Not quite. Infant mortality is whatever it's defined to be. If death before the age of one year isn't defined as being part of the infant mortality count then it isn't part of the infant mortality count.
And of course, all counts are subject to assumptions about honesty.
I'm willing to credit Swedish honesty in the infant mortality count but I wouldn't give a second thought to the likelihood of the Cuban figures being anything other then what some government official's decided they ought to be.
And we know about these low infant mortality rates and life expectancy figures because the Cuban government collects the data and offers it up, right? Well hey, that's the gold standard, right?
In an effort to stem his slide into irrelevance and anonymity, John Dvorak, long-time practitioner of the cheap-shot column, fired off a broadside which, while full of clichés, manages to avoid being informative, entertaining or original.
Displaying the insight and courage that's won Mr. Dvorak the coveted title of Web Pussy - the web award for belaboring the obvious, gratuitously angering readers, ignorance of all things technical and being consistently wrong - repeatedly, he asks whether a little, green computer or $200 worth of rice would be more helpful to a hungry child.
Congratulations to Mr. Dvorak for the hope he brings to arrogant, supercilious blowhards.
Yeah, that's why the Quebec Supreme Court decided that waiting for medical treatment until you die doesn't constitute medical treatment. Because socialized medicine works so well.
Of course then there's the inherent unjustness and potential for criminal behavior of socialized medicine that seems to get just about no mindshare. If the average Canadian has to wait three months for an MRI, we can be quite sure the Prime Minister doesn't. How about the other members of the cabinet? Their spouses? How about the Prime Minister's security detail? Their spouses? Their children?
Reading Stallman's rant, I'm surprised you could find 17 warm bodies that'd put up with his bullshit let alone 17 developers. No doubt Stallman's capable, his accomplishments put that question beyond much doubt but Jeez, the arrogance of the guy undermines him, and everything he believes in, at every turn.
In the article he says he launched the GNU OS in 1984 and seven years later a kid from Finland blows right past him. What was Stallman doing during those seven years? What's he been doing in the sixteen years since?
What's Torvalds got that Stallman doesn't?
Maybe the ability to keep his damned mouth shut when he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say? Maybe the sneaking suspicion that he isn't necessarily the smartest person in every room he enters? Maybe an ability to rein in his ego to move a project along and the realization that every good idea and worthwhile insight doesn't necessarily flow from his mighty mind?
Although it's pretty late in the game, I wish Stallman would come to appreciate that talking less and doing more will garner more respect then the opposite. Certainly open source software suffers from a perception, sometimes earned, of a lack of seriousness. As a major figure in open source, Stallman's antics don't help to change that perception.
Socialism is both self-evidently false and a uniform failure where ever and to what ever it's been applied. This troubles socialists not at all and this research suggests that the reason for preferring a political system that's never worked over one that has a chance of working is part of the structure of the brain.
You're not a liberal/socialist/communist/who-gives-a-shit because you're insightful or compassionate, you're a liberal because your brain is wired in such a way as to find some value in what conservatives see as abject failure.
Well if a bald-faced lie is acceptable then what's the rest of the column worth? Is it reasonable to assume any of the assertions in the column are anything but more bald-faced lies or a judicious mix of lies, half-lies and might-as-well-be lies?
and is considered one of the country's foremost neo-Keynesian economists.
Well now there's a distinction. Maybe he could get together with the country's foremost phlogiston chemist, Lysenkoist evolutionary biologist, heliocentric astronomer and Aristotlean physicist to form MIT Lite wherein you could study toward an advanced degree in discarded ideas from the leading lights in each field. Oh yeah, probably should include Marxist economists as well although that's a contradiction in terms.
Krugman is a Noam Chomsky wannabe. Taking a page from the master's book he's built a successful career pandering to the left edge of the political spectrum by churning out boilerplate columns such as this one. For an ambitious guy it's a much safer route to success then the con games that are more distinctly criminal. Easier as well.
The "never war" part of the declaration is only enforceable on the EU, not on some aggressive, sovereign state. If Libya decided to invade the EU what value would the "never war" declaration have? Until that time you can use the funding that goes to a military that's useless until it's desperately necessary to buy off domestic constituencies. Like farmers.
