Kennedy is not even a "liberalish" judge. He's a conservative judge appointed by Ronald Reagan. He perhaps isn't up to the wacky standards of Scalia and Thomas, but that doesn't change who he is.
One of the things that really annoys me about the last 30 years is how Conservatives keep getting us to move the idealogical goalposts, even though the general public's ideology hasn't changed much at all.
Next up - statistics, man. The average trip is 16 miles. That does not mean that 50% of the people
Actually, that's a very good point. Median != Mean. I have co-workers who commute 60 miles every day. It doesn't take many of those to raise the average rather high.
You're using old data. I'm going to do something heretical here, and consult TFA...
From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you'll see in the film is the change. It's been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly.
Ummm....I pretty sure no known Ape species exhibits a lot of herding behavior.
Chimps, the closest related extant species to humans, live in smallish tribes. They band together quite often for hunting and warfare with other tribes, but otherwise are even more individualistic than humans are.
If anything, the behavioral problem associated with "civilization" is the need for poeple to behave less like individuals and more like a herd, so that larger populations can live together without constantly breaking into tribes and starting to kill each other. So if you are looking for why some kind of chemical behavioral alteration might have been required, your need to look in exactly the opposite direction.
Ironworking appears to have been known in North America, but very few iron tools were made, possibly because stone tools had evolved far beyond anything seen in Eurasia.
If you want a good explanation for why. I'd suggest reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. If you want a lazy Slashdot answer instead, I suggest trying to imagine a (horseless) tribe trying to follow a buffalo herd around the plains while dragging an anvil with them on a dog travios (drag sled).
Well, if your personal definition of "truly rediculous" is 1 hour, and you do (based on your first message) about 21km in that time, then the average USA commute is a good 5KM too far for you. In other words, most people in the USA can't do what you are doing based on the distance alone.
What do you consider a "truly ridiculous commute"? I note from your units you aren't from the USA. My commute here is 10 miles (16km), and that's pretty modest by our standards. The average is supposedly 16 miles (approaching 26km).
I've done the bicycle commute thing for a couple of years, so I have a bit of personal experience on this. Let me tell you, bike commuting here in the USA is not for the feint of heart. We don't have bike lanes in most places, and sidewalks are often viewed as a newfangled invention for the effitte. If you try to use the roadways, you will be sharing them with 2+ ton vehicles whose drivers are utterly shocked to see you, if they notice you at all.
Also, average temperatures here are firmly in the sweat zone, so you'd better have an employer that provides shower facilities. Places that don't have summer temperatures in the 100's (F) typically have outright dangerous conditions in the winter.
Don't get me wrong, all this makes for a great workout, if you can do it. But it is just not practical for all but a few people.
I've heard some talk about encouraging live tweeting at my Church too. We are not one of those new touchy-feely casual contemporary churches, and our services are about as old-school as you can get without doing it all in Latin. We don't really want to change that, so I guess there is a lot of searching to find some way to freshen our appeal without changing what our current membership loves. This seems to be exactly the situation you are in.
Where livetweeting is really successful is sporting events. Having participated myself, and thought about it a bit wrt. Church services, I do have some thoughts on the subject.
Livetweeting has two basic flavors for two different purposes. The first is "official" tweets, which can be used live to report on the action during an event. This cheifly only for the benefit of those who cannot watch live or follow a radio feed, but still want reports of the "action." The question here is what would the "action" of a symphony or a church service be? In your symphonic case, I'm no expert, but I'd guess that if a particular piece or movement was particularly well-received it might be worth mentioning. At the least, you might report on the peices being performed. Again, not being a symphony fan I'm not sure how useful one would find that.
The other kind of livetweeting done for sporting events is unofficial tweets from fans. The main value of this is actually for them to discuss events with each other as they happen. It is a bonding experience between fans, and can significantly enhance the experience for those watching. I liken it to watching the game in a big virtual sports bar. This could add value for an event like a symphony, but it would be difficult to get a good critical mass of live tweeters at an event that is being witnessed by at most a few hundred people.
No kids on twitter, huh? So explain to me why one of the trending tags last night had to do with Justin Beiber's hampter dying. Is that what concerns "middle-aged dads" these days?
Well, I'm gratified that at least you start by pointing to the right place. Section 8 gives Congress the powers to tax, borrow, and spend federal money. Section 9 spells out what limits there are on what Congress can do with said taxes and monies. Note that there's no general prohibition on lending there (or giving away).
