Think back to the last time you did an all-night coding session. What kind of food did you eat? Those vending machines don't exactly sell health food.
For non-nerdy types (and many nerds too) -- think back to your last all-night drinking session. Beer is full of fat and carbs, and the pizza and junk food that goes along with it is pretty fattening too.
And regardless of why you're up late at night, if you go out to eat, the only restaurants open an 2 in the morning are Taco Bell and Denny's.
If one guy goes out and gets an expensive satellite connection, then his county would qualify as "serviced" if I'm understanding this right. There's a big difference between your neighbor (who lives 10 miles down the road) having a satellite broadband connection vs. you being able to call up SBC and get a DSL line for $27 a month.
The problem of course is that it's ambiguous. Most people are smart enough to figure out what 22/11/99 means, even if they live in the U.S. However, if some company announces a product release date of 08/02/05, what does that mean? Next month? This summer? Three years from now?
Unless your audience already knows what format you're using, it helps to write the date in a way that's unambiguous.
You're right, this is generally true. However, it is possible to have a law making it mandatory to report criminal activity you're aware of under certain circumstances. For example, in many (all?) US states, if a teacher is aware that one of the students is a victim of child abuse, they are required by law to report this.
So in other words, if one Company were to own severaL differEnt rAdio stations, instead of each station being undeR separate ownership, the stations Collectively could tHen be more profitAble. In other words, someoNe could make a lot of moNEy by starting a company that buys out Lots of different radio stations (at prices based on profitability under single ownership) and then makes them (overall) more economically efficient than they were before.
Remember, this is the same country where your land can be seized by the government if someone else grows marijuana on it. Even if they were trespassing and you weren't aware it was going on. How is this any different from owning a computer that is part of a botnet? In both cases, an unauthorized person is using your property illegally without your knowledge or consent.
The President does have the power to veto spending bills and, as John Kerry pointed out during the debates, Bush did not veto a single spending bill during his first term. Therefore it's fair to assign at least part of the blame to Bush.
Also, as others have already pointed out, the White House and Congress are all controlled by Republicans. Unlike Reagan, Bush can't blame his massive deficit on a Democratic congress.
The job is really a joke though. I've worked harder at EVERY other job I've EVER had including selling tickets!! I've told my manager and my manager's manager that I need work to do when I'm at work but a project is given a certain amount of money and that money needs to be spent even if no constructive work is really being done.
Actually, I thought the cultural decline of support for NASA had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without an evil empire to race against, people lost interest.
The novelty of sending people to space has also worn off, kind of like how jet travel used to be a big deal but now most people just read a book/magazine while they wait for the Southwest flight to land so they can use their cell phone.
Also a lot of the less glamorous stuff advances science a lot more than people think. We may have grounded the Space Shuttle, but we have unmanned probes studying Mars, going to Saturn, bringing solar wind particles back to Earth, etc.
Not to mention the fact that raising the gas tax would also encourage people to buy more efficient cars. Next time you fly into the Bay Area or LA, look out the window and you'll see why this might be a good idea. If everyone goes out and buys a Prius, no problem for the state -- just double the gas tax, and you collect the same revenue.
Another idea would be to calculate the sales tax on cars by dividing the purchase price by the miles per gallon. This avoids the "poor people driving old shitty cars that get bad gas mileage" argument against high gas taxes. For example -- Prius: $20000/55mpg = $363.64 sales tax Hummer: $50000/10mpg = $5000 sales tax
The real point of these laws isn't to stop people from abusing camera phones. The real purpose is to give the lawmakers the appearance of "doing something" about the problem. Next time they're up for reelection, watch for ads saying "I protected families and children by making it harder for pedophiles and perverts to use camera phones to hurt children. Vote for me." They're hoping most people don't stop to think about whether what they did had any real effect (and they're probably right).