"Never hunger" is easily handled by reducing government interference in the market and letting the chips, in this case the politically powerful farming lobby, fall where they may. Those African countries have expressed all sorts of eagerness to supply the EU with inexpensive produce in exchange for lots of shiny, new euros.
Sounds like those African countries are looking for lovin' not fightin' which is the other reason why the "never war" part of the declaration is stupid.
One of the better ways to prevent war is for nations to be mutually dependent. Foreign trade, since it creates that dependency, is an excellent way to prevent war. Vigorous foreign trade creates a very dedicated anti-war constituency in both states since that delightfully profitable foreign trade can't go on when people are shooting at each other.
I wonder how much power they'll be getting? Probably something in the neighborhood of 120 volts of bio-electric power which, if I'm not mistaken, is enough bio-electric power to run an entire civilization of self-aware, artificial-intelligence, anti-gravity, lasers-on-their-heads, robots.
It's also enough power to propel six hours and forty-three minutes of incoherent techno-babble, pretentious, pseudo-religiosity and a plot that makes sci-fi serials from the thirties look positively Shakespearean. If only the forces of good could harness such power!
What if Neo had chosen the red pill? What if Morpheus had told him they were suppositories? What would the snotty French guy have been called if the Da Vinci Code hadn't brought "Merovingian" into the popular lexicon? What's the Oracle do besides bake cookies? She sure isn't needed to help out when the river of pretentiousness starts to run dry. Why do the dumb-ass robots have to have big effing drills to get into Zion when there's doors that an ordinary ship can bash through? Why are they called "Armored Personnel Units" when they don't have any armor and a guy with a.22 rifle and a good place to hide could drop 'em all? What's the big deal with the EMP if every friggin' ship is pulling thirty foot high voltage arcs as part of business as usual? Why don't the dumb-ass robots develop some defense against the EMP? Why don't the dumb-ass humans develop a "Reset" for when they get killed in the Matrix? Why is the dialog more offensive then the gratuitous, not to mention spectacularly ineffective, use of firearms? Why are the least interesting characters in the movies the humans and the most interesting the programs? Where's the food come from to keep all those pod-people alive?
Our school system issues aren't all the fault of the government. Sure, "No child left behind" has fucked it up even more, but we can only lay a certain amount of blame on the government.
No, I think pretty much all the important problems of education are due to the fact that it is a government organization, i.e. the result of a political deal. That means every decision made since the founding of public education has had a political component to it where it wasn't exclusively political in nature.
For anyone who's read this far, NCLB required states to prove they were meeting their own standards in order to get that federal love. They didn't have to meet federal standards, the states just had to meet the standards they set for themselves and do something substantive about lousy schools like closing them.
Closing lousy schools?! Holy shit! Why would anyone want to close lousy schools? If lousy schools could be lousy for a couple of decades without much concern about survival why get all lathered about them now?
That's politics.
Oh yeah, part of the deal that got NCLB through was a substantial bump in federal funding to public education.
Sweet hey? In order to determine whether public schools were doing what they're supposed to do we had to bribe them to let us.
Our society looks down on education, to the point where we pass over well-educated, well-spoken presidential candidates for the apparent moron, the "regular joe guy I'd like to have a beer with." (Sorry, he doesn't drink any more, so you won't get that chance. But if you want to do some blow, he's the man.) Until we start respecting education as a society, our school system is doomed.
If society looks down on education we have one peculiar way of showing it. Nationally more then $530 billion was spent on K-12 public education in 2005. That seems pretty damned respectful to me.
Not that we can't fix the government's problems with education, while we're waiting: stop funding schools based on property taxes, which slants education in favor of the rich, and punishes the poor. Stop pretending you can replace teachers with a computer, or some bloke off the street, and start paying them better. Repeal "No Child Left Behind."
How does property tax support slant education in favor of the rich? Oh right, more money means more education.
Someone should should let the parents of Washington D.C. in on that insight. They're under the mistaken impression that the amount of money is immaterial if your kid can't read and those parents have kind of a special perspective on the topic. D.C. district per student spending is over $16,000 this year.
Oh, and teachers are over-paid. They have neither the responsibilities or educational requirements of a civil engineer yet their average salaries are equal. But that's understandable. After all, civil engineers can't use children to leverage pay increases.
Anyway. We've got a long way to go before we can fix our education system. But there's a lot more than the government at work here.
