To put it in libertarian terms, if we ended the government subsidation of the single occupant driver (e.g. insane 6 lane highway infrastructures, the military meddling/presence necesary to maintain friendly oil import, cities in bed with corrupt developers, etc...) methinks the market would tend to find the most efficient solution and somehow I don't think a 26 mile commute is particularly efficient, if only because it's a waste of one's time.
The model of the open road as freedom is an adolescent wet dream. How many people are in irrecoverable debt because of their car? Where can large groups of protesters publicly and spontaneously redress grievences when most of our shared land is asphaulted over? Cops still pull people over based on the color of their skin. The government reserves the right to yank your driver's license (and therefore your prosperity if you can't commute) on a whim. Your freedom is an illusion. When/if we get a national ID card, you can bet it will use the infrastructure in place for driver licensing. More Americans die each year on highways than by any other cause of accidental death, or, for that matter, any modern war. Who needs RFID tags when you have a license plate?
In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.
New York Times news service, as seen here. Now, granted, it's not the First Page news that one would assume it would be, but we've gotta keep alight of the latest Jackson family faux pas or else our great nation will fall into chaos.
There is no mention in the Constitution of a right to drive a car on publicly owned streets. This is a laissez faire issue, certainly, but not some civil liberty violation as people seem to be implying.
Okay, let's talk about the economy, because everyone knows that the economy is doing great! The wealth-poverty gap is growing astonishingly well at breakneck numbers that haven't been seen since the Great Depression. Huzzah, I say, huzzah! And, as all economists agree, the monopolization of industry is a stabilizing force that has finally ended the chaos, torment and consumer choice of a diverse and competitive marketplace! Certainly the productivity of waste and destruction is making life easier for us all. I, for one, would much rather be sucking in fumes in the latest morning traffic jam than ride a well-funded, safe and clean mass transit system. Or, god forbid, live close enough to my place of employment that I could walk and bike for most of my days. I just hate it when they build a new light rail line in my city and it reinvigorates forgotten neighborhoods and opens new communities. It sure would be great if they just widened the freeway and tore all those bothersome affordable housing projects down.
And the shrinking middle class is so happy, healthy and content. You can see it on their bellies and hear it in their divorce proceedings. And their children are so well-behaved and handle firearms astonishingly well. Think of all the horrors of what would happen if they moved out of the suburbs and joined real communities where they could integrate their private and public lives into a community of shared interests and resources?
I know I'll be happiest once they finally export all the tech and tech support jobs to India, like they did with all those boring white collar jobs during the past couple of decades. That will be a real boon for the American economy.
The author of the above post has shown zero scientific credentials. The author of the above post has referred to zero peer reviewed studies. The author of the above post has not once considered the posibility of the other side's views, let alone the ramifications.
I am not a climatologist. You are not a climatologist. The vast majority of the people engaging in this debate are not climatologists. Who am I supposed to trust? This is a big, big deal. Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history and people are still bickering about politics. Why isn't this front page news? Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?
People have a moral responsibility to fight and disobey immoral laws. Copyright laws, as currently implimented in the United States, are IMHO, immoral because they actually succeed in defeating the true historical purpose of copyright law. The idea used to be that art and its society heightening effects would be promoted by giving artists a limited monopoly on their creative works. Therefore, artists would be motivated to create new works because of their profitability. These laws were not created to protect the invincibility of soulless entertainment monopolists.
And yet, current copyright law extends the monopoly until 70 years past the life of the author! I don't know about you, but I haven't heard any new and creative songs from Sonny Bono in a long time and I don't really expect him to push any new and innovative musical boundaries between now and 2068.
The fact that the RIAA failed to take advantage of new, popular and cheap music distribution technology just shows that the ideals of capitalistic innovation and competition have been hijacked by America's corporate leadership. The fact that they're turning record profits and feel comfortable enough with their hegemony that they can randomly sue normal citizens in order to have a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas is an outrage.
He refuses to give extra points when students turn in laser-printed homework assignments with fancy computer fonts
Jebus H. Crisco, I'd certainly hope that teachers would grade for content and not for aesthetics. And this is coming from the kiddie who turned in everything with a sleek dot-matrix, clear plastic finish.
They taught cursive-italics in my elementary school and my pseudo-cursive handwriting is teh suck. I don't have a cursive background to compare it to, but I suspect cursive-italics are the worst of both worlds. They're still difficult for those of us who had mediocre motor skills as a kid and there's no payoff even after you struggle since it looks like crap and you're still slowing yourself down by lifting your pen from time to time.