Is this some weird interpretation I have? Well, if so, I share it with the very first Congress, filled with crafters and signers of the Constution, who thought so highly of the Federal Government lending money that they created a Federal Bank. Admittedly Thomas Jefferson was among those that disagreed, and at least one other objector (James Madison) tried to site the same 10th ammendent you try to site. However, the first Congress felt otherwise, President George Washinton felt otherwise, the Supreme Court did not even bother taking up any such objections, and this has been a settled issue in American Constitutional Law for over two centuries.
Now you may feel in your heart of hearts that your reading is more correct, and mine, most of the framers, most everyone else's, and 200 years of congressional and Supreme Court practice is wrong. That's certianly your perrogative. But the rest of us will continue to go on our merry way regardless. Frankly, the fact that the Courts habitually agree with a certian interpretation makes it right, no matter what someone else thinks they see in there.
1: It ain't Congress' job. See the Constitution (but we've covered that).
Yes, we have indeed covered that you have some imaginary Constitution in your head that says the US Government can't lend or give money out. However, I kind of insist on using the real US Constitution, which (fortunately) says no such thing.
If you want to believe otherwise as a matter of personal faith, that's your business. However, if you want to argue the point publicly with me, I'm going to have to insist you start by pointing out the exact articles that say this foolish thing you seem to think they say.
With the banks, I mostly agree (although I think a better complaint would be that the government got itself in a position where it felt it had to bail out banks to prevent another Great Depression. A situation that I don't believe has been rectified)
With the automakers, this is pretty clearly hookum. Without the auto bailout GM, and possibly Chrysler would be gone today. While from a market purist standpoint that might have been an OK result, from the standpoint of someone who cares about things like jobs and manufacturing capability in the USA, it would have been inarguably a far worse situation than we have today. It is most certianly the US government's job to worry about such things.
In the end the responsible management at GM was fired (exactly the right heads to roll), most of the jobs were saved, the companies are doing much better than before, and the taxpayer made money on the loans. So why am I supposed to be upset about this? Because it made the ghost of Ayn Rand cry or something?
The Constitution gives Congress the right to pass laws reguarding the disposition of Federal funds, and nothing in there says they can't use those funds to loan (or heck, even give) money to individuals or businesses. Both are done all the time, and in fact have been since the days of the very first Congress. Not only have both parties done this, but every party in US history that had a majority in Congress has done it, going right back to the Federalists.
From a finiancial standpoint, complaining about this is even dumber. The US Government made money on this deal. Even if you take the entire program together, including some prominent defaults, the US Government has made a higher return on this loan program than the T-Bill rate. In other words, spending money on these loans was a better deal for the taxpayer than paying down the debt by that amount would have been. If anything, our finances would be better off if the program were expanded.
You've got that backwards. If Microsoft makes their documentation more useful than StackOverflow, then it will float to the top of your typical Google result on its own.
My last one was half lab and half German Shepherd. So in addition to being on the large side (80 pounds), she was naturally very hyper. She also, for whatever reason, had a very dominant peronsality, so you really had to keep on top of her or she'd try to take over the family. Choke chains and the occasional "physical correction" were an absoulte nessecity. However, she was eminently trainable.
My current dog is half Great Pyraneese and the other half probably some kind of hound. She is naturally very passive. Simlply starting to get upset with her is more than enough "correction". Escalating to any kind of physical contact does nothing further but make her pee herself. IOW: just plain cruelty. Despite years of constant effort, she just cannot be fully house-trained. I looked up the breed, and Great Pyranese are known for that little problem. If picking up dog poo IN THE HOUSE is a no-go for you, then do not get this breed. That's all there is to it.
The fact is that dogs are all different, and may very well have undesirable behaviors that they cannot be trained out of. That includes inappropriate barking, chewing, defication, dominace attempts, and other such canine activities.
Dogs are not inifinately maleable robots. So while their behavior may be their owner's responsibility you cannot say with certianty that you know the cause. You might be right that the owner is a nitwit. However, it also may just be that the animal is that way, and the owner is doing the best they can, short of euthinizing the animal and trying again with a new one.
In European cities, where cycling is much more common, there seems to be significantly fewer (although sadly still more than zero) idiots. I assume it's simply that because cycling is so much more common, both the cyclists and the vehicle drivers are more used to dealing with each other.