You bet.
Let's see, the students are lousy, the parents are lousy. The kids take too much in the way of drugs or not enough. They watch too much television while playing too many video games while surfing the Internet for porn. They don't get enough to eat, they get too much to eat. They've got ADD, get too much homework which their parents either do for them or don't give a damn about, or not enough homework. They have to learn to work together, as a team, so that they can explore their individuality. They have to learn all about environmental responsibility while being dragged around town in big, fat school buses. They have to understand diverse perspectives but not ask too many questions. They must learn not to be judgmental except of those who don't understand the importance of being non-judgmental.Them it's OK to judge. They have to learn tha
Of course the cost to run the machines is less then $3/hour you shmuck. What conceivable reason could growers have for buying the machines other then to cut their costs? What do you think? They sit around their white-columned mansions dreaming up ways to torment migrant workers while incurring higher costs?
And do they reproduce themselves?
Cuz, you've got some strong competition there. Really? I'm sure the cotton-pickers, weavers, wheat harvesters, paper-makers, sawyers and teamsters might disagree. But then you probably think "I Love Lucy" reruns are accurate historical depictions of life before computers.
And you're so deeply concerned with mass unemployment that your solution is to stop technological progress so that those stupid, ignorant people can continue to do shitty, back-breaking jobs?
What's your solution to overpopulation? An artificially-induced famine?
Hey shit-fer-brains, technology's been throwing people out of shitty, back-breaking jobs for centuries and jinkies, look how bad off we are. We live thirty years longer then those lucky bastards who dug coal out by hand and climbed the rigging of sailing ships in the worst imaginable weather and a "problem" faced by society is obesity.
If that trend continues we may have a life expectancy of a hundred and wouldn't that be terrible?
Tell you what, let's ask a stupid, ignorant person:
Me: Hey stupid, ignorant person, would you rather die of obesity or starvation? SIP: Ah dunno. Do I get a prawz? Me: No, you just have to choose one of the other. SIP: One or t'other? I'll pick me oh-be-suh-tay.
And there you have it. A stupid, ignorant person making a rational decision. I guess maybe they don't need your compassion all that much.
As a threat it isn't much of a threat although I'd encourage Mr. Stallman to act on his rhetoric. That'd put him one up on Alec Baldwin which is, I'm sure, one of Mr. Stallman's goals in life.
I suppose we should scrap the OLPC project too, as they are looking for governmental backing, and the places they are slated to release them seem fairly low on active open source developers.
The OLPC is not a government-funded or managed project. Government involvement actually starts when the first check clears. Perhaps you'd like to hold your breath until that happens as a show of solidarity with the OLPC project?
The prospect that the government would screw this up is unfounded and ridiculous. Yes, the history of government technology projects is one of brilliant successes brought in on time and within budget.
You don't need to contribute to the FreeBSD project to know how to install and run the OS. There's a bit of difference between installing and running an OS and installing and running an OS throughout a nation. But I'm sure it's nothing the People's Bureau of Patriotic Hackers couldn't handle.
In fact, you don't know any of the specs of this machine, yet you assume it will just be used to pirate Windows. Of course it'll be used to pirate Windows. Whatever agency Chavez sets up will end up making Linux both less attractive and more expensive then Windows. The inefficiency and corruption of government programs will drive Venezuelans who want to do something with their computers other then use them as paperweights into Bill Gates' arms. Chalk up another victory for the people!
Hell, even Saddam Hussein, who used to be reviled throughout the Arab world, managed to resuscitate his historical legacy a bit through his opposition to Bush. Yeah, everywhere but Iraq.
Guess what, that's the definition of democracy: people get to choose on the issue. If the majority of registered voters LIKE the president's decree, they keep it, if they don't they can repel it. And it only takes 5% of the registered voters to call for a referendum on it. Does the "hated for its demakrassy" "democracy-exporting" US have any similarly democratic way to repel laws? Oh sure, heaps of 'em. Laws are regularly repealed by direct action of the electorate not that it's all that good a way to legislate. The U.S. is a constitutionally-limited republic, not a democracy. Direct legislation is anti-democratic since a pure democracy is always one vote away from a dictatorship. Of course if you're hoping to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat a democracy is pretty attractive.
