If we went to 'direct democracy', you better believe that there would be a very real appreciation for what the Southerners went through during the Civil War, and quite likely an admiration for what they conceived up until that point. Direct democracy would, essentially, turn the 'flyover' states into slave states, where at the federal level the votes make absolutely no difference.
What we have no still at least resembles the 'classic Greek' idea of equal states bringing different strengths to the table. Sure, nobody could fight like the Spartans, and nobody had ships like the Athenians, but they all did their part and provided value. Today's urbanites are basically saying, "we are the world and nothing outside of our technocratic bubble matters". Which may be true, for all intents and purposes, but it doesn't matter in the grander scheme of things.
And with current pro-urban district zoning, electoral college aside, we've got urban areas running over the suburban and rural locales, where the votes don't matter.
It stopped making sense when we became a real nation beyond point of breakup- basically after the civil war it was outdated.
On the contrary, "we want you to have a say, too" is one of the only things that's kept things together this long - the semblance of fairness.
You forget that most of our food and industry comes from these low population states.
It's a sad thing to see, really. Slashdot was the machine through which many of us saw all the awesomeness of the early years of the "world wide web" and when we cut our teeth on technology - I'd say 1997 through 2003, roughly. So it's sad to see stuff like this, particularly when we remember how it used to be, and how there really isn't much left on the Internet that's similar to "how it used to be" to such a large degree as even slashdot.
The flip side to your urbanist cant is that, if you actually look at the voter distribution from this past election, Obama ONLY won "urban" voting districts.
In short, we've got a President who was elected by a minority of the country. He's a populist, through and through, when it comes to the vote. That's inherrently derisive, and it leads to all sort of pleasantry like cultural warfare through the use of government programs (eg. killing farm subsidies to make gov't cheese cheaper).
Said another way: you could very likely travel across the entire US, from LA to NY (by land) and not run into a single person who voted for Obama except at your destination and departure locations.
If I look at my interests, beliefs, and the political issues that are important to me, my geographical location has little to do with it.
Oh, really. Maybe you've simply never lived anywhere which was geographically different enough to make a difference?
As someone who has spent roughly equal parts of my life in CA/NOVA/NY and SD (that'd be state, South Dakota), there most certainly is a huge, huge difference in how the geography (or more accurately, how the geography allows people to live) impacts how the population thinks and behaves.
For instance, if I'm living in the sun and bathing in the surf of Southern California, I'm more likely to think everyone should be able to have their bare minimum provided; how hard is that? Meanwhile, in other places where people actually have to work and endure unpleasant climates to make their living (regardless of what that living is)
When your geography dictates acres per head/bushel instead of head per acre/bushel - things are inherently scarce and take real, actual work to acquire - you tend to have a somewhat more conservative bent to your worldview.
Their vote in congress should be proportional to their number of constituents. What would be even better, is if an elected representative isn't keep promises, a voter should be able to go to a website, and switch to another.
What you seem to be doing is both misunderstanding and describing the House of Representatives. Not only is such a thing necessary, but it used to work better than it does today (when there were significantly more representatives (aka voters had a higher ratio to each representative)). The net result is a representive force which is like an ocean - it's powerful and slow moving but representative of the individual droplets.
The House keeps the Senate in check. If we were to restructure the US to look as this map projection suggests, it would destroy one of our few remaining political strengths (and outstanding features) of our political system: we would cease being a representative democracy and simply be a federal democracy, where the representation is of the state, not the people.
Especially since they have the same job/vocation as well as the same employment status (presumably not due to the status of the trial). I've only known one set of twins who were drastically different in terms of interest and personality, personally; all other experiences have been fully "identical".
Inshallah, you are absolutely right. Police lying to murder and rape suspects is morally and culturally equivalent to culturally sanctioned rape, communal stoning (at least they're well socialized), and honor killings. How silly of us to think otherwise. Allah ackbar!
Except by forcing them to both be a witness against their evil twin, at least one of them is serving as a witness against himself, inadvertently.
And on top of that, there is no absolute certainty that their DNA evidence won't find that neither twin fully matches. Stranger things have happened (even with DNA testing), and a 3rd sibling may have been snatched at birth or someone else mysteriously matches their DNA in that particular way, but not fully...
I have to wonder how anyone would actually run into these editors, like pico? I've rarely 'accidentally' run an editor I didn't want to run. Emacs is not lurking in the background somewhere when I type 'vi(m)' to edit files.
You mean the industry which is currently floundering, and has operated for decades by the skin of its teeth, largely depending on a shared understanding amongst competitors who have the same practices and the slow pace of technological advancement?
