So clearly, thermal considerations do matter for jumping from 100km. ... this is a nontrivial amount of energy that will be dissipated as heat over a very short period
Ok, so it has been a while since my college physics classes, but... where did you come up with this? Potential energy doesn't just magically convert itself to heat. The heat comes from atmospheric friction, if there is any.
If you jump from 100km, your potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, which generates no heat unless you're also rubbing against something along the way (say, an atmosphere). No atmosphere, no heat -- the only heat the process will produce in that case will be from the impact.
That said, if the owners of the hypothetical beanstalk ever do allow jumpers, you can be sure that ceramic surfboards, or some such contraption to buffer against friction-induced heat, will be used.
I think it has to do with the people who say non-white people are inheritly inferior and need government assistance. You know, the Democrats.
Last time I checked, you didn't have to be an ethnic minority to collect welfare. Oh, that's right... the majority of welfare recipientsare ethnic minorities.
Maybe you're talking about equal opportunity. Nobody needs that, because everybody knows that even if you're born into a poor family and attend crappy schools, you've got just as much chance of getting good SAT scores and those scholorships as anybody else... so laws to level the field aren't needed.
And, heck... just because women are stillearning only 76 cents for every dollar a man makes in the same job, they don't need equal opportunity laws either. The market will settle down to equality (at the current rate, in another 30 years).
The party of old money
This is a myth, perpetuated by borrow-and-spend Republicans.;-)
and actors.
Oh, you mean like Ronald Regan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Rather than wanting to hurt homosexuals, which is what a homophobe does, he wants to "help" them. I think both points of view are wrong, in their own way, but there's a hell of a big difference between them.
And I offer you this quote by C.S. Lewis:
The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
It depends, a lot, on how much control Card retained when he sold the movie rights. It is very likely that he retained little enough that the studio doesn't give a rat's ass whether Card gets pissed or not -- especially not if they also bought the movie options for the other books in the series, which is almost certain. Studios like to have complete control, and can afford it. A tiny bit of money (to the studios) is a huge amount to even a popular, productive author like Card.
They are indeed a part of the language, and definitely a new concept, but monads aren't nearly as confusing as people seem to think, certainly not more confusing than objects
It isn't that monads are confusing, but that they're a contagion. Now, I'm not a very experienced Haskell programmer; in fact, I'm not a very experienced functional programmer, so I'm probably just making some dumb mistakes... but almost every application that I write goes through the following evolution:
Application starts out at a high level, with function declarations, as I work the problem out. This is extremely elegant and natural, and defines the problem on paper nicely.
Application gains some data structures and function definitions, as I start "filling in the blanks."
At some point, I discover that I can't get around some problem without using monads.
Trigger frantic rewrite of almost all of the code as one seemingly trivial function using monads suddenly requires all the functions in the call stack to use monads.
Here's a really simple example that is so annoying, I'm convinced there must be a way to do it that I don't know about:
-- Assume 'qsort' such that: qsort:: (a -> a -> Int) -> [a] -> [a] -- So that: qsort (\x y -> if x<y then -1 else if x>y then 1 else 0) [3,2,1] -- Then an array randomizer could be: qsort (getRand) somearray
But not if you want to use randomIO, which provides non-seeded (or, rather, IO seeded) numbers. Once you get that IO monad in there, it makes it impossible to use any standard non-IO aware higher order functions.
Higher order functions are one of the cool Haskell features, and monads severely restrict their use.
A representative answers not only to the people, but to special interest groups....
This is unfortunate, but as long as SCOTUS thinks money is the same thing as speech, then this will continue to be the case. It does suck, though.
Agreed.
I'm down, let's do it. The problem then becomes how to implement it. The most likely solution would be one heavily involving technology, and we saw how well that went with the voting machines. I'd be all in favor of a direct democracy if I wasn't 99% sure that the end result would somehow be perverted into something worse than what we have now.
Again, agreed. Although, I do think that it would be possible to create a fair and safe electronic voting system if we could keep commercial interests out of it. There are some interesting GNU projects attempting to accomplish this.
Well, you do know even Bill Gates gives away billions a year in charity through the Gates foundation.... even if it is just to get a tax break.