Could it instead be a result of natural selection, since the most eggrigous of your idiots have long since been squished by cars?
More to the point, VHS was objectively better becuase it was an open standard. Anyone could make a VHS VCR, while making a Betamax VCR required you to either be Sony, or pay them exhorbitant sums. So the VHS market had loads of competition, and the Betamax one didn't.
My theory is that we all have a Stallman Point, a spot on the spectrum of the slide away from personal computing freedom where we just can't calmly stand around and watch folks push things further the wrong way. It looks to me like Linus just hit his with this "SecureBoot" crapola.
Sadly, everyone has a slightly different Stallman Point, and folks who haven't yet reached theirs look at someone getting upset and think "what an unreasonable person", while those who are long past theirs look at the same person and say "what a buffoon. If he'd only had this fit back at *my* Stallman Point we could have nipped this in the bud, but now its far too late".
That started with "I’m not really qualified to assess what happens on the other side of the aisle."
I was actually rather pleased by how up-front he was in saying when he didn't really understand things. If a person follows such a sentence, with a "...but", and you happen to understand "the other side" better than he does, its your own damn fault if you bother to read on.
OTOH, you'd hope a (former) political operative would make it their business to try to understand "the other side". If nothing else, you don't want to be blind-sided by their reactions to things you are trying to do. If that's the typical level of understanding of Democrats possessed by the Republican staff running their side of the government, its no wonder at all that they've managed to get themselves into the current situation they are in.
An easier fix would just be to remove the "exempt" labor status from IT workers. If companies were forced to pay time-and-a-half for overtime like they have to for welders and machinists, not to mention abiding by all the other pesky labor laws the US has for hourly workers, they might find hiring a few more workers to be far more cost-competitive than it is for them today.
Slashdot Mirror
Kennedy is not even a "liberalish" judge. He's a conservative judge appointed by Ronald Reagan. He perhaps isn't up to the wacky standards of Scalia and Thomas, but that doesn't change who he is.
One of the things that really annoys me about the last 30 years is how Conservatives keep getting us to move the idealogical goalposts, even though the general public's ideology hasn't changed much at all.
Yes. If you want to delve deeper into the whys than my flip one-liner, as I said that's what Guns Germs and Steel is all about.
Next up - statistics, man. The average trip is 16 miles. That does not mean that 50% of the people
Actually, that's a very good point. Median != Mean. I have co-workers who commute 60 miles every day. It doesn't take many of those to raise the average rather high.
From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you'll see in the film is the change. It's been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly.
Ummm....I pretty sure no known Ape species exhibits a lot of herding behavior.
Chimps, the closest related extant species to humans, live in smallish tribes. They band together quite often for hunting and warfare with other tribes, but otherwise are even more individualistic than humans are.
If anything, the behavioral problem associated with "civilization" is the need for poeple to behave less like individuals and more like a herd, so that larger populations can live together without constantly breaking into tribes and starting to kill each other. So if you are looking for why some kind of chemical behavioral alteration might have been required, your need to look in exactly the opposite direction.
Ironworking appears to have been known in North America, but very few iron tools were made, possibly because stone tools had evolved far beyond anything seen in Eurasia.
First off, no. Ironworking was unkown in pre-Columbian North America. The only exception to this I know of is the Norse settlements in Greenland. There was some use of native copper.
If you want a good explanation for why. I'd suggest reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. If you want a lazy Slashdot answer instead, I suggest trying to imagine a (horseless) tribe trying to follow a buffalo herd around the plains while dragging an anvil with them on a dog travios (drag sled).
Well, if your personal definition of "truly rediculous" is 1 hour, and you do (based on your first message) about 21km in that time, then the average USA commute is a good 5KM too far for you. In other words, most people in the USA can't do what you are doing based on the distance alone.
What do you consider a "truly ridiculous commute"? I note from your units you aren't from the USA. My commute here is 10 miles (16km), and that's pretty modest by our standards. The average is supposedly 16 miles (approaching 26km).
I've done the bicycle commute thing for a couple of years, so I have a bit of personal experience on this. Let me tell you, bike commuting here in the USA is not for the feint of heart. We don't have bike lanes in most places, and sidewalks are often viewed as a newfangled invention for the effitte. If you try to use the roadways, you will be sharing them with 2+ ton vehicles whose drivers are utterly shocked to see you, if they notice you at all.