... alternatively, we can go a full day of heavy use without charging our batteries and don't need secondary batteries. (But yes, that is also always an option.)
Don't be absurd. Of course it's "lefty". It's a spectrum. You can't really expect the media to be more "left" than the force of establishment it's trying to bolster without looking decidedly partisan, can you? Of course not.
Not to be a hypocrite here, but you realize ad hominem attacks are pretty much the bread and butter of those who lack a valid counter argument, right?
Look, I'm a technology geek. I love all that stuff, and (for fun) I'd love to build or convert a vehicle over to a full EV (I was thinking of an early 90s Chevy half ton cargo van, personally). But I'm a pragmatist and someone who looks at "worst possible and likely scenario" before I look at the benefits.
Since we're talking about cars, let me use a computer analogy. Costs aside, I could have a stable "big iron" system in a datacenter, which has predictable and known failures which are easily worked around but uses obscene amounts of power, or I could have a consumer grade desktop or laptop which is not redundant, is prone to crashes, and is much more efficient in many ways. There are tradeoffs to each, certainly, but the "big iron" option is more resilient by far even though it's got more of an operational cost.
With EVs, there are a number of problems which are not present in traditional vehicles. Traditional vehicles will be more resilient because their mechanisms are better understood and economy of scale means we've got over 100 years of innovation behind their construction and maintenance in those specific roles. EVs do not have that advantage; they're still most certainly early adopter technology and, if current reports and experiences are to believed, there's a fairly broad range of things that go wrong which cost a huge amount of money.
EVs also largely lack many of the failsafes present in older cars, or even in older designs - or more accurately, they're more prone to different types of failures for which they're not properly designed for. The power cables are often undersized to deal with potential discharge situations. They are incredibly prone to environmentally caused performance issues, even compared to (say) an older diesel. They have no manual safety mechanisms to override the electronics. And, unlike ICE vehicles (where parts are often cheap and available for 20+ years for a popular model), electronic parts are frequently unavailable or obscenely expensive only several years after the vehicles start going out of warranty - I'm thinking of things like ECUs, computers, dash clusters, and things of that nature in most of the vehicles I've had or had to fix for others.
In this specific case, blowing up the engine would not have been so much of a problem. The vehicle would have stopped and the man would have survived. The fact that he still survived is almost a miracle and not really a reason why that wouldn't have been preferable.
Considering it'd reasonably cost a $40 relay to do this (or even a switch under the dash to unpower everything), I don't see why it hasn't been done a long time ago. That switch would be invaluable for service and repair, too: forget disconnecting the battery, just flip a switch and deny power to the whole system (except that switch and the relay).
Oh, and do they do a handbrake turn at 120mph, with power to the wheels, or do they throw it into neutral first?:)
All this would do for him would be to kill him - and if not kill him, blow out/burn out his tires or brakes, resulting in an even less tenable driving situation until he runs out of fuel.
I'm just glad for the guy he didn't have much fuel left in the tank...
Turn it to "off" and the engine will lose power. The car will stop. Also, you can shift it in to neutral. Might not be the best for the engine at high RPMs, but it'll do the trick.
I've got very little experience with modern, electronically controlled cars, but....
Simply turning the car off will, at least, allow the transmission/engine drag to slow down the car faster than a coast - similar to a light breaking.
Shifting into neutral from drive on some automatic transmissions (eg. TH400) can potentially cause the transmission to grenade. I trust this doesn't apply in this situation...
It's not that difficult unless you're trying to parallel park or otherwise trying to take a sharp turn at low speeds. As speed increases, the amount of effort required to steer also decreases. Something about wheel cant/chamber and the pull of the roadway makes it easier.
I had a car for about 2 years with broken power steering (AC compressor went out, which was on the same belt as power steering... so I just drove without either). It was quite friendly once I got used to it, but it did take some initial muscling and getting used to. In snow or ice, I was able to much more readily judge road conditions as well. (I regularly drove at highway speeds, and that wasn't a problem, either.)
I once accidentially stalled out a full size (partially loaded) G30 cargo van on a winding mountain road. Scary as hell, but I was mroe than able to muscle the wheel to stay on the road and then park. Thank God for hydraboost breaks and a low first gear!
No power steering is not the end of the road, so to speak.
I use regex (pcre) on a daily basis. This? This hurt my head. Holy shit that puzzle is hard. (Granted, I hate crossword puzzles... maybe I'm not old enough yet.)
Slashdot Mirror
based on what criteria?
this might actually have merit if anyone cared what 'the rest of the world' thought about US politics. You do so to your detriment.
Here here.