This doesn't preclude him from being selfish. You'll note that he isn't anonymously donating that money; he isn't even doing it quietly. He's set up a "Gates Foundation" for it. He's getting tax benefits, and he's getting positive publicity. The Gates Foundation runs advertisements.
If the predominant motivation is for tax breaks and publicity, then it isn't a selfless act; it may be a good act, but it isn't selfless.
Hmm. Well, I gotta admit I do see Communism and totalitarianism as mutually exclusive. It's hard to say it's all about the workers and the people when you're enforcing totalitarian rule, which by nature exaggerates the importance of a dictator. For what it's worth, I also see Democracy (REAL democracy) and totalitarianism as mutually exclusive also.
... but they aren't mutually exclusive. Seriously, "communism" and "capitalism" are economic terms; they have to do with property, and ownership. "Totalitarianism" and "democracy" are political terms; they have to do with power (if you will) and social control. So, democracy and totalitarianism are mutually exclusive, as are communism and capitalism (although the Chinese are trying to mix them), but communism is still communism whatever political structure it exists under, be it a self perpetuating oligarchy or a democracy. This is an important point.
Not all communist societies have completely failed.
This is true. I said that capitalisms have a much better chance of surviving than communisms, as evidenced by the number and strength of the world's capitalisms, vs the number and strength of the world's communisms. Even the most powerful communism, China, has been slowly converting to capitalism; they have to, to compete.
They have one car for 15 people, whoever signs up for a certain date first gets to use the car
This is great; they must have a good public transportation system as well, or else you'd have 14 stranded people every day.
Probably the one thing I feel good generalizing about as regards Communism is that it's very easily applied to small scale communities, like families, churches, and workplaces. It's not so easily applied to nation/states, and it tends to get harder the larger the nation/state gets.
I could have sworn that it was launched in 1990. Which would make it 15...
Actually, it was completed in 1985, so it is, indeed, 20 years old. You're right, though, about it being put into orbit in 1990.
That said, is there any other telescope that can replace its functionality, or is it still the most advanced thing we have, even if it is 15?
I don't know. Somebody else commented on this story that it would be cheaper to put up a new telescope, but I really don't know.
Well, she's certainly in a better position to know, having phone banks, email addresses, PO boxes and staffs dedicated to keeping her in touch with what they want.
I vote. I even send emails (and the rare letter) to my representative telling them what I think about various issues. I don't think I've ever been asked for, or offered, my opinion on a budget issue as specific as this. I'm inclined to believe that she's making an educated (at best) guess. It is much more likely that the companies involved with the shuttle maintenance are letting her know what they want, via campaign contributions.
Now, can you see my point that the judgment calls they make should be to give their constituents what they want, be it for good or ill?
Yes. I think we only disagree on the scope, or meaning, of "what they want".
A representative answers not only to the people, but to special interest groups. Groups which, as entities, can not vote, and would normally have no vote were it not for the representative. However, these entities do have a voice in congress because of the representative, and this dilutes the will of the people.
If we're going to pretend that representatives are actually trying to give constituents what they want, I'd much rather have a direct democracy than a representative democracy. By having a representative democracy, we're implying that people are incapable of deciding for themselves, and need somebody to work in their best interests.
"didn't trust the average American to know what was good for themselves..."
Or, to my mind the most likely, some of both.
I agree. There was both a practical, and a philosophical side to this decision.
I disagree. A rep. who doesn't do what the people who voted her in want her to do gets voted out. She is there to be the voice of her constituents, even if they are all batshit insane.
Ok, but I think it doesn't work this way in practice, and I don't think it was intended to work this way in the first place. If we assume that the founding fathers wanted a "buffer," then they never intended the people to get everything they wanted. If Senators take money from special interest groups in the form of campaign contributions, if they listen to lobbyists funded primarily by corporations, then they aren't representing the will of their constituents.
Let me try putting it this way: If the sole job of a representative was to present the will of their constituents, then why not have a direct democracy? It would be a more accurate way to evaluate the will of the people. Since we don't have a representative democracy, there must be some other reason for having representatives, and it follows that it isn't their only job to represent the will of their constituents.