Also, average temperatures here are firmly in the sweat zone, so you'd better have an employer that provides shower facilities. Places that don't have summer temperatures in the 100's (F) typically have outright dangerous conditions in the winter.
Don't get me wrong, all this makes for a great workout, if you can do it. But it is just not practical for all but a few people.
I've heard some talk about encouraging live tweeting at my Church too. We are not one of those new touchy-feely casual contemporary churches, and our services are about as old-school as you can get without doing it all in Latin. We don't really want to change that, so I guess there is a lot of searching to find some way to freshen our appeal without changing what our current membership loves. This seems to be exactly the situation you are in.
Where livetweeting is really successful is sporting events. Having participated myself, and thought about it a bit wrt. Church services, I do have some thoughts on the subject.
Livetweeting has two basic flavors for two different purposes. The first is "official" tweets, which can be used live to report on the action during an event. This cheifly only for the benefit of those who cannot watch live or follow a radio feed, but still want reports of the "action." The question here is what would the "action" of a symphony or a church service be? In your symphonic case, I'm no expert, but I'd guess that if a particular piece or movement was particularly well-received it might be worth mentioning. At the least, you might report on the peices being performed. Again, not being a symphony fan I'm not sure how useful one would find that.
The other kind of livetweeting done for sporting events is unofficial tweets from fans. The main value of this is actually for them to discuss events with each other as they happen. It is a bonding experience between fans, and can significantly enhance the experience for those watching. I liken it to watching the game in a big virtual sports bar. This could add value for an event like a symphony, but it would be difficult to get a good critical mass of live tweeters at an event that is being witnessed by at most a few hundred people.
No kids on twitter, huh? So explain to me why one of the trending tags last night had to do with Justin Beiber's hampter dying. Is that what concerns "middle-aged dads" these days?
Well, I'm gratified that at least you start by pointing to the right place. Section 8 gives Congress the powers to tax, borrow, and spend federal money. Section 9 spells out what limits there are on what Congress can do with said taxes and monies. Note that there's no general prohibition on lending there (or giving away).
Is this some weird interpretation I have? Well, if so, I share it with the very first Congress, filled with crafters and signers of the Constution, who thought so highly of the Federal Government lending money that they created a Federal Bank. Admittedly Thomas Jefferson was among those that disagreed, and at least one other objector (James Madison) tried to site the same 10th ammendent you try to site. However, the first Congress felt otherwise, President George Washinton felt otherwise, the Supreme Court did not even bother taking up any such objections, and this has been a settled issue in American Constitutional Law for over two centuries.
Now you may feel in your heart of hearts that your reading is more correct, and mine, most of the framers, most everyone else's, and 200 years of congressional and Supreme Court practice is wrong. That's certianly your perrogative. But the rest of us will continue to go on our merry way regardless. Frankly, the fact that the Courts habitually agree with a certian interpretation makes it right, no matter what someone else thinks they see in there.
1: It ain't Congress' job. See the Constitution (but we've covered that).
Yes, we have indeed covered that you have some imaginary Constitution in your head that says the US Government can't lend or give money out. However, I kind of insist on using the real US Constitution, which (fortunately) says no such thing.
If you want to believe otherwise as a matter of personal faith, that's your business. However, if you want to argue the point publicly with me, I'm going to have to insist you start by pointing out the exact articles that say this foolish thing you seem to think they say.
With the banks, I mostly agree (although I think a better complaint would be that the government got itself in a position where it felt it had to bail out banks to prevent another Great Depression. A situation that I don't believe has been rectified)
With the automakers, this is pretty clearly hookum. Without the auto bailout GM, and possibly Chrysler would be gone today. While from a market purist standpoint that might have been an OK result, from the standpoint of someone who cares about things like jobs and manufacturing capability in the USA, it would have been inarguably a far worse situation than we have today. It is most certianly the US government's job to worry about such things.
In the end the responsible management at GM was fired (exactly the right heads to roll), most of the jobs were saved, the companies are doing much better than before, and the taxpayer made money on the loans. So why am I supposed to be upset about this? Because it made the ghost of Ayn Rand cry or something?
That is, frankly, sheer stupidity.
The Constitution gives Congress the right to pass laws reguarding the disposition of Federal funds, and nothing in there says they can't use those funds to loan (or heck, even give) money to individuals or businesses. Both are done all the time, and in fact have been since the days of the very first Congress. Not only have both parties done this, but every party in US history that had a majority in Congress has done it, going right back to the Federalists.