If we went to 'direct democracy', you better believe that there would be a very real appreciation for what the Southerners went through during the Civil War, and quite likely an admiration for what they conceived up until that point. Direct democracy would, essentially, turn the 'flyover' states into slave states, where at the federal level the votes make absolutely no difference.
What we have no still at least resembles the 'classic Greek' idea of equal states bringing different strengths to the table. Sure, nobody could fight like the Spartans, and nobody had ships like the Athenians, but they all did their part and provided value. Today's urbanites are basically saying, "we are the world and nothing outside of our technocratic bubble matters". Which may be true, for all intents and purposes, but it doesn't matter in the grander scheme of things.
And with current pro-urban district zoning, electoral college aside, we've got urban areas running over the suburban and rural locales, where the votes don't matter.
It stopped making sense when we became a real nation beyond point of breakup- basically after the civil war it was outdated.
On the contrary, "we want you to have a say, too" is one of the only things that's kept things together this long - the semblance of fairness.
You forget that most of our food and industry comes from these low population states.
It's a sad thing to see, really. Slashdot was the machine through which many of us saw all the awesomeness of the early years of the "world wide web" and when we cut our teeth on technology - I'd say 1997 through 2003, roughly. So it's sad to see stuff like this, particularly when we remember how it used to be, and how there really isn't much left on the Internet that's similar to "how it used to be" to such a large degree as even slashdot.
The flip side to your urbanist cant is that, if you actually look at the voter distribution from this past election, Obama ONLY won "urban" voting districts.
In short, we've got a President who was elected by a minority of the country. He's a populist, through and through, when it comes to the vote. That's inherrently derisive, and it leads to all sort of pleasantry like cultural warfare through the use of government programs (eg. killing farm subsidies to make gov't cheese cheaper).
Said another way: you could very likely travel across the entire US, from LA to NY (by land) and not run into a single person who voted for Obama except at your destination and departure locations.
If I look at my interests, beliefs, and the political issues that are important to me, my geographical location has little to do with it.
Oh, really. Maybe you've simply never lived anywhere which was geographically different enough to make a difference?
As someone who has spent roughly equal parts of my life in CA/NOVA/NY and SD (that'd be state, South Dakota), there most certainly is a huge, huge difference in how the geography (or more accurately, how the geography allows people to live) impacts how the population thinks and behaves.
For instance, if I'm living in the sun and bathing in the surf of Southern California, I'm more likely to think everyone should be able to have their bare minimum provided; how hard is that? Meanwhile, in other places where people actually have to work and endure unpleasant climates to make their living (regardless of what that living is)
When your geography dictates acres per head/bushel instead of head per acre/bushel - things are inherently scarce and take real, actual work to acquire - you tend to have a somewhat more conservative bent to your worldview.
Their vote in congress should be proportional to their number of constituents. What would be even better, is if an elected representative isn't keep promises, a voter should be able to go to a website, and switch to another.
What you seem to be doing is both misunderstanding and describing the House of Representatives. Not only is such a thing necessary, but it used to work better than it does today (when there were significantly more representatives (aka voters had a higher ratio to each representative)). The net result is a representive force which is like an ocean - it's powerful and slow moving but representative of the individual droplets.
The House keeps the Senate in check. If we were to restructure the US to look as this map projection suggests, it would destroy one of our few remaining political strengths (and outstanding features) of our political system: we would cease being a representative democracy and simply be a federal democracy, where the representation is of the state, not the people.
Especially since they have the same job/vocation as well as the same employment status (presumably not due to the status of the trial). I've only known one set of twins who were drastically different in terms of interest and personality, personally; all other experiences have been fully "identical".
Who cares, they probably have red hair...
Inshallah, you are absolutely right. Police lying to murder and rape suspects is morally and culturally equivalent to culturally sanctioned rape, communal stoning (at least they're well socialized), and honor killings. How silly of us to think otherwise. Allah ackbar!
Except by forcing them to both be a witness against their evil twin, at least one of them is serving as a witness against himself, inadvertently.
And on top of that, there is no absolute certainty that their DNA evidence won't find that neither twin fully matches. Stranger things have happened (even with DNA testing), and a 3rd sibling may have been snatched at birth or someone else mysteriously matches their DNA in that particular way, but not fully...
I have to wonder how anyone would actually run into these editors, like pico? I've rarely 'accidentally' run an editor I didn't want to run. Emacs is not lurking in the background somewhere when I type 'vi(m)' to edit files.
Video Game Consoles
You mean the industry which is currently floundering, and has operated for decades by the skin of its teeth, largely depending on a shared understanding amongst competitors who have the same practices and the slow pace of technological advancement?
