be better. "Sloppy" might be best of all.
That climate change has national security implications is kind of a "well, duh" proposition. Of course it has national security implications, through its potentially destabilizing effect on other nations at the very least. Climate change has a huge impact on the military due to its effect on vector borne infectious diseases. Only recently have historians begun to appreciate the huge and possibly decisive impact malaria had on the American Revolution, and to this day the US military has considerable public health efforts to protect the immunologically naive American troops, who grew up in a hygienic temperate environment, deployed in tropical or squalid conditions.
The executive branch has regulatory and monitoring functions assigned to it by Congress, and considerable leeway in implementing policy within the constraints established by legislation. For example it may be tasked with monitoring the spread of agricultural pests -- a topic closely related in several ways to climate change. Within that function it can draft regulations and propose programs which it then submits budget requests to Congress.
So the executive branch has considerable influence on how or even whether the US government responds to the prospect of climate change. It's hardly extreme to suggest the executive branch should have a policy stance toward it. It's just wooly-headed to compare it to terrorism, a totally different kind of security concern with different causes, different effects, and very different planning horizons.
Car analogy time. I have a neighbor who drives a BMW. I drive a Honda Accord. We both like our cars for good reasons. He likes the things he can do with this car. I have no desire to do those things, and I appreciate the simple, well thought-out control layout of the Honda. They're both great cars for different reasons, and they both objectively fit our subjective needs better than the other would.
One thing that Linux has made apparent over the last decade is there doesn't have to be One True Desktop that everyone has to use. I've tried KDE and found that the bells and whistles are intriguing but not something that really makes much of a difference to me. I think part of this is that I no longer live in a totally desktop-centric world, spending considerable time on tablets and smartphones so I appreciate the marginal features of KDE less and the simplicity of XFCE more. Others may have different needs.
That's not to say I don't find occasions where I'd rather be using KDE or Gnome, but by in large I'm happy with my day to day use of XFCE as I am driving my boring but functional Accord. The analogy isn't perfect since the Accord is almost without exception well thought out and XFCE has a few rough spots -- someone else mentioned Thunar and I totally agree it should be better. But you have to judge a desktop environment by its overall effect, and I appreciate XFCE's simplicity, responsiveness, and predictability.
Disclaimer: some of the opinions are based on using Ubuntu, and my opinions no doubt have been shaped by the distro's choices of KDE releases -- to say nothing of Gnome! This may well be another virtue of XFCE, that its focus on producing a simple and conventional desktop rather than a "cutting edge" desktop results in fewer distro-introduced hiccups in the user experience.
The problem is *terroir*. Consider a wine grape from Burgundy. Grow it in Sonoma County and it will produce a different wine, albeit with some similarities. Modern oenology allows mass produced wines to achieve consistency even in "bad" years, so climate change is not going to have much effect on a cheap mass produced table wine, short of total collapse in production. Far before your $20 bottle of chardonnay becomes hard to find, many small craft wineries producing maybe 5000 bottles of high end wine will go out of business. The expertise needed to run them won't necessarily migrate to the new ideal areas for cultivation, if they exist, and even if the expertise does move it won't be producing the same wines.
Similarly you aren't going to see any climate driven change in the taste of a cup of Maxwell House, although prices may rise or fall depending on how climate change affects supply. For example if climate change makes growing arabica beans unprofitable in some regions, those regions might start to plant the hardier and cheaper C. robusta. The result may be cheaper supermarket coffee. Or not.
What you are more likely to lose are certain high end varietal coffees like Ethiopian Harrar (my personal favorite) that are grown in areas which are vulnerable to changes in climate. It is possible (although not certain) that ideal conditions for coffee may appear in other places to compensate for the loss of current varietal coffee plantations, but it will take years, possibly decades to find these places and develop an international market and reputation for their product.
Actually, the job of Congressman is crap; you get egoboo but you're a slave to fundraising and spend as much or more time in shabby political boiler room offices calling around begging for money as you do in your nice government office. It's stunningly degrading, and the average person wouldn't be able to stand it. You probably helps to be a major attention-hound, but it still stinks. It's much better when you get out of Congress and become a lobbyist who can afford to screen his calls.