This whole debate is wanksville anyway. The focus should be on getting kids to write clearly and legibly in any way possible. For some kids that means print, for some kids that means beautiful cursive loops and for some kids that means some hybrid between the two. Time spent trying to turn every kid into a carbon copy master calligrapher could be better spent teaching vocabulary, grammar and style. Form is nice, but function is essential.
Ah crap. You're right. My apologies. I was thinking of the ITAA. Specifically, this is that I was thinking of.
Seriously, I feel bad. Imma gonna go write "I will not confuse four-letter acronyms" on the chalkboard one thousand times. I bet if Slashdot outsourced its comment writing to India, these types of horrible errors would never happen again.
Tech workers should have unionized against this type of abuse ages ago. Even if the company goes ahead and hires a bunch of desperate scabs to break your strike, you've now got a powerful political lobby to fight off the lies of the IEEE (tech worker shortage, my ass) and get NCAs made illegal, if not nationally then do it state by state.
The county would pay a Klingon interpreter only in the unlikely case he or she was actually called into service.
"We said, 'What the heck, let's throw it in,' " Jelusich says. "It doesn't cost us any money."
That's from the Oregonian's original write-up of this story. Once again pack journalism has played the telephone game and utterly missed the most important fact of the story.
I just knew somebody was going to try to leverge this into an argument against much needed mental health funding in Oregon.
This is obviously a very stupid priority, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater quite yet, okay? CNN and Slashdot are treating this as a joke/fluff story, so we don't have any hard facts to collaborate what's going on here. For all I know, it's a harmless prank or a devious libertarian news troll. Maybe the nuts really are running the nuthouse. Maybe there's a legitimate need because an epidemic of trekkies got post traumatic stress disorder when the realized there would be no more Next Generation movies. The point is that we don't know.
Even if there are still some wasted expenses here and there, chipping away at petty cash isn't going to solve our major problems like PERS, the economy and the city-rural ideology gap. People are literally dying. I'm a mainstream journalism cynic, but this story in the Oregonian is some damn fine journalism. Schizophrenics without their meds or without a support network are a bigger liability to society than creeping social welfare.
You joke, but back when film was first invented, filmmakers weren't allowed to copyright it, so they sent a picture of every frame to the copyright office instead. Film restorationists have been able to go back to these archives and reconstruct the films from the individual photographs.
I ran a few high school clubs in my day and the parent comment is absolutely correct: Find an advisor first. This is pretty important, because you want an advisor who's passionate enough to advocate for you and who's not a total lunatic or bore. I actually don't think convincing the administration will be too difficult, although I'd also advise you not to get too tech speaky on the admins. If the only resources you need from the school are a room and a few outlets to plug into, I doubt they'll care. Just tell the admins you want to start a computer club, you have Teacher So-and-so on board, many enthusiastic members, it won't cost the school a dime and it'll, obviously, enhance the school's computer education goals.
Now, if you actually do need some dimes from the school, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. At my school, the student council controlled extracurricular funds and you had to give a presentation to all the preppies in there to get money and then, after they voted you some funds, you'd still have to bitch at the bookkeeper for forever until she finally coughed up a purchase order.
Since school funding is tight almost everywhere, I'd suggest you develop a plan for self-sufficiency instead of going for school funds. A bunch of compunerds can do all kinds of money making schemes. Host a community computer literacy course, repair or build computers, hold a techie yard sale, sell and/or install some linux distros or do desktop tech consulting.
You'll want to spread your nets for membership far and wide throughout your high school. If you're really, really lucky, you might even gain some girl members. It wouldn't even hurt to target that demographic specifically. Advertising is easy. Print up some posters (black on differently colored paper works well, especially if you group posters together to make designs) and get the principal's permission to poster the school. Getting a story in the school newspaper shouldn't be too difficult, especially if you have a unique fundraiser planned. Make sure you get an entry in the school announcements and you announce the first meeting a few days before the meeting and on the day of the meeting. Arrange to speak to all of the relevant classes in your school to announce the club and its goals. That is to say, if your school has any computer sci classes, keyboarding, library science, computer modelling, physics etc... classes, arrange with those teachers so you can talk to those students for a few minutes. Get your advisor to write you a permission slip for any classes you have to miss to give speeches. If you suck at this kind of public speaking, find somebody who's interested in the club to come with you or do it for you.
When you have your first meeting, get the emails/phones and first period classes of everybody who shows up, so you can remind them of upcoming meetings. Also put every meeting in the school announcements.