This looks like it's from Michael Moore's "17 reasons not to slit your wrists" that he sent out a day or two after the election. The actual quote is:
2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
It's only sitting presidents, and it doesn't count the incumbents that lost (Bush 41, Carter, etc). In other words, the following Presidents won reelection by a wider margin than Bush did:
Clinton (1996) Reagan (1984) Nixon (1972) Johnson (1964) Eisenhower (1956) Truman (1948) FDR (1944) FDR (1940) FDR (1936) Coolidge (1924)
Now when a Democrat liberal president appoints liberal judge to bench and Republican conservatives try to block it they are partisan stalling and hurting the nation.
I never said this. Maybe someone else did?
As you said, the judges should be there to interpret law, not push an agenda one way or another. If the President (Republican or Democrat) nominates someone who wants to legislate from the bench, or who has views that are too extreme, it's the responsibility of the opposition party to block the nomination. This applies whether it's a Republican president nominating someone who wants to roll back civil rights laws and invalidate all the labor laws, or a Democratic president nominating someone who wants to invalidate all the marijuana laws and force all states to recognize gay marriages.
Filibusters are a legitimate part of the system, no matter who is doing it. Ideally, anyone who makes it through the process is someone that's palatable to both parties, and therefore relatively impartial and free of agendas.
It's unlikely that Ashcroft would make it onto the Supreme Court, but Bush might use him as a stalking horse. Nominate him, watch the country go crazy, watch the Democrats use up all their time and political capital fighting off Ashcroft... then when everyone is worn out from blocking the Ashcroft nomination, Bush appoints a relative unknown who turns out to be as bad or worse.
The Democrats need to watch out for this, and keep up the resistance against anyone on the right wing that Bush tries to put on the Court. We still have 45 seats in the Senate, that's enough for a filibuster. The ability to filibuster is there for a reason -- to stop a President and 51 Senators (or in this case 55) from the same party from putting an extremist on the Supreme Court. The Democrats need to make sure Bush comes up with nominees that are at lease somewhat moderate.
I think the population of each county determines its height on the map, not its volume. If volume were actually proportional to population, the tallest spikes would be the most densely populated counties -- places like San Francisco and the Borough of Manhattan. Instead, the tallest spikes are simply the most populous counties, like Cook County IL and Los Angeles County.
I'm not entirely sure what the methodology is though. Maricopa County, AZ (the only one in Arizona with any real height to it on the map) has about 1/3 the population of Los Angeles County, but the height ratio on the map is a lot more than 3:1. Also San Bernardino County looks a lot flatter than it should be.
If you're around secondhand smoke a lot, over a long period of time -- like if you're married to a smoker or you spend several years working in smoky bars or casinos or wherever -- there's a good chance this will cause some health problems of some kind. If you get a lungful of cigarette smoke once in a while as you leave a building or pull up next to a smoker at a red light or visit friends/relatives who smoke or watch movies where the characters smoke, it's not going to hurt you.
Think of it this way: Big Macs are unhealthy. Cyanide is also unhealthy. The difference is that eating one Big Mac isn't going to kill you. Cigarettes are unhealthy like Big Macs. If you smoke, quit, and if you don't smoke, don't start. But at the same time, don't freak out over every cubic millimeter of cigarette smoke that happens to touch you.
This is why I get so sick and tired of the Republicans whining about the Democrats in the Senate holding up Bush's judicial nominees. There's a reason why the system allows 40 Senators to block nominees in a filibuster. Bush shouldn't get to fill the courts with right wing justices just because 51 senators are Republicans, nor should Kerry get to fill the courts with left-wing justices just because 51 senators are Democrats. The system is designed to put moderate judges in the courts that people from both parties can support.
People come up with dumber reasons all the time. At least you can read the website and find out where they stand on the issues.
6. Who has the better looking television ads? 7. Which one is taller? 8. Who are your parents voting for? 9. Whose niece/nephew got arrested for drug possession? 10. Who did Fau^H^Hox News tell you to vote for?