Well, you don't win elections by having more people wanting to vote for you. You win elections by having more people actually get to the polls and cast a vote for you. GOTV is critical in winning a race unless you're are totally blowing the other guy away, as in CA where Obama got almost 21% more votes than Romney.
Still, there's something in what you say. Obama's margins in the swing states this year weren't landslides, but they were pretty solid in a lot of those states:
NV (6EV): 4.6%
IA (6EV): 5.6%
CO (9EV): 3.7%
WI (10EV): 6.7%
VA (13EV): 3%
NC (15EV): -2.4% (Romney win)
OH (18EV): 1.9%
FL (29EV): 0.5%
It's easy to imagine that without Obama's GOTV effort he'd have lost at least FL and OH -- and conceivably (although less likely) in VA and CO. Flipping all four of those states would shift 69 electoral votes, bringing Obama down from 332 to 263 and Romney up from 206 to 275 for a bare win.
It's easy to imagine a better Romney GOTV effort flipping Florida, maybe even Ohio, but that's not enough. He'd have to scare up another 108K Romney voters in VA who stayed at home, and in Colorado another 85K. That seems unlikely, so an improved Romney GOTV operation alone would probably not have changed this election. You'd have to get rid of Obama's GOTV operation, in which case a successful Romney operation might *barely* have flipped this to the Republicans.
What is striking when you look at these swing state numbers is that we're talking about eight states and less than 20% of the total electoral college here. To win, a Republican has to pick up 79 of those 106 electoral votes. A Democrat has to win 32. It's no wonder the math geeks were favoring Obama so early and consistently. Writing off almost the entire Northeast and California, Republicans have to sweep the three largest swing states to win. Things are going to get tougher on the Republicans. This year, even the Cuban-Americans in Fl favored Obama; within a generation demographic changes could flip Texas to the Democrats, unless the Republicans get their act together with Hispanics.
So blame Romney's shortcomings as a candidate if you like. Blame his GOTV effort. Blame Karl Rove, Nate Silver, or even the 47%. But don't forget to blame the Southern Strategy. It gave the Republicans a good ride for a few decades, but change is turning it into a strategic millstone around Republicans' necks. Since George H. W. Bush vs. Mike Dukakis there have been six elections, of which the Republicans have won two but *barely*. Even with Obama's economic vulnerabilities, his 332-206 win over Romney eclipses the Republicans' strongest electoral college victory in the last twenty years (286 Bush to 251 Kerry).
Well, I have to agree with you, in that you're making a statement in a form that can't be refuted without proving a negative by example. But it's a straw man argument. The question is whether certain recreational drugs can improve programmer performance -- not whether programmer performance can be improved without drugs. Of course it can. Getting a good night's sleep on a regular basis probably would beat any kind of mind enhancing drug, at least for people with poor sleep habits.
There's a difference between pillorying somebody for something they actually did and doing it for something you imagined they did. Seriously, death panels? Birtherism? Being a secret Muslim? Plotting to take away everyone's guns? It's not only contemptible, it's alarmingly paranoid. This kind of shaky grip on reality goes all the way back to the notion that the Clintons plotted to have people murdered in Arkansas.
Not that there weren't cheap shots taken at George W. -- like painting him as stupid, which he wasn't. Or rumors that he was back in the bottle. But the real gripes people had with Bush was that he invaded Iraq under false pretenses and that his administration's response to Katrina was incompetent and his personal response was almost incredibly tin-eared. Those are things that unquestionably happened. The biggest gripe people had was that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 occurred on his watch, which is unquestionably true, although it had been brewing for some time and other players (Alan Greenspan, Wall Street in general) had a big role in creating it. Still, the perception was that the crisis occurred because of regulatory policies that were consistent with Bush's philosophy of government, and I think there is some justice in this. He should have, by his own philosophy, let the banks fail; but he was unprepared for that eventuality and didn't have the stomach to let the economy collapse in order to maintain his laissez-faire principles.