Okay, now if you've played your cards right and done at least half of the advertising I've suggested, you'll have a room full of computer nerds and even a few soon-to-be computer nerd converts at your first meeting. The hard part now is keeping them interested. You're going to lose quite a few members between the first meeting and the second meeting, but that's just high schoolers for you.
Here's the part that's only hard if you make it hard: You must allow everyone to participate. Obviously, you have a very specific idea about how you want this club to progress. Odds are good that many other people won't agree with you. If you're a good leader, you'll compromise on these points. Delegate some of the responsibilities (i.e. eventually vote on a tresurer, head home page designer, project coordinator, stuff like that). Don't just allow you and your clique of friends to control everything. That's seriously not cool.
Finally, you're probably going to want to make it so this club will survive long after you graduate. That means creating club goals, traditions and preparing some resume padding, err, starry eyed underclassman to become the club's next president.
I wonder if it would be anything like deja vu. Perhaps it would also restrengthen the values of the neurons that were originally altered during the original encoding. That's not always a good idea: Run the same value through a neural network enough times and the neural network becomes too rigid and loses its ability to estimate.
You forgot about Deep Space Nine reruns. They recently played the final season again locally and, I'm sorry, but that's some of the best mainstream sci-fi writing I've ever seen, since this was when they were competeing with, and emulating, Babylon 5. I have this dread feeling that they're going to jump the movie franchise straight to Voyager, the suckiest of the suck, and ignore finishing the hanging threads of DS9 entirely.
The problem is that Windows has a negative reenforcement thing going with patches. In fact, I tried to install SP3 the other day and Windows gave me a nice, vague error message. Regular users can get into a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, since it seems that upgrading when you're not having problems is just asking to have your system wrecked by some stupid bug.
Personally, I'm the opposite. I don't care about the parity of wealth issue, and I think the university did the right thing limiting the P2P bandwidth.
In other words, the people you disagree with are hypocrites, but your contradictory opinions are alright.
Plus, you're ascribing these two contradictory opinions to your opponents without any proof that anybody actually thinks that way. Can you say, "strawman agrument?"
I have a feeling that most Windows folks would roll their eyes at Nethack's ASCII graphics. I know, I speak sacrilege, but we can win over the infidels with the delights of the Falcon's Eye Nethack wrapper.
Putty.exe is 347 kb. That's not a heck of a lot of space to take up on the proposed CD, considering that some of that 95% will someday grow an itch to dig further into computing and that Windows should fricking ship with an ssh client anyways.
Egoboo is a top-down dungeon crawler written with the Quake 2 engine. The authors cite Nethack as a major influence but it plays a lot more like Zelda64.
The last time I checked (which was several months ago) Egoboo wasn't quite ready for prime time, but it's fun enough that I doubt anybody will care and the installation and setup was painless. It's certainly a project to keep an eye on.
Well, we all know that the Slashdot mod system is worthless. "Oh yes, any opinion that makes me question my core beliefs is flamebait." But those of us who hang out on reasonable messageboards where karmawhores don't get an automatic +1 bonus for even their most hackneyed comments (such as comment one I'm replying to), we know that there are many, many Americans who don't believe in "eye for an eye" pseudo-justice and who are justifiably enraged at the current administration's cavalier attitude towards starting wars.
Sufficith to say, whether you agree with me or not, I am an American. A proud American and I know that the current plans for war are unjust and I know that there are many, many, many people who agree with me. The Americans that are opposed to this war are just as red blooded and civil minded as the flagwaving patriots. Heck, just the fact that most other nations are against this should say something. Is going after Saddam worth burning so many international bridges and inciting more hatred against America, land of the cowboys? Hatred against America is what caused this mess in the first place. Let's go create some more hatred. Yay. That's a good idea.
Fellow occassional moderators: Feel free to mod this comment offtopic, or whatever you wish, but keep in mind that meaningful discussions are often ignited by tagental topics and even "flamebait" opinions are sometimes legitimate starting points. (i.e. save those precious downmods for crapflooders, thanks.)
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The model of the open road as freedom is an adolescent wet dream. How many people are in irrecoverable debt because of their car? Where can large groups of protesters publicly and spontaneously redress grievences when most of our shared land is asphaulted over? Cops still pull people over based on the color of their skin. The government reserves the right to yank your driver's license (and therefore your prosperity if you can't commute) on a whim. Your freedom is an illusion. When/if we get a national ID card, you can bet it will use the infrastructure in place for driver licensing. More Americans die each year on highways than by any other cause of accidental death, or, for that matter, any modern war. Who needs RFID tags when you have a license plate?