Tell you what, the first time Chavez has any legislation repealed by "the people" he professes to love so deeply is when he can claim to be an elected representative. Until then he's a Castro, or a Mao, or an Uncle Joe wannabe anxious to become the real deal.
Although one of those TV stations provided material assistance to the anti-democracy coup, so they got off easy by losing their license to broadcast. Other countries deal with treason more harshly. Yes, the two qualities consistently displayed by noble men of the people are truthfulness and compassion.
Their patience with political opposition is also legendary embracing, as they inevitably do, diversity. Oh, and that's not "anti-democratic coup". The preferred term is "counter-revolutionary action", or it is "hooliganism against the people"? The, whatever the translation is for "KGB", will take care of them.
Maybe you know what the Spanish word for "gulag" might be?
The only problem with a pure free market is that it acts under the assumption that what makes the best business sense will be inherently good for everyone.
You're free to provide examples of the environmentally beneficial effects of the centrally-planned economy.
Just because the average consumer want to pay less for goods in exchange for more environmental damage, that doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Maybe but it's a damned sight better idea then "the average consumer" being told how much environmental damage is the right amount and what price is the right price.
The reason that we have (and need, unfortunately) governments is that often what the best choice for society at large is a poor choice for a give segment of that society.
You ought to crack a history book some time.
The reason we have governments, at least the dominant reason historically, is so a small group of elites can control a large group of non-elites. Generally on the basis of crackpot rationales like Marxism or that dad was king.
If you happen to fancy yourself one of those elites, imposing your opinions on the lesser life forms is just good, common sense and anyone who doesn't see it that way is obviously just a bit too average to have anything worthwhile to contribute to the discussion. I can see how an idea like that would go over pretty well in Europe.
So it isn't actually education software. It's resource management software specialized for, I assume, American public education.
I wonder about the size and makeup of its user community. Given the continuous whining about inadequate resources, I'd like to know how many public schools/school districts have adopted this software? My experience suggest that damned few public school districts are using/planning to use Centre but I'm willing to be surprised.
Employment is still low, stock is still down, petroleum products are still horribly expensive. That would make you French, possibly Spanish or German. In the US unemployment is nearing a historic low, the stock market and economy a historic high and petroleum products are expensive but hardly horribly so if all the full-size SUVs I see on the road are any indication.
Oh yeah, and we're still entrenched in a losing battle with terrorism. Well, if we stopped funding the Palestinian Authority and encouraged a bit of civil unrest in Iran then we'd be "entrenched" in a battle with terrorism that we'd be winning faster then we're winning it now.
What a great time to be alive and ignorant . .. You aren't kiddin'. You can be the sort of shmuck who jets from one environmental riot to another and never be troubled by the hypocrisy. Or the sort who decries the fascist government, loudly, publicly, repeatedly and without the slightest concern that they'll end up where people who loudly, publicly and repeatedly criticize a fascist government traditionally end up.
Since radar's been in widespread usage just after World War II don't you think we would have noticed the die-offs related microwave exposure around the time radar went into common use? It's been fifty years. What were the little suckers waiting for if microwaves mess them up? A book deal?
There's another source of microwaves that's been around since the '40s - radar. Some of them are awfully powerful, certainly more powerful then a cell phone or a cell tower transmitter, and the RF is definitely pulsed. If high-powered, pulsed microwaves were the cause of the disappearance of honey bees you wouldn't have found a single bee within miles of a radar dish and the disappearance would have gotten started around the end of World War II.
Given the economic importance of bees, I don't think it'll be tough to score a bunch of grant money to study the disappearance. I'll bet it's a pathogen, probably a fungus.
Slashdot Mirror
..if there were some performance figures. I don't give that much of a damn how it looks if it runs like a son of a gun.
Not quite. Infant mortality is whatever it's defined to be. If death before the age of one year isn't defined as being part of the infant mortality count then it isn't part of the infant mortality count.
And of course, all counts are subject to assumptions about honesty.
I'm willing to credit Swedish honesty in the infant mortality count but I wouldn't give a second thought to the likelihood of the Cuban figures being anything other then what some government official's decided they ought to be.
And we know about these low infant mortality rates and life expectancy figures because the Cuban government collects the data and offers it up, right? Well hey, that's the gold standard, right?
So the problem is evolution in human cultures and the solution is intelligent design?