It seems to me a better system would be to greatly increase federal funding for drug research, then whatever drugs are developed as a result immediately become part of the public domain. The actual manufacturing could be done by the generic drug manufacturers, just like when a drug's patent expires. This would probably be cheaper than what Medicare pays to buy drugs from private companies. It would certainly be cheaper if/when we get a universal health care system. In the case of AIDS drugs, it would solve many of the problems related to African countries not being able to afford patent royalties.
Of course, private companies would still be allowed to develop and patent medicines, and would keep the patents they have today. What I imagine is that the government would focus on developing treatments for serious illnesses (cancer, heart disease, AIDS, etc.) while "lifestyle" drugs like Viagra could be left to private companies. And if the government didn't do a very good job in a particular area, the drug companies would be able to make a lot of money picking up the slack.
I got the same thing you got. The grandparent is off by a factor of exactly 52 1/7, which is exactly the number of weeks in a [365 day] year. It looks like after dividing by 7 (as in the travel time to Saturn being 7 years) he divided by 7 again instead of dividing by 365.
I'm not sure it's that people are of below-average intelligence so much as not all people are interested in science in and of itself. As you pointed out, if you can use science to create something they find useful, they'll care. Those of us on Slashdot may be interested in how passing electricity through a plasma can be used to produce a certain wavelength of light, but most people don't seem to care until you use it to build a TV.
This can work the other way around for different topics. Most people in the Slashdot crowd aren't interested in fashion for its own sake, but many of us will start to care if there's a way to use it to do something useful, like get a job or a date.
I think the bottom line is, different people are interested in different things. Not everyone is a science geek.
Slashdot Mirror
Think back to the last time you did an all-night coding session. What kind of food did you eat? Those vending machines don't exactly sell health food.
For non-nerdy types (and many nerds too) -- think back to your last all-night drinking session. Beer is full of fat and carbs, and the pizza and junk food that goes along with it is pretty fattening too.
And regardless of why you're up late at night, if you go out to eat, the only restaurants open an 2 in the morning are Taco Bell and Denny's.
If one guy goes out and gets an expensive satellite connection, then his county would qualify as "serviced" if I'm understanding this right. There's a big difference between your neighbor (who lives 10 miles down the road) having a satellite broadband connection vs. you being able to call up SBC and get a DSL line for $27 a month.
But it's 600,000* and not (600,000)*. So it could be 60,000 or 600,000 or 6 trillion, etc. (I'm also cheating with the commas, of course).
The problem of course is that it's ambiguous. Most people are smart enough to figure out what 22/11/99 means, even if they live in the U.S. However, if some company announces a product release date of 08/02/05, what does that mean? Next month? This summer? Three years from now?
Unless your audience already knows what format you're using, it helps to write the date in a way that's unambiguous.
You're right, this is generally true. However, it is possible to have a law making it mandatory to report criminal activity you're aware of under certain circumstances. For example, in many (all?) US states, if a teacher is aware that one of the students is a victim of child abuse, they are required by law to report this.
So in other words, if one Company were to own severaL differEnt rAdio stations, instead of each station being undeR separate ownership, the stations Collectively could tHen be more profitAble. In other words, someoNe could make a lot of moNEy by starting a company that buys out Lots of different radio stations (at prices based on profitability under single ownership) and then makes them (overall) more economically efficient than they were before.
I wonder how come no one's thought of this yet...
Remember, this is the same country where your land can be seized by the government if someone else grows marijuana on it. Even if they were trespassing and you weren't aware it was going on. How is this any different from owning a computer that is part of a botnet? In both cases, an unauthorized person is using your property illegally without your knowledge or consent.
The President does have the power to veto spending bills and, as John Kerry pointed out during the debates, Bush did not veto a single spending bill during his first term. Therefore it's fair to assign at least part of the blame to Bush.