New York Times news service, as seen here. Now, granted, it's not the First Page news that one would assume it would be, but we've gotta keep alight of the latest Jackson family faux pas or else our great nation will fall into chaos.
Oh, please, won't someone think of the casinos!?!
There is no mention in the Constitution of a right to drive a car on publicly owned streets. This is a laissez faire issue, certainly, but not some civil liberty violation as people seem to be implying.
And the shrinking middle class is so happy, healthy and content. You can see it on their bellies and hear it in their divorce proceedings. And their children are so well-behaved and handle firearms astonishingly well. Think of all the horrors of what would happen if they moved out of the suburbs and joined real communities where they could integrate their private and public lives into a community of shared interests and resources?
I know I'll be happiest once they finally export all the tech and tech support jobs to India, like they did with all those boring white collar jobs during the past couple of decades. That will be a real boon for the American economy.
I am not a climatologist. You are not a climatologist. The vast majority of the people engaging in this debate are not climatologists. Who am I supposed to trust? This is a big, big deal. Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history and people are still bickering about politics. Why isn't this front page news? Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?
And yet, current copyright law extends the monopoly until 70 years past the life of the author! I don't know about you, but I haven't heard any new and creative songs from Sonny Bono in a long time and I don't really expect him to push any new and innovative musical boundaries between now and 2068.
The fact that the RIAA failed to take advantage of new, popular and cheap music distribution technology just shows that the ideals of capitalistic innovation and competition have been hijacked by America's corporate leadership. The fact that they're turning record profits and feel comfortable enough with their hegemony that they can randomly sue normal citizens in order to have a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas is an outrage.
Jebus H. Crisco, I'd certainly hope that teachers would grade for content and not for aesthetics. And this is coming from the kiddie who turned in everything with a sleek dot-matrix, clear plastic finish.
This whole debate is wanksville anyway. The focus should be on getting kids to write clearly and legibly in any way possible. For some kids that means print, for some kids that means beautiful cursive loops and for some kids that means some hybrid between the two. Time spent trying to turn every kid into a carbon copy master calligrapher could be better spent teaching vocabulary, grammar and style. Form is nice, but function is essential.
Done and done.
Seriously, I feel bad. Imma gonna go write "I will not confuse four-letter acronyms" on the chalkboard one thousand times. I bet if Slashdot outsourced its comment writing to India, these types of horrible errors would never happen again.
Tech workers should have unionized against this type of abuse ages ago. Even if the company goes ahead and hires a bunch of desperate scabs to break your strike, you've now got a powerful political lobby to fight off the lies of the IEEE (tech worker shortage, my ass) and get NCAs made illegal, if not nationally then do it state by state.
That's from the Oregonian's original write-up of this story. Once again pack journalism has played the telephone game and utterly missed the most important fact of the story.
This is obviously a very stupid priority, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater quite yet, okay? CNN and Slashdot are treating this as a joke/fluff story, so we don't have any hard facts to collaborate what's going on here. For all I know, it's a harmless prank or a devious libertarian news troll. Maybe the nuts really are running the nuthouse. Maybe there's a legitimate need because an epidemic of trekkies got post traumatic stress disorder when the realized there would be no more Next Generation movies. The point is that we don't know.
Even if there are still some wasted expenses here and there, chipping away at petty cash isn't going to solve our major problems like PERS, the economy and the city-rural ideology gap. People are literally dying. I'm a mainstream journalism cynic, but this story in the Oregonian is some damn fine journalism. Schizophrenics without their meds or without a support network are a bigger liability to society than creeping social welfare.
You joke, but back when film was first invented, filmmakers weren't allowed to copyright it, so they sent a picture of every frame to the copyright office instead. Film restorationists have been able to go back to these archives and reconstruct the films from the individual photographs.
Now, if you actually do need some dimes from the school, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. At my school, the student council controlled extracurricular funds and you had to give a presentation to all the preppies in there to get money and then, after they voted you some funds, you'd still have to bitch at the bookkeeper for forever until she finally coughed up a purchase order.
Since school funding is tight almost everywhere, I'd suggest you develop a plan for self-sufficiency instead of going for school funds. A bunch of compunerds can do all kinds of money making schemes. Host a community computer literacy course, repair or build computers, hold a techie yard sale, sell and/or install some linux distros or do desktop tech consulting.