In this election, the Republicans have only themselves for the failure of their ambitions to capture the White House and the Senate. It was their *own* BS, not other people's BS that sank them. Akin and Mourdock torpedoed their own senate campaigns by making remarks only someone who is unaccustomed to talking within earshot of people who disagree with him could make. I'm not one who usually criticizes people for changing their minds, which in moderation is an admirable thing, but Mitt Romney's rapid and radical shifts in position were so clearly motivated by expediency he handed Obama a trump card in this election. Romney played the economic discontent card, and Obama played the "can you really trust this guy?" card. That might not be pretty, but anyone with any sense would play that card if their opponent was foolish enough to hand it to them.
"Balance" means giving equal scrutiny to *facts* on either side of an issue, not equal scrutiny to conclusions. That's not balance, it's false equivalence. You can decry pettiness on both sides -- and I'm with you. Liberals have just as much capacity for hypocrisy when they smell blood in the water as conservatives. I got myself pilloried on DailyKos a few years back for objecting to the sexist treatment of Carrie Prejean there, so I've experienced it firsthand. Hypocrisy is something it takes more integrity to guard against than most people have. But just because all sides engage in it doesn't mean that all politicians are equally good or bad, or that all criticisms of politicians are equally unfounded.
I agree with this. Many of the tasks affected by the law are easy ones -- if you can figure out that they need to be done.
The most common engine repair is replacing a bad O2 sensor -- accounting for over 9% of all engine repairs. That's an easy fix, but increasingly these days requires a specialized tool for no purpose other than making the job hard for a DIY'er. Also accounting for over 9% of engine repairs is a bad seal on fuel filler caps, which cause the "check engine" light to go on. Fixing that is surely a DIY project, if you can read the fault code from the car's computer.
Doesn't that state also have a bunch of local ordinances that prohibit working on your car in your driveway or parked on the street?
-jcr
Nope. Not as far as I know.
This is the first I've ever heard of that and I've lived in Massachusetts all my life. I've worked on my car in the street with no complaints, and see others do it all the time. I don't see how you could ban *all* working on cars. If you've got a flat tire or a bad headlight, what would you be supposed to do? I could understand some communities banning oil changing on the street given the convenient storm drains for illegally dumping your waste oil, but I don't know of any that have. It's easy to dispose of used oil. Any store that sells oil is required to accept used oil for recycling, which I suppose is probably the national norm.
In any case, on-street repairs are not practical much of the year due to lousy weather. Most people would prefer to do the work in their garage if they have one.
Well, I've voted in Presidential elections since 1980, and this one doesn't seem more divisive than normal. If anything, it might be less so because of a general lack of enthusiasm for Romney in the Republican camp.
What Obama has to deal with is an unwillingness of many Republicans to accept the legitimacy of his presidency, no matter how strong his popular or electoral college wins are. We saw that with the ridiculous kerfluffle over the Chief Justice's administration of the oath of office (with some even claiming there should be no do-overs!). We see that in the continued birtherism in Republican ranks. What will happen is that support for the president will fall along partisan lines, with the Republicans fairly solidly against him and the Democrats behind him, but not reliably so. That's purely a matter of party character, not anything special about this election.
So a lot depends on the down-ballot elections. It's the sheer number of Republicans in each house that creates problems for Obama, not election-mojo. As it stands the Democrats will *probably* retain their majority in the Senate and the Republicans will *certainly* retain their majority in the House. If one party were to do significantly better than expected in both houses, signaling some kind of change in momentum, it is possible there might be some kind of election mojo effect. But I don't expect that to happen. I expect at least two more years of the same kind of politics we've had for the last two years, with Democrats holding on to a razor thin majority in the Senate and the Republicans maintaining a strong gerrymandering-secured lead in the House.
Check out the image to conventional portrait of Curiosity in the Wikipedia entry. You'll see there is a robotic arm mounted on the front of the rover that does not appear in the self portrait.