Also, as others have already pointed out, the White House and Congress are all controlled by Republicans. Unlike Reagan, Bush can't blame his massive deficit on a Democratic congress.
The job is really a joke though. I've worked harder at EVERY other job I've EVER had including selling tickets!! I've told my manager and my manager's manager that I need work to do when I'm at work but a project is given a certain amount of money and that money needs to be spent even if no constructive work is really being done.
What government agency do you work for?
Actually, I thought the cultural decline of support for NASA had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without an evil empire to race against, people lost interest.
The novelty of sending people to space has also worn off, kind of like how jet travel used to be a big deal but now most people just read a book/magazine while they wait for the Southwest flight to land so they can use their cell phone.
Also a lot of the less glamorous stuff advances science a lot more than people think. We may have grounded the Space Shuttle, but we have unmanned probes studying Mars, going to Saturn, bringing solar wind particles back to Earth, etc.
Not to mention the fact that raising the gas tax would also encourage people to buy more efficient cars. Next time you fly into the Bay Area or LA, look out the window and you'll see why this might be a good idea. If everyone goes out and buys a Prius, no problem for the state -- just double the gas tax, and you collect the same revenue.
Another idea would be to calculate the sales tax on cars by dividing the purchase price by the miles per gallon. This avoids the "poor people driving old shitty cars that get bad gas mileage" argument against high gas taxes. For example --
Prius: $20000/55mpg = $363.64 sales tax
Hummer: $50000/10mpg = $5000 sales tax
The real point of these laws isn't to stop people from abusing camera phones. The real purpose is to give the lawmakers the appearance of "doing something" about the problem. Next time they're up for reelection, watch for ads saying "I protected families and children by making it harder for pedophiles and perverts to use camera phones to hurt children. Vote for me." They're hoping most people don't stop to think about whether what they did had any real effect (and they're probably right).
Florida has a version of this. Someone should send the link to these lowest-bid contractors.
http://www.callsunshine.com/corp/index.html
I guess endorsements aren't just for athletes and movie stars anymore. Now even Clippy has his own endorsement deals.
Only in America.
This looks like it's from Michael Moore's "17 reasons not to slit your wrists" that he sent out a day or two after the election. The actual quote is:
2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
It's only sitting presidents, and it doesn't count the incumbents that lost (Bush 41, Carter, etc). In other words, the following Presidents won reelection by a wider margin than Bush did:
Clinton (1996)
Reagan (1984)
Nixon (1972)
Johnson (1964)
Eisenhower (1956)
Truman (1948)
FDR (1944)
FDR (1940)
FDR (1936)
Coolidge (1924)
Now when a Democrat liberal president appoints liberal judge to bench and Republican conservatives try to block it they are partisan stalling and hurting the nation.
I never said this. Maybe someone else did?
As you said, the judges should be there to interpret law, not push an agenda one way or another. If the President (Republican or Democrat) nominates someone who wants to legislate from the bench, or who has views that are too extreme, it's the responsibility of the opposition party to block the nomination. This applies whether it's a Republican president nominating someone who wants to roll back civil rights laws and invalidate all the labor laws, or a Democratic president nominating someone who wants to invalidate all the marijuana laws and force all states to recognize gay marriages.
Filibusters are a legitimate part of the system, no matter who is doing it. Ideally, anyone who makes it through the process is someone that's palatable to both parties, and therefore relatively impartial and free of agendas.
It's unlikely that Ashcroft would make it onto the Supreme Court, but Bush might use him as a stalking horse. Nominate him, watch the country go crazy, watch the Democrats use up all their time and political capital fighting off Ashcroft... then when everyone is worn out from blocking the Ashcroft nomination, Bush appoints a relative unknown who turns out to be as bad or worse.
The Democrats need to watch out for this, and keep up the resistance against anyone on the right wing that Bush tries to put on the Court. We still have 45 seats in the Senate, that's enough for a filibuster. The ability to filibuster is there for a reason -- to stop a President and 51 Senators (or in this case 55) from the same party from putting an extremist on the Supreme Court. The Democrats need to make sure Bush comes up with nominees that are at lease somewhat moderate.