Even the most selfish person on Earth isn't that way 100% of the time.
No, they aren't. But, on the whole, people are mostly selfish. I think the Bill Gateses are more prevalent than the Mother Theresas. Greed is more common than altruism.
If everybody were always selfish then society wouldn't exist, we'd all be nomads fending for ourselves and screwing everybody else.
I never said that. What I said was that if her consituents want something done it's her job to represent them in accomplishing that.
Ok, I misunderstood you.
Again, this isn't ditch-digging and hole filling. This is the bleeding edge of astronomy
Or not. The Hubble is twenty years old, and has been in space for 19 of them. I don't know about the part of the country you live in, but around here, we use a different phrase for technology that old.
However, I'm not arguing that we should buy more tanks, or spend another month in Iraq, instead of repairing the Hubble. If we're going to stray from the topic of whether the Senator is doing her job or not, then I'd be asking whether or not be better off spending the money sending up a new telescope rather than fixing the old one. I certainly am not willing to blindly accept that we have to keep the Hubble going merely to keep money flowing to the government contractors in charge of maintenance.
Then they can write her and express their displeasure with her failure to represent them, and if she continues to misrepresent them then they can vote her out of office.
You started your comment by asking what was wrong with what she was doing, and made the assumption that she was carrying out the will of her constituents. I, in turn, suggested that maybe she wasn't. Your whole position throughout this has been to assume that she's doing what her constituents want. I'm saying that we don't know what her constituents want, and that, since neither of us know (and, probably, neither does she), perhaps she isn't doing whats in the best interests of her constituents.
But she's not a judge
Yes, yes she is. She has no mandate from her constituents on this. She's making judgement calls on almost every decision she makes. She's trying to guess what her people want, if she's an honest politician, and she's doing what special interest groups want in exchange for kick-backs if she isn't. That's the whole point to having representatives in the first place, to elect people who can make informed decisions for the good of their constituents. This is (part of) the reason why we don't have a direct democracy. What we have is called "representative democracy"... maybe you've heard of it.
Incidentally, the main reason why we have a representative democracy was because the founding fathers didn't trust the average American to know what was good for themselves; they wanted a buffer between government and the unwashed masses. Or, if you're an optimist, it was because it took so long to send messages across the country, it was impractical to have a direct democracy. In neither case was the sole job of the representative to be an erzatz for direct democracy. The job of a Senator is to try to get the best deal for her constituents. This doesn't always mean doing what is most popular; government wouldn't function if the representatives didn't compromise, giving up lesser goods to gain what they percieve to be greater goods.
This philosophy assumes that all people are inherently evil,
No, it assumes that people are basically selfish. Suffient proof of this is the fact that capitalism, which is based on a philosophy of selfishness, is significantly more successful than communism, which requires that people be basically altruistic.
It further assumes that any amount of public welfare is automatically anathema to democracy.
Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? The implied premise is that people are selfish, and the proposition is that a system which allows people to exploit it for personal gain is doomed to failure. I don't see the inferrance that any welfare is harmful to democracy -- unless you assume that anything that can be abused or
But what you overlook is that there are 99 other Senators who represent THEIRS as well. This is why they do things like... VOTE.
Aaah, the old "everybody else is doing it" argument.
One could also make that argument about every government expenditure ever. There's always gonna be a better or worse course we could have taken, but at some point you gotta shit or get off the pot and do the best you can.
Yes, and one should make that argument about every government expenditure. If the only argument for an expenditure is to funnel money to a state, then there exists a serious need to re-evaluating the expenditure in the first place.
If the only reason for maintaining the Hubble is to keep some people in Virginia employed, then maybe we might consider a more direct form of welfare for them and cut out the middle-man. Hell, just give them the money; they'd get more of it.
I never said she could do no wrong, I said she was doing her job.
Are you suggesting that a Senator's job description includes the mandate to suck as much of the federal budget as she can into her own state?
One of the particular challenges of Americans is seeing the long-term goal over the short-term one. I could argue that, by doing something that may damage the overall health of the country for short-term gains in her state, she's not, actually, being a very good representative. The citizens of her state didn't vote for this; they don't vote at the granularity of how taxes are spent. On top of this, you are assuming that the majority in her state want the budget spent this way. What if they don't?