If you think of the robotic arm as analogous to a human arm, it has a pair of motors at the "shoulder" (for two axes of motion), one at the "elbow" and another pair at the "wrist". In the self portrait only the "shoulder" of the arm is visible -- you can see one of the motors (which looks like a pair of stacked black cylinders) adjacent to the nearest wheel at roughly the ten o'clock position. The arm itself would be on the other side of the joint from that motor, but it is replaced in the composite shot by a picture of the ground behind where it would be taken when the arm was in a different position.
It took a clever bit of planning to make this image.
Well, when the Ford Model T was introduced in 1908 at $850 ($ in current dollars), the next cheapest automobile you could buy cost over $3000, which is roughly $74K in 2012 dollars. Take the cheapest car you can buy today, say a Nissan Verso at $11,000 list. Cheap as it is, that car probably cost millions to develop, and if it were sold in the quantities that pre-Model T cars were sold it might well cost north of $50,000, just to amortize the engineering costs.
By 1908 standards, the Verso would be a marvel of engineering, yet it's $11K price tag when adjusted to 1908 dollars is only $446. That's far cheaper than the $850 price tag of the Model T. Two things make this amazingly low price: a century of experience in how to design and manufacture internal combustion engine vehicles, and huge sales volumes.
An early adopter for any technological innovation pays a steep premium. It's not range that has held back the electric car -- not in a society where four-car families is common. It's the early adopter premium you pay for new technology. That comes from having to figure out how to do so many new things (or get around limitations of current technology), and the small number of people who are willing to take the plunge with an immature technology.
It's not a case of the management at Tesla sitting down and saying to themselves, "What would be a good price for this car? How about $78,500?" $78,500 is no doubt the profit maximizing price. When the technology matures, they can *also* obtain economies of scale they can't get now. Economies of scale offered by lower prices would be overwhelmed by lack of technological know-how. This is why Tesla is focusing on the exotic car segment. Exotic cars are expected to be expensive and not entirely practical. They've produced a car which is expensive and lacks the full range of practicality of current ICE (i.e., no cross-country road trips). That's a canny way to bootstrap the development of a future model that will be the Model T of electric cars.
Your argument isn't internally self-consistent. You can't cite a history of unrest, civil war, and warlordism as proof of an inherent tendency toward orderliness and complacency in the Chinese character. Neither Buddhism nor Taoism (or Islam for that matter - there are many Chinese Muslims) has stopped people from being revolutionaries in the past. So what accounts for Chinese the current complacency toward the government?
The history of China is a history of bureaucratic inertia, court infighting and official corruption squandering China's abundant native resolution and ingenuity. Officials have always tried to hide bad news, either from their superiors or from the people, and the communist party is simply practicing more of the same. They get away with it for now because over the last generation the material welfare of most people in China has gotten better. People don't overthrow regimes when they feel like there is progress, even if the regimes are somewhat corrupt and self-serving. At present people badly served by the party can be marginalized -- rural provincials, Uyghurs, religious minorities -- all can be swept under the rug of up-and-coming urban masses. At present.
The Communists have had control of China for just over 60 years now. That's not very long in the history of China. When the party faces a serious crisis of confidence, you'll see exactly how complacent the Chinese people are. If there were a society where everyone was always on time, that society wouldn't have a word for "punctuality". In a world where nobody lied, "honesty" wouldn't be in the dictionary. The fact that "stability" is such an important part of the Chinese political lexicon should tell you something.
So, this is the same UN who keeps batting around the idea of making blasphemy universally illegal. Great! Can't wait to have them handling my internet traffic!
You make the UN is sound pretty good. Most of the nations of the world have representation in the UN, so all kinds of minority viewpoint proposals are bound to be floated, some on a regular basis. These proposals never go anywhere because they are unpopular. Altogether that sounds like a system that's quite reasonable: unpopular ideas are not quashed, but they aren't forced on everyone either.