Isn't intelligent design in a culture more accurately referred too as authoritarianism? I'm sure somewhere Joe Stalin is smiling.
The Turing test's supposed to fool the big head not the little head.
In an effort to stem his slide into irrelevance and anonymity, John Dvorak, long-time practitioner of the cheap-shot column, fired off a broadside which, while full of clichés, manages to avoid being informative, entertaining or original.
Displaying the insight and courage that's won Mr. Dvorak the coveted title of Web Pussy - the web award for belaboring the obvious, gratuitously angering readers, ignorance of all things technical and being consistently wrong - repeatedly, he asks whether a little, green computer or $200 worth of rice would be more helpful to a hungry child.
Congratulations to Mr. Dvorak for the hope he brings to arrogant, supercilious blowhards.
Yeah, that's why the Quebec Supreme Court decided that waiting for medical treatment until you die doesn't constitute medical treatment. Because socialized medicine works so well.
Of course then there's the inherent unjustness and potential for criminal behavior of socialized medicine that seems to get just about no mindshare. If the average Canadian has to wait three months for an MRI, we can be quite sure the Prime Minister doesn't. How about the other members of the cabinet? Their spouses? How about the Prime Minister's security detail? Their spouses? Their children?
Reading Stallman's rant, I'm surprised you could find 17 warm bodies that'd put up with his bullshit let alone 17 developers. No doubt Stallman's capable, his accomplishments put that question beyond much doubt but Jeez, the arrogance of the guy undermines him, and everything he believes in, at every turn.
In the article he says he launched the GNU OS in 1984 and seven years later a kid from Finland blows right past him. What was Stallman doing during those seven years? What's he been doing in the sixteen years since?
What's Torvalds got that Stallman doesn't?
Maybe the ability to keep his damned mouth shut when he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say? Maybe the sneaking suspicion that he isn't necessarily the smartest person in every room he enters? Maybe an ability to rein in his ego to move a project along and the realization that every good idea and worthwhile insight doesn't necessarily flow from his mighty mind?
Although it's pretty late in the game, I wish Stallman would come to appreciate that talking less and doing more will garner more respect then the opposite. Certainly open source software suffers from a perception, sometimes earned, of a lack of seriousness. As a major figure in open source, Stallman's antics don't help to change that perception.
What's to understand?
Socialism is both self-evidently false and a uniform failure where ever and to what ever it's been applied. This troubles socialists not at all and this research suggests that the reason for preferring a political system that's never worked over one that has a chance of working is part of the structure of the brain.
You're not a liberal/socialist/communist/who-gives-a-shit because you're insightful or compassionate, you're a liberal because your brain is wired in such a way as to find some value in what conservatives see as abject failure.
Well now there's a distinction. Maybe he could get together with the country's foremost phlogiston chemist, Lysenkoist evolutionary biologist, heliocentric astronomer and Aristotlean physicist to form MIT Lite wherein you could study toward an advanced degree in discarded ideas from the leading lights in each field. Oh yeah, probably should include Marxist economists as well although that's a contradiction in terms.
Krugman is a Noam Chomsky wannabe. Taking a page from the master's book he's built a successful career pandering to the left edge of the political spectrum by churning out boilerplate columns such as this one. For an ambitious guy it's a much safer route to success then the con games that are more distinctly criminal. Easier as well.
Actually, both ideas are stupid and self-serving.
The "never war" part of the declaration is only enforceable on the EU, not on some aggressive, sovereign state. If Libya decided to invade the EU what value would the "never war" declaration have? Until that time you can use the funding that goes to a military that's useless until it's desperately necessary to buy off domestic constituencies. Like farmers.
"Never hunger" is easily handled by reducing government interference in the market and letting the chips, in this case the politically powerful farming lobby, fall where they may. Those African countries have expressed all sorts of eagerness to supply the EU with inexpensive produce in exchange for lots of shiny, new euros.
Sounds like those African countries are looking for lovin' not fightin' which is the other reason why the "never war" part of the declaration is stupid.
One of the better ways to prevent war is for nations to be mutually dependent. Foreign trade, since it creates that dependency, is an excellent way to prevent war. Vigorous foreign trade creates a very dedicated anti-war constituency in both states since that delightfully profitable foreign trade can't go on when people are shooting at each other.
