Here in France, digital over-the-air TV was just launched last September. The analog signal is not supposed to be switched off before 2015 or so. Yet you can already buy a digital converter for euro59.90 or less in virtually every store. Those boxes just convert the digital signal received by your regular antenna into a signal readable by your regular TV.
We're using DVB-T here like most Restoftheworldians. AFAIK, North America adopted ATSC which uses a different modulation technique. Maybe that's the reason why simple converters don't do the work.
Under current law, it costs an employer a minimum of about $500/week (depending upon the state) to employ a person for 40 hours at minimum wage.
40 hours a week, $3 per hour makes $120 per week. I honestly can't see how your cognitive system can reconcile this with the $500/week minimum cost. Do you really believe that, in the US, wages taxes add up to more than 300%?
Yes, but was the "EU constitution" helping or harming the cause of European federalism?
I think that this whole EU constitution thing was a very bad idea from the beginning. Constitution speaks of superstate and federalism, yet nothing of the sort was included in the text itself. Ensued a terribly confusing campaign where very few people (myself NOT included) understood what they were voting for. And even fewer voted for the right reason. I voted YES, mainly for fear of what would happen should the NO win. Short answer : Nothing, long answer : I don't know.
I personally favor a form of European federalism, with an elected federal government holding real powers over member states in key domains (defense, diplomacy, currency...). I don't think this is achievable with 25 member states, it'll have to start with fewer (at least the UK would never allow it). Maybe the adoption of the EU constitution would have prevented that.
I regret to inform you that you have a terrible misperception of the way business is done and value chains are built and evolved.
By definition, any external company is not there to help you, they're just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible.
Paranoia and self-delusion, period. Are you telling me that you never buy anything for fear that the vendor would rip you? And if you want to be paranoid, please explain to me why an employee would not be just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible?
The OSS world is composed of a myriad of different projects with vastly differing maturity, polish, documentation, feature perimeter etc... And all of these are constantly evolving. For a given task, you can find dozens of relevant OSS projects. When you factor in compatibility, support and maintenance, this becomes an inextricable jungle.
Most customers don't have the time or skills or will to see clearly through all of this and need someone to define, package, test and support a coherent collection of OSS components that will get the job done. This not only reduces the percepted complexity but also allows greater reusability and most importantly support costs that don't grow exponentially over time.
Now, you can call these OSS components collections whatever you want. "Bunch of related products...", software piles, solution stacks, application groups... whatever. But the fact that such a term has appeared is a sure sign that the industry has matured and that players on the OSS market now understand what their customers need. By refusing to acknowledge that such a term is needed you just show that you don't understand what's going on.
Customers don't want code, they want a product that meet their specs (a "solution" to their problem?). OSS is working to offer that and I think it's a good thing. OSS is spreading in spite of you, not thanks to you. I think it's pretty sad if you consider yourself an OSS supporter.
That is, of course, if the free "cheese" they give me isn't really a pile of poison poo spray painted yellow. I really hate when that happens.
By writing this sentence as a part of your whole cheese-HBO analogy, you chose to blur the difference between the free samples offered by HBO (not poisoned) and the regular shows downloaded without HBO's consent over bittorrent (poisoned). Equating the two propositions hints that the latter should be allowed since the former is.
I am puzzled by the fact that you seem to believe I have made that argument. I have done nothing of the kind. Perhaps you need to go read my post again and try to see what those who moderated me saw.
You made that argument through your analogy. And I think it's for this exact reason that you were modded up.
I agree. This whole civilization thing is way overrated. The mere concept of helping each other for no immediate personal profit reeks of communism. Let's abolish all of this crap and adopt an efficient win-or-die model. Well, the wolves have been doing this for eons, and they are obviously a much better evolutionary success than us humans.
Look, what you wrote is wrong on so many ways... Factually, morally, economically, you name it. People like you consider that misery is a feature of the system rather than a bug. You have wilfully renounced what has always driven human development.
"As comparison with other Western nations alone shows, the US could easily cut its CO2 emissions in half without any decrease in its standard of living; quite to the contrary: a serious program to do that would increase the standard of living and create jobs."
Really? While you might define returning to horses as the dominant form of transportation to be no change in standard of living, I think most would disagree with you. That is what would be required for a 50% cut. The only countries who find it easy to reduce carbon emissions are ones stuck in depressions with extremely outdated technology. Even western European countries will find it hard to reduce carbon emissions.