You'll want to spread your nets for membership far and wide throughout your high school. If you're really, really lucky, you might even gain some girl members. It wouldn't even hurt to target that demographic specifically. Advertising is easy. Print up some posters (black on differently colored paper works well, especially if you group posters together to make designs) and get the principal's permission to poster the school. Getting a story in the school newspaper shouldn't be too difficult, especially if you have a unique fundraiser planned. Make sure you get an entry in the school announcements and you announce the first meeting a few days before the meeting and on the day of the meeting. Arrange to speak to all of the relevant classes in your school to announce the club and its goals. That is to say, if your school has any computer sci classes, keyboarding, library science, computer modelling, physics etc... classes, arrange with those teachers so you can talk to those students for a few minutes. Get your advisor to write you a permission slip for any classes you have to miss to give speeches. If you suck at this kind of public speaking, find somebody who's interested in the club to come with you or do it for you.
When you have your first meeting, get the emails/phones and first period classes of everybody who shows up, so you can remind them of upcoming meetings. Also put every meeting in the school announcements.
Okay, now if you've played your cards right and done at least half of the advertising I've suggested, you'll have a room full of computer nerds and even a few soon-to-be computer nerd converts at your first meeting. The hard part now is keeping them interested. You're going to lose quite a few members between the first meeting and the second meeting, but that's just high schoolers for you.
Here's the part that's only hard if you make it hard: You must allow everyone to participate. Obviously, you have a very specific idea about how you want this club to progress. Odds are good that many other people won't agree with you. If you're a good leader, you'll compromise on these points. Delegate some of the responsibilities (i.e. eventually vote on a tresurer, head home page designer, project coordinator, stuff like that). Don't just allow you and your clique of friends to control everything. That's seriously not cool.
Finally, you're probably going to want to make it so this club will survive long after you graduate. That means creating club goals, traditions and preparing some resume padding, err, starry eyed underclassman to become the club's next president.
I wonder if it would be anything like deja vu. Perhaps it would also restrengthen the values of the neurons that were originally altered during the original encoding. That's not always a good idea: Run the same value through a neural network enough times and the neural network becomes too rigid and loses its ability to estimate.
The picture had a caption that said, "Everytime you masturbate, God kills a kitten... and a plane full of infidels."
You forgot about Deep Space Nine reruns. They recently played the final season again locally and, I'm sorry, but that's some of the best mainstream sci-fi writing I've ever seen, since this was when they were competeing with, and emulating, Babylon 5. I have this dread feeling that they're going to jump the movie franchise straight to Voyager, the suckiest of the suck, and ignore finishing the hanging threads of DS9 entirely.
The problem is that Windows has a negative reenforcement thing going with patches. In fact, I tried to install SP3 the other day and Windows gave me a nice, vague error message. Regular users can get into a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, since it seems that upgrading when you're not having problems is just asking to have your system wrecked by some stupid bug.
In other words, the people you disagree with are hypocrites, but your contradictory opinions are alright.
Plus, you're ascribing these two contradictory opinions to your opponents without any proof that anybody actually thinks that way. Can you say, "strawman agrument?"
I have a feeling that most Windows folks would roll their eyes at Nethack's ASCII graphics. I know, I speak sacrilege, but we can win over the infidels with the delights of the Falcon's Eye Nethack wrapper.
Putty.exe is 347 kb. That's not a heck of a lot of space to take up on the proposed CD, considering that some of that 95% will someday grow an itch to dig further into computing and that Windows should fricking ship with an ssh client anyways.
The last time I checked (which was several months ago) Egoboo wasn't quite ready for prime time, but it's fun enough that I doubt anybody will care and the installation and setup was painless. It's certainly a project to keep an eye on.
Sufficith to say, whether you agree with me or not, I am an American. A proud American and I know that the current plans for war are unjust and I know that there are many, many, many people who agree with me. The Americans that are opposed to this war are just as red blooded and civil minded as the flagwaving patriots. Heck, just the fact that most other nations are against this should say something. Is going after Saddam worth burning so many international bridges and inciting more hatred against America, land of the cowboys? Hatred against America is what caused this mess in the first place. Let's go create some more hatred. Yay. That's a good idea.
Fellow occassional moderators: Feel free to mod this comment offtopic, or whatever you wish, but keep in mind that meaningful discussions are often ignited by tagental topics and even "flamebait" opinions are sometimes legitimate starting points. (i.e. save those precious downmods for crapflooders, thanks.)