From a finiancial standpoint, complaining about this is even dumber. The US Government made money on this deal. Even if you take the entire program together, including some prominent defaults, the US Government has made a higher return on this loan program than the T-Bill rate. In other words, spending money on these loans was a better deal for the taxpayer than paying down the debt by that amount would have been. If anything, our finances would be better off if the program were expanded.
George Lucas is indeed a walking advertisiment for lowering the amount of time before copyrights expire.
Help me Public Domain. You're my only hope!
You've got that backwards. If Microsoft makes their documentation more useful than StackOverflow, then it will float to the top of your typical Google result on its own.
Different dogs are ...well...different.
My last one was half lab and half German Shepherd. So in addition to being on the large side (80 pounds), she was naturally very hyper. She also, for whatever reason, had a very dominant peronsality, so you really had to keep on top of her or she'd try to take over the family. Choke chains and the occasional "physical correction" were an absoulte nessecity. However, she was eminently trainable.
My current dog is half Great Pyraneese and the other half probably some kind of hound. She is naturally very passive. Simlply starting to get upset with her is more than enough "correction". Escalating to any kind of physical contact does nothing further but make her pee herself. IOW: just plain cruelty. Despite years of constant effort, she just cannot be fully house-trained. I looked up the breed, and Great Pyranese are known for that little problem. If picking up dog poo IN THE HOUSE is a no-go for you, then do not get this breed. That's all there is to it.
The fact is that dogs are all different, and may very well have undesirable behaviors that they cannot be trained out of. That includes inappropriate barking, chewing, defication, dominace attempts, and other such canine activities.
Dogs are not inifinately maleable robots. So while their behavior may be their owner's responsibility you cannot say with certianty that you know the cause. You might be right that the owner is a nitwit. However, it also may just be that the animal is that way, and the owner is doing the best they can, short of euthinizing the animal and trying again with a new one.
In European cities, where cycling is much more common, there seems to be significantly fewer (although sadly still more than zero) idiots. I assume it's simply that because cycling is so much more common, both the cyclists and the vehicle drivers are more used to dealing with each other.
Could it instead be a result of natural selection, since the most eggrigous of your idiots have long since been squished by cars?
More to the point, VHS was objectively better becuase it was an open standard. Anyone could make a VHS VCR, while making a Betamax VCR required you to either be Sony, or pay them exhorbitant sums. So the VHS market had loads of competition, and the Betamax one didn't.
Open standards beat closed ones every time.
My theory is that we all have a Stallman Point, a spot on the spectrum of the slide away from personal computing freedom where we just can't calmly stand around and watch folks push things further the wrong way. It looks to me like Linus just hit his with this "SecureBoot" crapola.
Sadly, everyone has a slightly different Stallman Point, and folks who haven't yet reached theirs look at someone getting upset and think "what an unreasonable person", while those who are long past theirs look at the same person and say "what a buffoon. If he'd only had this fit back at *my* Stallman Point we could have nipped this in the bud, but now its far too late".
4 – Placing a group of skilled snipers to hunt the drone, especially the reconnaissance ones because they fly low, about six kilometers or less.
That would be a really neat trick, since the acknowledged World's longest sniper kill is only about 2 and a half kilometers.
I hope for their sake the rest of these ideas of theirs work better.
They'd better hope none of "their" asteriods hits the earth. The potential liability could be ruinous.
Then they go home, get the bill, and skew the results there too.
That started with "I’m not really qualified to assess what happens on the other side of the aisle."
I was actually rather pleased by how up-front he was in saying when he didn't really understand things. If a person follows such a sentence, with a "...but", and you happen to understand "the other side" better than he does, its your own damn fault if you bother to read on.
OTOH, you'd hope a (former) political operative would make it their business to try to understand "the other side". If nothing else, you don't want to be blind-sided by their reactions to things you are trying to do. If that's the typical level of understanding of Democrats possessed by the Republican staff running their side of the government, its no wonder at all that they've managed to get themselves into the current situation they are in.
An easier fix would just be to remove the "exempt" labor status from IT workers. If companies were forced to pay time-and-a-half for overtime like they have to for welders and machinists, not to mention abiding by all the other pesky labor laws the US has for hourly workers, they might find hiring a few more workers to be far more cost-competitive than it is for them today.