Here is a list of countries by ratio of GDP to CO2 emission. The European Union produces 31.5% of world GDP yet only emits 15.3% of the CO2. The US produces 28.2% of the world GDP yet emits 24.3% of the CO2. If the US were as CO2-efficient than the EU, they could produce the same GDP while only emitting 13.7% of the world CO2, ie roughly half of what the US is emitting right now.
So maybe you have a highly distorted view of how Europeans are living. But Europe shows that cutting emissions in half IS possible without reverting to horse-powered carts.
Let me follow your argument here. You're saying that the reason why US soldiers are causing the most friendly fire is because US soldiers are doing the most of the fighting. Right?
Let's imagine a situation where 90% of the allied troops are US and 10% are other allied (UK or other). Sounds familiar? Let's assume (your argument) that each nationality has the same probability of firing on friends and that this probability is independant on the nationality of the friend.
Then, there should be roughly the same number of US on allied casualties than the other way around. And the number of US on US casualties should be 9 times the number of US on allied (or allied on US). Think about it, there are 9 times more US shooters but also 9 times more US targets.
Now, it's very difficult to get official stats, so I'll have to rely on a general feeling from reading the media. Regarding Iraq for example, I'm under the impression that US on UK casualties far outnumber UK on US casualties. And before you invoke the "liberal media" defense, please reread your post. You don't seem to challenge the fact that the US does most of the friendly fire on allies, you try to explain it away with the number argument. And I think I proved that this argument does not hold.
The bottom line is that it's more dangerous for a non-US soldier to be deployed close to US units than close to other NATO units. The doctrine in the US army seems to be "if not absolutely sure that it's an ally, shoot" and many allies are not perfectly up to date with US authentication codes.
Liberals and/or feminists are the people that define porn as exploitation
Yeah sure. It was liberals and/or feminists who made so much fuss about half a breast last superbowl. Sure.
The truth is that feminists AND social conservatives are the ones who seem to have a problem with pornography, arguably for very different reasons. Most liberals don't really give a damn. Of course, most feminists ARE liberals, but most liberals are NOT feminists.
Regrettably, the literacy data stops in 1979. It would be interesting to know how the trend evolves in the latest quarter century, ie. into the age of cable TV and mass advertising.
Megafauna dissappeared around the same time as human occupation in many places including North America.
TFA says that the magafauna extinction happened 13,000 years ago. Everybody knows that the world was created 6,000 years ago. Humans can't be blamed for species extinction that predate the creation of the world.
Yes, I see it now. Start a space-weapons program. It will trigger a space-arms race. The Terr'rists will have to join in the race or admit defeat. They will spend themselves to the ground. In the end, we win... without firing a bullet.
It worked soooooooooooooo well with SDI. It's time to reuse that masterplan. Waste truckloads of money on useless stuff in the hope that the enemy will be dumb enough to follow us.
ID is an attempt by a religious organization to counter the scientific method's encroachment on their domain. With every scientific advance, their concept of "God" becomes less effective and more nebulous and this scares them.
I disagree.
IMHO science and religion do not compete because they do not answer the same question. Science answers the how and religion answers the why. Whatever progress science makes, it will never answer the question of purpose. Why are we here? Why does it work that way? A scientist will still have these questions. If he's agnostic, he 'll answer "it is the way it is, there's no purpose". If he's religious, he'll answer "God made it that way."
Only someone with an agenda opposes science and religion. Religious fundies and priest-bashers have this in common : they use religion or science to gain power. I have more respect for people who serve religion or science.
But if you can't admit it might have a place in a philosophical discussion (NOT a scientific discussion), we have nothing further to say.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, but your (original) post is pretty ambiguous, especially as a response to the question of whether ID should be taught in class or not.
To illustrate the ambiguity, I'll start by breaching Godwin's law. If I say "nazism should be taught in class," many people will disagree strongly. They don't think nazism should be advocated or presented as a legitimate ideology.
But of course, there's a lot to teach about nazism in history or philosophy class. What was it ? How did it come to power ? What were its results ? How did it compare with communism ? How can democracies protect themselves against totalitarian drifts ?