As an aside, there's a quote from Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813) that's germane to this discussion:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
The larger question I'm asking is whether the Hubble is largess, or is it the most efficient way of spending the money to get the science done? The smaller question is whether the Senator is really doing the best thing for her state.
Can you please explain to me why a Senator representing her constituants who, like most of us, want jobs, is a BAD thing? Isn't that why they're elected, to represent their constituants?
I don't think it is a bad thing, per se, but consider the logic: Senator X votes for Congress to spend $10bn digging a big hole in the ground in her state. The only use for this hole is that next year, she'll vote for another $10bn to fill it back in again.
This will provide needed jobs and income for her state. It'll help the state's economy. And it'll all be paid for with taxes that would otherwise be needlessly spent on programs such as public education -- or police funding, or national healthcare, or a new Hubble telescope... pick your favorite program.
What's wrong with this? Nothing; she's just representing her constituents (who -- since this money is also coming out of their taxes -- are also paying for it). However, one could argue that there are more constructive ways of spending that money, even in her own state.
I don't know much about the Hubble issue, but I do take exception to the argument that, just because a Senator is working on behalf of her constituents, she can do no wrong.
This is only the deaths directly relating to plane crashes...
While I agree with you politically, and while I wouldn't put it past a proven criminal like Bush to have people wacked, I'd like to point out that there are so many vocal critics of Bush, that the odds of there being one in any given plane crash is extremely high. It is like claiming that feminazis are out to kill all men and pointing to statistics about the number of men who die in plane crashes every year as proof.
Psst... you are on the clock to work, not to play.
...
Holy shit, where do you work? I'll gladly take your job and save that company time, money, and probably idiotic commentary from you.
A-fricken-men. This guy is a moron, evidenced by the fact that he, too, is "on the clock to work, not to play." It is his job to support the users; it isn't his job to make them use crappy software just so he can sit around jerking off on company time. It sounds like he's lazy, on top of stupid.
if you can't handle "complex" forms then get the fuck out of web development, there is no complexity to the issue at all. fuckwit.
Based on the sophistication of your reply, you're obviously a highly intelligent person. I'll try to answer your deeply intellectual comment.
My problem isn't with "complex" web forms. My problem is the fact that any non-trivial form (IE, most of the ones generated in this organization) end up being over a megabyte not including another couple hundred K for the reams of Javascript that are neccessary to drive the forms. This pretty much brings IE to its knees, and maintaining all of that is a full time job; trying to keep it working in a cross-browser fashion aggrevates the situation.
Incidently, I'm not in "web development". I have to do web development on occasion when management makes poor design decisions and I can't shovel the shit onto someone like you. Only an idiot would think that HTML is capable of providing a suitable UI to a complex application, and only a Visual Basic reject would consider Javascript to be a suitable language for large-scale application development.
As for XForms, what can you do with them that you can't do already? Less Javascript perhaps? Is that worth having to support 3 separate technologies?
Heck, yeah.
Until you've had to author a complex, generic, forms toolkit for an inflexible organization that refuses to allow any applications that aren't XHTML and Javascript, you'll never truly understand how necessary this is.
The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
Organizations will stop trying to use the web browser as a user interface to applications, or
We'll keep trudging along with the XHTML and Javascript nightmare, and we'll forever be doomed to browsing a web where "this page was designed for XXX browser, and doesn't work with yours.", or
Something like XForms will succeed.
(1) will never happen. Never. (2) is just too painful to think about. (3) may be a little painful at first, but is certainly less painful that (2) and vastly more probable than (1).
Sigh. If only there were a way to copy them all to one format so you wouldn't have these problems...
That's great!
Would you be happy buying a 12-pack at the corner store, but having to sacrifice one can/bottle to some guy at the exit door for no apparent reason?
I already do. I live in the wonderful state of Pennsylvania, where I not only have to pay Federal and State taxes, but also local taxes (to the township) and sales tax. I also have to pay a 1% property transfer tax if I buy a house (it is, actually, 2% on the transfer; each party pays half).