Matrix jokes aside? Bullshit!
.22 rifle and a good place to hide could drop 'em all?
I wonder how much power they'll be getting? Probably something in the neighborhood of 120 volts of bio-electric power which, if I'm not mistaken, is enough bio-electric power to run an entire civilization of self-aware, artificial-intelligence, anti-gravity, lasers-on-their-heads, robots.
It's also enough power to propel six hours and forty-three minutes of incoherent techno-babble, pretentious, pseudo-religiosity and a plot that makes sci-fi serials from the thirties look positively Shakespearean. If only the forces of good could harness such power!
What if Neo had chosen the red pill?
What if Morpheus had told him they were suppositories?
What would the snotty French guy have been called if the Da Vinci Code hadn't brought "Merovingian" into the popular lexicon?
What's the Oracle do besides bake cookies? She sure isn't needed to help out when the river of pretentiousness starts to run dry.
Why do the dumb-ass robots have to have big effing drills to get into Zion when there's doors that an ordinary ship can bash through?
Why are they called "Armored Personnel Units" when they don't have any armor and a guy with a
What's the big deal with the EMP if every friggin' ship is pulling thirty foot high voltage arcs as part of business as usual?
Why don't the dumb-ass robots develop some defense against the EMP?
Why don't the dumb-ass humans develop a "Reset" for when they get killed in the Matrix?
Why is the dialog more offensive then the gratuitous, not to mention spectacularly ineffective, use of firearms?
Why are the least interesting characters in the movies the humans and the most interesting the programs?
Where's the food come from to keep all those pod-people alive?
Well, that clears my sinuses a bit.
Our school system issues aren't all the fault of the government. Sure, "No child left behind" has fucked it up even more, but we can only lay a certain amount of blame on the government.
No, I think pretty much all the important problems of education are due to the fact that it is a government organization, i.e. the result of a political deal. That means every decision made since the founding of public education has had a political component to it where it wasn't exclusively political in nature.
For anyone who's read this far, NCLB required states to prove they were meeting their own standards in order to get that federal love. They didn't have to meet federal standards, the states just had to meet the standards they set for themselves and do something substantive about lousy schools like closing them.
Closing lousy schools?! Holy shit! Why would anyone want to close lousy schools? If lousy schools could be lousy for a couple of decades without much concern about survival why get all lathered about them now?
That's politics.
Oh yeah, part of the deal that got NCLB through was a substantial bump in federal funding to public education.
Sweet hey? In order to determine whether public schools were doing what they're supposed to do we had to bribe them to let us.
Our society looks down on education, to the point where we pass over well-educated, well-spoken presidential candidates for the apparent moron, the "regular joe guy I'd like to have a beer with." (Sorry, he doesn't drink any more, so you won't get that chance. But if you want to do some blow, he's the man.) Until we start respecting education as a society, our school system is doomed.
If society looks down on education we have one peculiar way of showing it. Nationally more then $530 billion was spent on K-12 public education in 2005. That seems pretty damned respectful to me.
Not that we can't fix the government's problems with education, while we're waiting: stop funding schools based on property taxes, which slants education in favor of the rich, and punishes the poor. Stop pretending you can replace teachers with a computer, or some bloke off the street, and start paying them better. Repeal "No Child Left Behind."
How does property tax support slant education in favor of the rich? Oh right, more money means more education.
Someone should should let the parents of Washington D.C. in on that insight. They're under the mistaken impression that the amount of money is immaterial if your kid can't read and those parents have kind of a special perspective on the topic. D.C. district per student spending is over $16,000 this year.
Oh, and teachers are over-paid. They have neither the responsibilities or educational requirements of a civil engineer yet their average salaries are equal. But that's understandable. After all, civil engineers can't use children to leverage pay increases.
Anyway. We've got a long way to go before we can fix our education system. But there's a lot more than the government at work here.
You bet.
Let's see, the students are lousy, the parents are lousy.
The kids take too much in the way of drugs or not enough.
They watch too much television while playing too many video games while surfing the Internet for porn.
They don't get enough to eat, they get too much to eat.
They've got ADD, get too much homework which their parents either do for them or don't give a damn about, or not enough homework.
They have to learn to work together, as a team, so that they can explore their individuality.