I'm not saying or implying that ID is in any way similar to nazism. I'm just saying that, for the sake of the discussion, you should clarify what you mean by "Intelligent Design certainly has a place in the classroom." Do you mean (as Pres. Bush seems to recommand) that ID should be presented in class as a legitimate alternative to evolution (a scientific theory)? Or do you mean that ID should just be discussed as a cognitive construction in a philosphy class ? In the latter case, I don't think IMHO that it's a topic nearly as interesting as nazism; but, as I said, it's just my opinion.
You forced me to Google it. It was Kerry, as I thought. Interestingly, this quote was used by the Bush campaign to illustrate how much Kerry was out of touch with what the world had became. Yet you thought it was Bush who said it.
Whoever said it, it makes a lot of sense. But what do YOU think now that you know Kerry said it?
IMHO, both propositions are completely unrelated. We could invade Iraq or not. We can set up more counter-terrorist cells or not. Each proposition should be (have been?) decided on its own merits.
Words have a meaning, you know? Everybody agrees that Hussein was a bad guy. He was a bloodthirsty dictator but not a terrorist. He did not blow up airliners or subway stations for instance. He's still an evil man, but not a terrorist.
There are (sadly) a lot of evil dictators in the world. North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar and others come to mind. These guys are generally not terrorists because they're usually more interested in maintaining their own power and completing their little genocide than pissing off western countries and risking to lose everything.
An interesting exception is Col. Gaddafi, dictator of Libya. This guy has been convicted of conducting terror attacks by several western courts. He's been proven responsible of blowing up at least 2 airliners in the eighties. He was the archetypal bad guy back then, the Saddam of his time. In "Back to the future" for instance the villains are Libyans.
Gaddafi is a terrorist. He's still the dictator of Libya. Yet all western (including US) sanctions against Libya were lifted 2 years ago when Gaddafi dropped his WMD programs. Talk about a war on terror...
Just in case you were wondering why the US (and the West) would clear a known terrorist, Libya has HUGE oil reserves...
Slashdot Mirror
Here in France, digital over-the-air TV was just launched last September. The analog signal is not supposed to be switched off before 2015 or so. Yet you can already buy a digital converter for euro59.90 or less in virtually every store. Those boxes just convert the digital signal received by your regular antenna into a signal readable by your regular TV.
We're using DVB-T here like most Restoftheworldians. AFAIK, North America adopted ATSC which uses a different modulation technique. Maybe that's the reason why simple converters don't do the work.
More pirates means less global warming
... not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here.
Yeah. Especially when responding to an article headlined "AJAX sucks..."
Well, I'm having trouble convincing myself that most Slashdot posts are not written by a virus.
Under current law, it costs an employer a minimum of about $500/week (depending upon the state) to employ a person for 40 hours at minimum wage.
40 hours a week, $3 per hour makes $120 per week. I honestly can't see how your cognitive system can reconcile this with the $500/week minimum cost. Do you really believe that, in the US, wages taxes add up to more than 300%?
Court wants Ellison to pay 100m to other Oracle shareholders.
Problem : Ellison owns 25% of Oracle.
Solution : Order him to pay 133m to Oracle.
This whole charity thing does not make sense.
Paladins are annoying for the Alliance too :)
Yes, but was the "EU constitution" helping or harming the cause of European federalism?
I think that this whole EU constitution thing was a very bad idea from the beginning. Constitution speaks of superstate and federalism, yet nothing of the sort was included in the text itself. Ensued a terribly confusing campaign where very few people (myself NOT included) understood what they were voting for. And even fewer voted for the right reason. I voted YES, mainly for fear of what would happen should the NO win. Short answer : Nothing, long answer : I don't know.
I personally favor a form of European federalism, with an elected federal government holding real powers over member states in key domains (defense, diplomacy, currency...). I don't think this is achievable with 25 member states, it'll have to start with fewer (at least the UK would never allow it). Maybe the adoption of the EU constitution would have prevented that.
I regret to inform you that you have a terrible misperception of the way business is done and value chains are built and evolved.
By definition, any external company is not there to help you, they're just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible.
Paranoia and self-delusion, period. Are you telling me that you never buy anything for fear that the vendor would rip you? And if you want to be paranoid, please explain to me why an employee would not be just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible?
Stop insulting people and try to learn.
The OSS world is composed of a myriad of different projects with vastly differing maturity, polish, documentation, feature perimeter etc... And all of these are constantly evolving. For a given task, you can find dozens of relevant OSS projects. When you factor in compatibility, support and maintenance, this becomes an inextricable jungle.