With the example our government sets, is it any surprise that consumers are "taxing" the RIAA?
Microsoft would be fighting an uphill battle against 3 companies
Microsoft is still fighting an uphill battle. Their Halo-box still isn't making them any money. I don't know if they'll ever cut their losses and leave the market, but probably not while they have cash to burn.
Sorry, to clarify I meant when XSL was first introduced, and for the first while thereafter
Ah, OK.
It's the same reason that, while Perl is an interesting language... , Ruby provides 99% of what Perl can do with 100x the elegance
Are you saying that CSS is to XSL as Ruby is to Perl?
I'd agree with you, but only partially. XSL can do much, much more than CSS, but Perl can't do much, much more than Ruby. Still, I can see that you appreciate the concise, function-focused nature of CSS.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about CSS. It is much easier to use than XSL -- not because XSL is hard, per se, but there's a hell of a lot of typing to do even minimal tasks. If there was a compact syntax for XSL, I'd have no complaints.
What I don't like about CSS is that the results are dependant on the browser, and browsers don't implement CSS consistently. I can get far more consistent layouts on IE and Mozilla by transforming with XSL than I can be relying on CSS to reposition elements on the page.
They are very capable of squashing serious deployment of Linux out there
How? They tried cutting their prices in half, and they still lost Munich. What other legal options are left to them?
The only reason they're not doing that is the simple fact that they are effectively a monopoly
Why does that make a difference in how they act? With the Pubes in power for another four years, monopolies are effectively safe from any prosecution. The only entity capable of bringing a company to court under monopoly charges is the US government, and this administration has proven that it is not interested in pursuing such charges
-- at least not for companies that have contributed significantly to the Republican campaign funds. Heck, Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly, but as soon as Bush got into office, the prosecution backed off of insisting on any significant penalties, and the result was that MS got off with less than a wrist-slap.
No, Microsoft isn't scared of being called a monopoly. Unless you're a pinko commie, "monopoly" isn't even a bad word anymore. The fact that they're still having trouble in the EU just proves that the EU is full of commies; in fact, the French are probably behind all of that trouble, and anyone who says different is an unpatriotic terrorist-lover and will be directly responsible for the next terrorist attack on the US.
Actually, I say all of this with a caveat: because of the EU monopoly trials, MS is probably a little bit worried about the M-word over there. With a few dollars in the right places, though, they can probably buy themselves out of any trouble they might have. More likely, they'll just appeal ad nauseum until they can buy some political seats over there and all blows over like it did in the US.
What if you're being attacked in your home, and your smart gun suddenly decides (due to circuitry failure or some other business) that you're not it's rightful owner?
Well... considering that for every one time a handgun is used in a home in self defense, 43 other people are killed in unintentional shootings, homicides, or suicides (New England Journal of Medicine. Vol. 314, No. 24. PP. 1557-1560.) maybe a higher failure rate would be a blessing.
Incidently, my Makarov (of Bulgerian production) is pretty reliable, except when my wife fires it. She limp-wrists it, which causes it to jam on the feed.
Why? JPEG2000 is patent encumbered and doesn't provide noticeable compression improvement, except in the cases of high compression ratios. Raph Levien did a comparison of JPEG2000 vs. simply downsampling the image before compressing with regular old JPEG, and was able to achieve similar results without incurring an odious patent situation. The only other improvement, improved meta-data, is already provided by JNG.
Slashdot Mirror
If you jump from 100km, your potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, which generates no heat unless you're also rubbing against something along the way (say, an atmosphere). No atmosphere, no heat -- the only heat the process will produce in that case will be from the impact.
That said, if the owners of the hypothetical beanstalk ever do allow jumpers, you can be sure that ceramic surfboards, or some such contraption to buffer against friction-induced heat, will be used.
--- SER
Maybe you're talking about equal opportunity. Nobody needs that, because everybody knows that even if you're born into a poor family and attend crappy schools, you've got just as much chance of getting good SAT scores and those scholorships as anybody else... so laws to level the field aren't needed.
And, heck... just because women are still earning only 76 cents for every dollar a man makes in the same job, they don't need equal opportunity laws either. The market will settle down to equality (at the current rate, in another 30 years).