I think the population of each county determines its height on the map, not its volume. If volume were actually proportional to population, the tallest spikes would be the most densely populated counties -- places like San Francisco and the Borough of Manhattan. Instead, the tallest spikes are simply the most populous counties, like Cook County IL and Los Angeles County.
I'm not entirely sure what the methodology is though. Maricopa County, AZ (the only one in Arizona with any real height to it on the map) has about 1/3 the population of Los Angeles County, but the height ratio on the map is a lot more than 3:1. Also San Bernardino County looks a lot flatter than it should be.
If you're around secondhand smoke a lot, over a long period of time -- like if you're married to a smoker or you spend several years working in smoky bars or casinos or wherever -- there's a good chance this will cause some health problems of some kind. If you get a lungful of cigarette smoke once in a while as you leave a building or pull up next to a smoker at a red light or visit friends/relatives who smoke or watch movies where the characters smoke, it's not going to hurt you.
Think of it this way: Big Macs are unhealthy. Cyanide is also unhealthy. The difference is that eating one Big Mac isn't going to kill you. Cigarettes are unhealthy like Big Macs. If you smoke, quit, and if you don't smoke, don't start. But at the same time, don't freak out over every cubic millimeter of cigarette smoke that happens to touch you.
Someone needed to say this.
This is why I get so sick and tired of the Republicans whining about the Democrats in the Senate holding up Bush's judicial nominees. There's a reason why the system allows 40 Senators to block nominees in a filibuster. Bush shouldn't get to fill the courts with right wing justices just because 51 senators are Republicans, nor should Kerry get to fill the courts with left-wing justices just because 51 senators are Democrats. The system is designed to put moderate judges in the courts that people from both parties can support.
People come up with dumber reasons all the time. At least you can read the website and find out where they stand on the issues.
6. Who has the better looking television ads?
7. Which one is taller?
8. Who are your parents voting for?
9. Whose niece/nephew got arrested for drug possession?
10. Who did Fau^H^Hox News tell you to vote for?
They said bush would take the side of the church
If only this were true for Bush's favorite issue to talk about...
Vatican questions "preventive" wars
It seems to me a better system would be to greatly increase federal funding for drug research, then whatever drugs are developed as a result immediately become part of the public domain. The actual manufacturing could be done by the generic drug manufacturers, just like when a drug's patent expires. This would probably be cheaper than what Medicare pays to buy drugs from private companies. It would certainly be cheaper if/when we get a universal health care system. In the case of AIDS drugs, it would solve many of the problems related to African countries not being able to afford patent royalties.
Of course, private companies would still be allowed to develop and patent medicines, and would keep the patents they have today. What I imagine is that the government would focus on developing treatments for serious illnesses (cancer, heart disease, AIDS, etc.) while "lifestyle" drugs like Viagra could be left to private companies. And if the government didn't do a very good job in a particular area, the drug companies would be able to make a lot of money picking up the slack.
I got the same thing you got. The grandparent is off by a factor of exactly 52 1/7, which is exactly the number of weeks in a [365 day] year. It looks like after dividing by 7 (as in the travel time to Saturn being 7 years) he divided by 7 again instead of dividing by 365.
I'm not sure it's that people are of below-average intelligence so much as not all people are interested in science in and of itself. As you pointed out, if you can use science to create something they find useful, they'll care. Those of us on Slashdot may be interested in how passing electricity through a plasma can be used to produce a certain wavelength of light, but most people don't seem to care until you use it to build a TV.
This can work the other way around for different topics. Most people in the Slashdot crowd aren't interested in fashion for its own sake, but many of us will start to care if there's a way to use it to do something useful, like get a job or a date.
I think the bottom line is, different people are interested in different things. Not everyone is a science geek.