Most customers don't have the time or skills or will to see clearly through all of this and need someone to define, package, test and support a coherent collection of OSS components that will get the job done. This not only reduces the percepted complexity but also allows greater reusability and most importantly support costs that don't grow exponentially over time.
Now, you can call these OSS components collections whatever you want. "Bunch of related products...", software piles, solution stacks, application groups... whatever. But the fact that such a term has appeared is a sure sign that the industry has matured and that players on the OSS market now understand what their customers need. By refusing to acknowledge that such a term is needed you just show that you don't understand what's going on.
Customers don't want code, they want a product that meet their specs (a "solution" to their problem?). OSS is working to offer that and I think it's a good thing. OSS is spreading in spite of you, not thanks to you. I think it's pretty sad if you consider yourself an OSS supporter.
From your original post :
That is, of course, if the free "cheese" they give me isn't really a pile of poison poo spray painted yellow. I really hate when that happens.
By writing this sentence as a part of your whole cheese-HBO analogy, you chose to blur the difference between the free samples offered by HBO (not poisoned) and the regular shows downloaded without HBO's consent over bittorrent (poisoned). Equating the two propositions hints that the latter should be allowed since the former is.
I am puzzled by the fact that you seem to believe I have made that argument. I have done nothing of the kind. Perhaps you need to go read my post again and try to see what those who moderated me saw.
You made that argument through your analogy. And I think it's for this exact reason that you were modded up.
I agree. This whole civilization thing is way overrated. The mere concept of helping each other for no immediate personal profit reeks of communism. Let's abolish all of this crap and adopt an efficient win-or-die model. Well, the wolves have been doing this for eons, and they are obviously a much better evolutionary success than us humans.
Look, what you wrote is wrong on so many ways... Factually, morally, economically, you name it. People like you consider that misery is a feature of the system rather than a bug. You have wilfully renounced what has always driven human development.
You, sir, are evil.
Think about it for a second. If they did, they surrendered to the French :)
"As comparison with other Western nations alone shows, the US could easily cut its CO2 emissions in half without any decrease in its standard of living; quite to the contrary: a serious program to do that would increase the standard of living and create jobs."
Really? While you might define returning to horses as the dominant form of transportation to be no change in standard of living, I think most would disagree with you. That is what would be required for a 50% cut. The only countries who find it easy to reduce carbon emissions are ones stuck in depressions with extremely outdated technology. Even western European countries will find it hard to reduce carbon emissions.
Here is a list of countries by ratio of GDP to CO2 emission. The European Union produces 31.5% of world GDP yet only emits 15.3% of the CO2. The US produces 28.2% of the world GDP yet emits 24.3% of the CO2. If the US were as CO2-efficient than the EU, they could produce the same GDP while only emitting 13.7% of the world CO2, ie roughly half of what the US is emitting right now.
So maybe you have a highly distorted view of how Europeans are living. But Europe shows that cutting emissions in half IS possible without reverting to horse-powered carts.
Let me follow your argument here. You're saying that the reason why US soldiers are causing the most friendly fire is because US soldiers are doing the most of the fighting. Right?
Let's imagine a situation where 90% of the allied troops are US and 10% are other allied (UK or other). Sounds familiar? Let's assume (your argument) that each nationality has the same probability of firing on friends and that this probability is independant on the nationality of the friend.
Then, there should be roughly the same number of US on allied casualties than the other way around. And the number of US on US casualties should be 9 times the number of US on allied (or allied on US). Think about it, there are 9 times more US shooters but also 9 times more US targets.
Now, it's very difficult to get official stats, so I'll have to rely on a general feeling from reading the media. Regarding Iraq for example, I'm under the impression that US on UK casualties far outnumber UK on US casualties. And before you invoke the "liberal media" defense, please reread your post. You don't seem to challenge the fact that the US does most of the friendly fire on allies, you try to explain it away with the number argument. And I think I proved that this argument does not hold.
The bottom line is that it's more dangerous for a non-US soldier to be deployed close to US units than close to other NATO units. The doctrine in the US army seems to be "if not absolutely sure that it's an ally, shoot" and many allies are not perfectly up to date with US authentication codes.
Liberals and/or feminists are the people that define porn as exploitation
Yeah sure. It was liberals and/or feminists who made so much fuss about half a breast last superbowl. Sure.