This is a myth, perpetuated by borrow-and-spend Republicans.--- SER
--- SER
It depends, a lot, on how much control Card retained when he sold the movie rights. It is very likely that he retained little enough that the studio doesn't give a rat's ass whether Card gets pissed or not -- especially not if they also bought the movie options for the other books in the series, which is almost certain. Studios like to have complete control, and can afford it. A tiny bit of money (to the studios) is a huge amount to even a popular, productive author like Card.
- Application starts out at a high level, with function declarations, as I work the problem out. This is extremely elegant and natural, and defines the problem on paper nicely.
- Application gains some data structures and function definitions, as I start "filling in the blanks."
- At some point, I discover that I can't get around some problem without using monads.
- Trigger frantic rewrite of almost all of the code as one seemingly trivial function using monads suddenly requires all the functions in the call stack to use monads.
Here's a really simple example that is so annoying, I'm convinced there must be a way to do it that I don't know about: But not if you want to use randomIO, which provides non-seeded (or, rather, IO seeded) numbers. Once you get that IO monad in there, it makes it impossible to use any standard non-IO aware higher order functions.Higher order functions are one of the cool Haskell features, and monads severely restrict their use.
--- SER
If the predominant motivation is for tax breaks and publicity, then it isn't a selfless act; it may be a good act, but it isn't selfless.
--- SER
Actually, it was completed in 1985, so it is, indeed, 20 years old. You're right, though, about it being put into orbit in 1990.
I don't know. Somebody else commented on this story that it would be cheaper to put up a new telescope, but I really don't know.
I vote. I even send emails (and the rare letter) to my representative telling them what I think about various issues. I don't think I've ever been asked for, or offered, my opinion on a budget issue as specific as this. I'm inclined to believe that she's making an educated (at best) guess. It is much more likely that the companies involved with the shuttle maintenance are letting her know what they want, via campaign contributions.
Yes. I think we only disagree on the scope, or meaning, of "what they want".
A representative answers not only to the people, but to special interest groups. Groups which, as entities, can not vote, and would normally have no vote were it not for the representative. However, these entities do have a voice in congress because of the representative, and this dilutes the will of the people.
If we're going to pretend that representatives are actually trying to give constituents what they want, I'd much rather have a direct democracy than a representative democracy. By having a representative democracy, we're implying that people are incapable of deciding for themselves, and need somebody to work in their best interests.
I agree. There was both a practical, and a philosophical side to this decision.
Ok, but I think it doesn't work this way in practice, and I don't think it was intended to work this way in the first place. If we assume that the founding fathers wanted a "buffer," then they never intended the people to get everything they wanted. If Senators take money from special interest groups in the form of campaign contributions, if they listen to lobbyists funded primarily by corporations, then they aren't representing the will of their constituents.
Let me try putting it this way: If the sole job of a representative was to present the will of their constituents, then why not have a direct democracy? It would be a more accurate way to evaluate the will of the people. Since we don't have a representative democracy, there must be some other reason for having representatives, and it follows that it isn't their only job to represent the will of their constituents.
No, they aren't. But, on the whole, people are mostly selfish. I think the Bill Gateses are more prevalent than the Mother Theresas. Greed is more common than altruism.
Ok, I misunderstood you.
Or not. The Hubble is twenty years old, and has been in space for 19 of them. I don't know about the part of the country you live in, but around here, we use a different phrase for technology that old.
However, I'm not arguing that we should buy more tanks, or spend another month in Iraq, instead of repairing the Hubble. If we're going to stray from the topic of whether the Senator is doing her job or not, then I'd be asking whether or not be better off spending the money sending up a new telescope rather than fixing the old one. I certainly am not willing to blindly accept that we have to keep the Hubble going merely to keep money flowing to the government contractors in charge of maintenance.
You started your comment by asking what was wrong with what she was doing, and made the assumption that she was carrying out the will of her constituents. I, in turn, suggested that maybe she wasn't. Your whole position throughout this has been to assume that she's doing what her constituents want. I'm saying that we don't know what her constituents want, and that, since neither of us know (and, probably, neither does she), perhaps she isn't doing whats in the best interests of her constituents.