... alternatively, we can go a full day of heavy use without charging our batteries and don't need secondary batteries. (But yes, that is also always an option.)
Some of us have perfected a 'fix' for the razor scam.
It's called not shaving.
Don't be absurd. Of course it's "lefty". It's a spectrum. You can't really expect the media to be more "left" than the force of establishment it's trying to bolster without looking decidedly partisan, can you? Of course not.
Not to be a hypocrite here, but you realize ad hominem attacks are pretty much the bread and butter of those who lack a valid counter argument, right?
Look, I'm a technology geek. I love all that stuff, and (for fun) I'd love to build or convert a vehicle over to a full EV (I was thinking of an early 90s Chevy half ton cargo van, personally). But I'm a pragmatist and someone who looks at "worst possible and likely scenario" before I look at the benefits.
Since we're talking about cars, let me use a computer analogy. Costs aside, I could have a stable "big iron" system in a datacenter, which has predictable and known failures which are easily worked around but uses obscene amounts of power, or I could have a consumer grade desktop or laptop which is not redundant, is prone to crashes, and is much more efficient in many ways. There are tradeoffs to each, certainly, but the "big iron" option is more resilient by far even though it's got more of an operational cost.
With EVs, there are a number of problems which are not present in traditional vehicles. Traditional vehicles will be more resilient because their mechanisms are better understood and economy of scale means we've got over 100 years of innovation behind their construction and maintenance in those specific roles. EVs do not have that advantage; they're still most certainly early adopter technology and, if current reports and experiences are to believed, there's a fairly broad range of things that go wrong which cost a huge amount of money.
EVs also largely lack many of the failsafes present in older cars, or even in older designs - or more accurately, they're more prone to different types of failures for which they're not properly designed for. The power cables are often undersized to deal with potential discharge situations. They are incredibly prone to environmentally caused performance issues, even compared to (say) an older diesel. They have no manual safety mechanisms to override the electronics. And, unlike ICE vehicles (where parts are often cheap and available for 20+ years for a popular model), electronic parts are frequently unavailable or obscenely expensive only several years after the vehicles start going out of warranty - I'm thinking of things like ECUs, computers, dash clusters, and things of that nature in most of the vehicles I've had or had to fix for others.
In this specific case, blowing up the engine would not have been so much of a problem. The vehicle would have stopped and the man would have survived. The fact that he still survived is almost a miracle and not really a reason why that wouldn't have been preferable.
Considering it'd reasonably cost a $40 relay to do this (or even a switch under the dash to unpower everything), I don't see why it hasn't been done a long time ago. That switch would be invaluable for service and repair, too: forget disconnecting the battery, just flip a switch and deny power to the whole system (except that switch and the relay).
Oh, and do they do a handbrake turn at 120mph, with power to the wheels, or do they throw it into neutral first? :)
All this would do for him would be to kill him - and if not kill him, blow out/burn out his tires or brakes, resulting in an even less tenable driving situation until he runs out of fuel.
I'm just glad for the guy he didn't have much fuel left in the tank...
Turn it to "off" and the engine will lose power. The car will stop. Also, you can shift it in to neutral. Might not be the best for the engine at high RPMs, but it'll do the trick.
I've got very little experience with modern, electronically controlled cars, but....
Simply turning the car off will, at least, allow the transmission/engine drag to slow down the car faster than a coast - similar to a light breaking.
Shifting into neutral from drive on some automatic transmissions (eg. TH400) can potentially cause the transmission to grenade. I trust this doesn't apply in this situation...
It's not that difficult unless you're trying to parallel park or otherwise trying to take a sharp turn at low speeds. As speed increases, the amount of effort required to steer also decreases. Something about wheel cant/chamber and the pull of the roadway makes it easier.
I had a car for about 2 years with broken power steering (AC compressor went out, which was on the same belt as power steering... so I just drove without either). It was quite friendly once I got used to it, but it did take some initial muscling and getting used to. In snow or ice, I was able to much more readily judge road conditions as well. (I regularly drove at highway speeds, and that wasn't a problem, either.)
I once accidentially stalled out a full size (partially loaded) G30 cargo van on a winding mountain road. Scary as hell, but I was mroe than able to muscle the wheel to stay on the road and then park. Thank God for hydraboost breaks and a low first gear!
No power steering is not the end of the road, so to speak.
No kidding. If not that, then at least sit forward, crank the music, and enjoy the speed (and police escort)!
Yes. This.
I use regex (pcre) on a daily basis. This? This hurt my head. Holy shit that puzzle is hard. (Granted, I hate crossword puzzles... maybe I'm not old enough yet.)
Took me a second to get it, but that right there is funny!