The truth is that feminists AND social conservatives are the ones who seem to have a problem with pornography, arguably for very different reasons. Most liberals don't really give a damn. Of course, most feminists ARE liberals, but most liberals are NOT feminists.
Regrettably, the literacy data stops in 1979. It would be interesting to know how the trend evolves in the latest quarter century, ie. into the age of cable TV and mass advertising.
Megafauna dissappeared around the same time as human occupation in many places including North America.
TFA says that the magafauna extinction happened 13,000 years ago. Everybody knows that the world was created 6,000 years ago. Humans can't be blamed for species extinction that predate the creation of the world.
Duh, you tree-huggers don't make sense.
Yes, I see it now. Start a space-weapons program. It will trigger a space-arms race. The Terr'rists will have to join in the race or admit defeat. They will spend themselves to the ground. In the end, we win... without firing a bullet.
It worked soooooooooooooo well with SDI. It's time to reuse that masterplan. Waste truckloads of money on useless stuff in the hope that the enemy will be dumb enough to follow us.
ID is an attempt by a religious organization to counter the scientific method's encroachment on their domain.
With every scientific advance, their concept of "God" becomes less effective and more nebulous and this scares them.
I disagree.
IMHO science and religion do not compete because they do not answer the same question. Science answers the how and religion answers the why. Whatever progress science makes, it will never answer the question of purpose. Why are we here? Why does it work that way? A scientist will still have these questions. If he's agnostic, he 'll answer "it is the way it is, there's no purpose". If he's religious, he'll answer "God made it that way."
Only someone with an agenda opposes science and religion. Religious fundies and priest-bashers have this in common : they use religion or science to gain power. I have more respect for people who serve religion or science.
But if you can't admit it might have a place in a philosophical discussion (NOT a scientific discussion), we have nothing further to say.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, but your (original) post is pretty ambiguous, especially as a response to the question of whether ID should be taught in class or not.
To illustrate the ambiguity, I'll start by breaching Godwin's law. If I say "nazism should be taught in class," many people will disagree strongly. They don't think nazism should be advocated or presented as a legitimate ideology.
But of course, there's a lot to teach about nazism in history or philosophy class. What was it ? How did it come to power ? What were its results ? How did it compare with communism ? How can democracies protect themselves against totalitarian drifts ?
I'm not saying or implying that ID is in any way similar to nazism. I'm just saying that, for the sake of the discussion, you should clarify what you mean by "Intelligent Design certainly has a place in the classroom." Do you mean (as Pres. Bush seems to recommand) that ID should be presented in class as a legitimate alternative to evolution (a scientific theory)? Or do you mean that ID should just be discussed as a cognitive construction in a philosphy class ? In the latter case, I don't think IMHO that it's a topic nearly as interesting as nazism; but, as I said, it's just my opinion.
You forced me to Google it. It was Kerry, as I thought. Interestingly, this quote was used by the Bush campaign to illustrate how much Kerry was out of touch with what the world had became. Yet you thought it was Bush who said it.
Whoever said it, it makes a lot of sense. But what do YOU think now that you know Kerry said it?
You're right, of course.
IMHO, both propositions are completely unrelated. We could invade Iraq or not. We can set up more counter-terrorist cells or not. Each proposition should be (have been?) decided on its own merits.
Words have a meaning, you know? Everybody agrees that Hussein was a bad guy. He was a bloodthirsty dictator but not a terrorist. He did not blow up airliners or subway stations for instance. He's still an evil man, but not a terrorist.
There are (sadly) a lot of evil dictators in the world. North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar and others come to mind. These guys are generally not terrorists because they're usually more interested in maintaining their own power and completing their little genocide than pissing off western countries and risking to lose everything.
An interesting exception is Col. Gaddafi, dictator of Libya. This guy has been convicted of conducting terror attacks by several western courts. He's been proven responsible of blowing up at least 2 airliners in the eighties. He was the archetypal bad guy back then, the Saddam of his time. In "Back to the future" for instance the villains are Libyans.
Gaddafi is a terrorist. He's still the dictator of Libya. Yet all western (including US) sanctions against Libya were lifted 2 years ago when Gaddafi dropped his WMD programs. Talk about a war on terror...
Just in case you were wondering why the US (and the West) would clear a known terrorist, Libya has HUGE oil reserves...