Yes, yes she is. She has no mandate from her constituents on this. She's making judgement calls on almost every decision she makes. She's trying to guess what her people want, if she's an honest politician, and she's doing what special interest groups want in exchange for kick-backs if she isn't. That's the whole point to having representatives in the first place, to elect people who can make informed decisions for the good of their constituents. This is (part of) the reason why we don't have a direct democracy. What we have is called "representative democracy"... maybe you've heard of it.
Incidentally, the main reason why we have a representative democracy was because the founding fathers didn't trust the average American to know what was good for themselves; they wanted a buffer between government and the unwashed masses. Or, if you're an optimist, it was because it took so long to send messages across the country, it was impractical to have a direct democracy. In neither case was the sole job of the representative to be an erzatz for direct democracy. The job of a Senator is to try to get the best deal for her constituents. This doesn't always mean doing what is most popular; government wouldn't function if the representatives didn't compromise, giving up lesser goods to gain what they percieve to be greater goods.
No, it assumes that people are basically selfish. Suffient proof of this is the fact that capitalism, which is based on a philosophy of selfishness, is significantly more successful than communism, which requires that people be basically altruistic.
Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? The implied premise is that people are selfish, and the proposition is that a system which allows people to exploit it for personal gain is doomed to failure. I don't see the inferrance that any welfare is harmful to democracy -- unless you assume that anything that can be abused or
Aaah, the old "everybody else is doing it" argument.
Yes, and one should make that argument about every government expenditure. If the only argument for an expenditure is to funnel money to a state, then there exists a serious need to re-evaluating the expenditure in the first place.
If the only reason for maintaining the Hubble is to keep some people in Virginia employed, then maybe we might consider a more direct form of welfare for them and cut out the middle-man. Hell, just give them the money; they'd get more of it.
Are you suggesting that a Senator's job description includes the mandate to suck as much of the federal budget as she can into her own state?
One of the particular challenges of Americans is seeing the long-term goal over the short-term one. I could argue that, by doing something that may damage the overall health of the country for short-term gains in her state, she's not, actually, being a very good representative. The citizens of her state didn't vote for this; they don't vote at the granularity of how taxes are spent. On top of this, you are assuming that the majority in her state want the budget spent this way. What if they don't?
As an aside, there's a quote from Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813) that's germane to this discussion:
The larger question I'm asking is whether the Hubble is largess, or is it the most efficient way of spending the money to get the science done? The smaller question is whether the Senator is really doing the best thing for her state.
I don't think it is a bad thing, per se, but consider the logic: Senator X votes for Congress to spend $10bn digging a big hole in the ground in her state. The only use for this hole is that next year, she'll vote for another $10bn to fill it back in again.
This will provide needed jobs and income for her state. It'll help the state's economy. And it'll all be paid for with taxes that would otherwise be needlessly spent on programs such as public education -- or police funding, or national healthcare, or a new Hubble telescope... pick your favorite program.
What's wrong with this? Nothing; she's just representing her constituents (who -- since this money is also coming out of their taxes -- are also paying for it). However, one could argue that there are more constructive ways of spending that money, even in her own state.
I don't know much about the Hubble issue, but I do take exception to the argument that, just because a Senator is working on behalf of her constituents, she can do no wrong.
--- SER
Wait... does that mean... that Microsoft is my friend? Or that software patents are my friend??
Does... not... compute..... So... confused!
Tick: "My head feels like... like it's going to have a baby!"
Arthur: "It's called a 'headache'."
Tick: "It has a name?!?"
--- SER
While I agree with you politically, and while I wouldn't put it past a proven criminal like Bush to have people wacked, I'd like to point out that there are so many vocal critics of Bush, that the odds of there being one in any given plane crash is extremely high. It is like claiming that feminazis are out to kill all men and pointing to statistics about the number of men who die in plane crashes every year as proof.
A-fricken-men. This guy is a moron, evidenced by the fact that he, too, is "on the clock to work, not to play." It is his job to support the users; it isn't his job to make them use crappy software just so he can sit around jerking off on company time. It sounds like he's lazy, on top of stupid.