Several things about this storm make it "huge", but the most important is that it is, literally, *huge*. The wind speed may not be high compared to hurricanes that routinely cut across Florida, but the sheer geographic scope of the thing is astonishing -- nearly a *thousand* miles across. You could line up two Floridas on a line from the Keys to the Panhandle and *two* would fit in the diameter of this storm. What this means is that many places that might have dodged the bullet of past hurricanes moving up the East Coast are facing something more like a cluster bomb. An individual bomblet might not be as lethal as a well placed bullet, but the whole package is far more deadly.
The second things about the storm is that it is moving slowly. This means places will endure the winds and rain longer, and many coastal areas will be facing *two* near-record storm surges. Astonishing quantities of precipitation are going to fall over the storm's thousand mile swath. There are are places inland that are projected to get four feet of snow.
The third thing about this storm is that it isn't petering out. It is interacting with other weather systems and actually becoming slightly more energetic where a normal storm would be dying. This means it's going to retain high tropical force winds much farther north than normally felt. There will be a lot of vulnerable structures that have not been tested by such strong winds recently, if ever. Same for trees. There are going to be power outages on tremendous scales and it'll be the death of a thousand cuts by falling tree limbs. The storm is just getting into swing here in Massachusetts, and already we've got over fifty thousand homes without electricity.
So this is the real deal -- a bona-fide super-storm like the Blizzard of '78 or the Halloween Northeaster/Perfect Storm of '91. There have been larger storms, and there have been storms with far more spot destructive power, but few that spread destructive power over such a large area for so long.
I think "freedom of speech" is misnamed. Freedom of speech is meaningless unless it is accompanied by a corresponding "freedom to hear". Both freedom to speak and freedom to hear unpopular speech are necessary for a citizenry to be well-informed and to engage in intelligent debate on maters of public policy.
The government deprives US citizens of the right to hear independent viewpoints when it harasses foreign visitors for disagreeing with US policies.
Just because the job takes place in public, doesn't make everything a public act.
Err... At least in most of the US, you've got this exactly wrong. Something that happens in a public place is necessarily a public act -- note that "public place" includes private property where the public is allowed to enter freely. There is no expectation of privacy for acts that take place in plain sight in public, although using things like listening devices to record a private conversation taking place in a public place is a no-no. There was a landmark case a few years ago involving the recording of paramedics; video footage was OK because they were working in public areas where anyone could see, but putting a microphone on the EMTs violated the patient's expectation of privacy because while bystanders could normally *see* the paramedics at work, they couldn't normally hear the conversation with the patients.
There's a big difference between a random joe and a journalist in a civilized society.
Again not true. Journalists aren't licensed or given special investigatory powers. They have no more or less legal power to investigate than any other private citizen. Journalists are issued credentials by private parties, which is a private license -- like an invitation to a party. It allows the journalist to attend restricted events, to use special areas set aside for media etc. Others who have business at an event can record and publish their impressions too, even if they have been denied credentials (as sometimes happens when the event organizer expects negative coverage).
I'm sure he'd have liked to get the perfect photograph by lying on the ground beneath the arrest, "not touching you, not touching you!"
And what if the mall cops dragged the guy they were arresting to the local TV station and beaten the crap out of him in front of the cameras broadcasting the 6 PM news? Can't see the relevancy of that scenario? Of course you can't, because it has nothing to do with what actually happened. Just like your scenario.
The arguments you give are either unsupported (he has no right to take photos -- citations please?), wrong (reporters have special investigatory powers -- what law says that?), weak (photographing the security guards causes the security guards distressed -- is that a general rule then? You aren't allowed to do things that cause others distress?) or totally irrelevant (if he'd lain down on the ground beneath the arrest he'd have been interfering -- except he didn't do that).
The owner of the mall is a giant retail conglomerate called "Ivanhoé Cambridge", headquartered in Montreal with properties in Canada, the US, Europe and South America.
You can see if they have a property close to you that you can boycott on their website. Then you can inform them via their contact page.
No problem. I read TFA too and I figured you'd just misread it. You're right about the shortness of the gap, but I took the poster's intent as being that the government shouldn't provide weather data at all, leaving that to the private sector. I was addressing that scenario (the government gets out of the weather data business) rather than the gap scenario.
This will raise the Linux community's credibility with the public.