They have to learn all about environmental responsibility while being dragged around town in big, fat school buses.
They have to understand diverse perspectives but not ask too many questions.
They must learn not to be judgmental except of those who don't understand the importance of being non-judgmental.Them it's OK to judge.
They have to learn tha
Cuz, you've got some strong competition there. Really? I'm sure the cotton-pickers, weavers, wheat harvesters, paper-makers, sawyers and teamsters might disagree. But then you probably think "I Love Lucy" reruns are accurate historical depictions of life before computers.
And you're so deeply concerned with mass unemployment that your solution is to stop technological progress so that those stupid, ignorant people can continue to do shitty, back-breaking jobs?
What's your solution to overpopulation? An artificially-induced famine?
Hey shit-fer-brains, technology's been throwing people out of shitty, back-breaking jobs for centuries and jinkies, look how bad off we are. We live thirty years longer then those lucky bastards who dug coal out by hand and climbed the rigging of sailing ships in the worst imaginable weather and a "problem" faced by society is obesity.
If that trend continues we may have a life expectancy of a hundred and wouldn't that be terrible?
Tell you what, let's ask a stupid, ignorant person:
Me: Hey stupid, ignorant person, would you rather die of obesity or starvation?
SIP: Ah dunno. Do I get a prawz?
Me: No, you just have to choose one of the other.
SIP: One or t'other? I'll pick me oh-be-suh-tay.
And there you have it. A stupid, ignorant person making a rational decision. I guess maybe they don't need your compassion all that much.
As a threat it isn't much of a threat although I'd encourage Mr. Stallman to act on his rhetoric. That'd put him one up on Alec Baldwin which is, I'm sure, one of Mr. Stallman's goals in life.
Tell you what, the first time Chavez has any legislation repealed by "the people" he professes to love so deeply is when he can claim to be an elected representative. Until then he's a Castro, or a Mao, or an Uncle Joe wannabe anxious to become the real deal.
Their patience with political opposition is also legendary embracing, as they inevitably do, diversity. Oh, and that's not "anti-democratic coup". The preferred term is "counter-revolutionary action", or it is "hooliganism against the people"? The, whatever the translation is for "KGB", will take care of them.
Maybe you know what the Spanish word for "gulag" might be?
The only problem with a pure free market is that it acts under the assumption that what makes the best business sense will be inherently good for everyone.
You're free to provide examples of the environmentally beneficial effects of the centrally-planned economy.
Just because the average consumer want to pay less for goods in exchange for more environmental damage, that doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Maybe but it's a damned sight better idea then "the average consumer" being told how much environmental damage is the right amount and what price is the right price.
The reason that we have (and need, unfortunately) governments is that often what the best choice for society at large is a poor choice for a give segment of that society.
You ought to crack a history book some time.
The reason we have governments, at least the dominant reason historically, is so a small group of elites can control a large group of non-elites. Generally on the basis of crackpot rationales like Marxism or that dad was king.
If you happen to fancy yourself one of those elites, imposing your opinions on the lesser life forms is just good, common sense and anyone who doesn't see it that way is obviously just a bit too average to have anything worthwhile to contribute to the discussion. I can see how an idea like that would go over pretty well in Europe.
So it isn't actually education software. It's resource management software specialized for, I assume, American public education.
I wonder about the size and makeup of its user community. Given the continuous whining about inadequate resources, I'd like to know how many public schools/school districts have adopted this software? My experience suggest that damned few public school districts are using/planning to use Centre but I'm willing to be surprised.
Yup, great time to be alive and ignorant.
If you define "recent" as fifty years.
Since radar's been in widespread usage just after World War II don't you think we would have noticed the die-offs related microwave exposure around the time radar went into common use? It's been fifty years. What were the little suckers waiting for if microwaves mess them up? A book deal?
There's another source of microwaves that's been around since the '40s - radar. Some of them are awfully powerful, certainly more powerful then a cell phone or a cell tower transmitter, and the RF is definitely pulsed. If high-powered, pulsed microwaves were the cause of the disappearance of honey bees you wouldn't have found a single bee within miles of a radar dish and the disappearance would have gotten started around the end of World War II.
Given the economic importance of bees, I don't think it'll be tough to score a bunch of grant money to study the disappearance. I'll bet it's a pathogen, probably a fungus.