Based on the sophistication of your reply, you're obviously a highly intelligent person. I'll try to answer your deeply intellectual comment.
My problem isn't with "complex" web forms. My problem is the fact that any non-trivial form (IE, most of the ones generated in this organization) end up being over a megabyte not including another couple hundred K for the reams of Javascript that are neccessary to drive the forms. This pretty much brings IE to its knees, and maintaining all of that is a full time job; trying to keep it working in a cross-browser fashion aggrevates the situation.
Incidently, I'm not in "web development". I have to do web development on occasion when management makes poor design decisions and I can't shovel the shit onto someone like you. Only an idiot would think that HTML is capable of providing a suitable UI to a complex application, and only a Visual Basic reject would consider Javascript to be a suitable language for large-scale application development.
Pthhhhffft.
--- SER
Heck, yeah.
Until you've had to author a complex, generic, forms toolkit for an inflexible organization that refuses to allow any applications that aren't XHTML and Javascript, you'll never truly understand how necessary this is.
The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
- Organizations will stop trying to use the web browser as a user interface to applications, or
- We'll keep trudging along with the XHTML and Javascript nightmare, and we'll forever be doomed to browsing a web where "this page was designed for XXX browser, and doesn't work with yours.", or
- Something like XForms will succeed.
(1) will never happen. Never. (2) is just too painful to think about. (3) may be a little painful at first, but is certainly less painful that (2) and vastly more probable than (1).--- SER
With the example our government sets, is it any surprise that consumers are "taxing" the RIAA?
--- SER
Microsoft is still fighting an uphill battle. Their Halo-box still isn't making them any money. I don't know if they'll ever cut their losses and leave the market, but probably not while they have cash to burn.
Ah, OK.
Are you saying that CSS is to XSL as Ruby is to Perl?
I'd agree with you, but only partially. XSL can do much, much more than CSS, but Perl can't do much, much more than Ruby. Still, I can see that you appreciate the concise, function-focused nature of CSS.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about CSS. It is much easier to use than XSL -- not because XSL is hard, per se, but there's a hell of a lot of typing to do even minimal tasks. If there was a compact syntax for XSL, I'd have no complaints.
What I don't like about CSS is that the results are dependant on the browser, and browsers don't implement CSS consistently. I can get far more consistent layouts on IE and Mozilla by transforming with XSL than I can be relying on CSS to reposition elements on the page.
How? They tried cutting their prices in half, and they still lost Munich. What other legal options are left to them?
Why does that make a difference in how they act? With the Pubes in power for another four years, monopolies are effectively safe from any prosecution. The only entity capable of bringing a company to court under monopoly charges is the US government, and this administration has proven that it is not interested in pursuing such charges -- at least not for companies that have contributed significantly to the Republican campaign funds. Heck, Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly, but as soon as Bush got into office, the prosecution backed off of insisting on any significant penalties, and the result was that MS got off with less than a wrist-slap.
No, Microsoft isn't scared of being called a monopoly. Unless you're a pinko commie, "monopoly" isn't even a bad word anymore. The fact that they're still having trouble in the EU just proves that the EU is full of commies; in fact, the French are probably behind all of that trouble, and anyone who says different is an unpatriotic terrorist-lover and will be directly responsible for the next terrorist attack on the US.
Actually, I say all of this with a caveat: because of the EU monopoly trials, MS is probably a little bit worried about the M-word over there. With a few dollars in the right places, though, they can probably buy themselves out of any trouble they might have. More likely, they'll just appeal ad nauseum until they can buy some political seats over there and all blows over like it did in the US.
Why do you care? I mean, are there people who have so little to do that they track who is "karma whoring"? --- SER
Well... considering that for every one time a handgun is used in a home in self defense, 43 other people are killed in unintentional shootings, homicides, or suicides (New England Journal of Medicine. Vol. 314, No. 24. PP. 1557-1560.) maybe a higher failure rate would be a blessing.
Incidently, my Makarov (of Bulgerian production) is pretty reliable, except when my wife fires it. She limp-wrists it, which causes it to jam on the feed.
--- SER