And you Reagan was a Marx expert ? I doubt he has even read "The capital" when he said this sentenced. I'd think twice before quoting Reagan on anything. Remember this other one from Ronald Reagan :
Trees are the biggest cause of air-polution
Everyone knows Reagan IQ was well in the two to single digits and that he was a puppet president. Heck, he was already a lame actor. Reagan was one of the most incompetent and stupid president the US ever had. Heck, even Bush Junior is more intelligent (although another puppet).
True - but US TV is also the crappiest because it has the highest ratio of commercials/content you'll ever find on earth. Dammit - when you watch a movie or serie there's as much commercials as actual content. It's just not worth it.
Given that the plausibility of a guy that is invisible, that no one has ever seen except as described in very old books, and that is supposed to have absolute power and knowledge is about the same as the plausibility that unicorns exists, I'd say this requires a whole lotta more brainwashing that any wrong-science could ever need. You can check that the world is round (despite what most religions were saying) - you still can't check that God said this or that or that he exists either. That's the difference between brainwashing and checking the facts.
Actually it wouldn't be hard to write a book with only 7 letters long words only. As for as book without the letter 'e', Georges Perec (French author) has written a whole fiction without a single 'e', and if you know of often the 'e' is used in French you know what a feat this is.
Well given enough time, there's certainly a mathematical transformation that would change The Bible into Shakespear's "Romeo and Juliet", up to the comma.
So one can always read a text in such a way as often to find the number 7 (or 9, 12 or even 42:). Random chance ? Hell no ! The guys who found this first decided to look for the number 7, then arranged their method of searching/computing so that they would find lots of 7 in The Bible. I'm also sure the Bible is full of 7 letters long words. And 8 letters long word too. That's not a reason to claim that 7 (or 8 or 5) is "hiding" in this book either.
is the number 7, which is mentioned over and over again in various relationships to God the number that this kind of numerology works with?
Hugh... 10 commandments anyone ? Anyway if there is an intent in putting "hiding" the number 7 in the Bible (which is doubtfull, as the only intent I'm sure is that people are looking for the number 7 and ready to use whatever skewed method of analysis to find it), it just shows the writers put the number 7 in there. Hey - I could write a text with the number 7 everywhere, it doesn't make me God or divine. It doesn't proove anything at all.
Given enough religious brainwashing, anything is possible. Heck, if you can manage people to believe that there's a guy high above with a white beard that created everything, you can lead those people to believe pretty much anything else (that pork is not good, that working on sunday is evil, etc...)
The PC is not such a mess as you describe. ISA being dead - you end up with PCI which is very clean. Aside from that there's the x86 CPU which, while having some quirks from the old day, can work as well as any other RISC provided you use it properly (32 bit protected mode, MMX & SSE instructions, etc...)
Frankly the idea that the PC is full of legagy shit is a real stereotype. Sure if you want to support every piece of ISA extension card that roamed the earth, you'll have to deal with lots of horrible legacy stuff. But if you drop ISA cards support everything is as clean as anywhere else (PPC Mac, Alpha, Sun, whatever as they all use PCI bus now too).
Actually Real Networks is a terrible company - their software is so full of marketing and commercial shit you have to click on a good hundred of checkboxes to NOT get spam and constant sollicitation.
If they don't teach a minimum "standard" dressing code in school - those kids are in a for a rought surprise once they look for a job (where having piercing all over your face is not really helpful to get a job at the Chase Manhattan Bank;)
I think the author vastly overestimated the concern of society for the environment (or vastly underestimated the greed and strengh of economic lobbies..). With Bush Junior wanting to drill more petrol in Alaska, I don't see a "ban on coal burning" and such things as ubiquitous solar power coming anytime soon in USA.
Except that sometimes someone will forget that he subscribed to a mailing list or accepted received marketing emails. I've seen it - people who will create user accounts with all the details (name/adresse/phone/email) and check "send me some email", then 6 month later receive said email and will write to abuse@ complaining that they never heard about this website and never created any account. With this law they could sue for 500 $ (and loose, but then it's cost time and money to deal with).
If those things can happen with a 5000 addresses list - I shudder to think how costly it would be for amazon or other big serious online business to generate emails... I'm all in favor of jailing the "get rich quick" spams with bogus return adresses, but there must be protection for legitimate emails.
Well most companies and web sites have mailing list for customers/visitors to subscribe to. If those are counted as spam then you'll just restrict email to inter-person communication and kill all automatically generated email (mailing list, announce list, mail on demand, etc...). There's a difference between "I just turned 18 and made some nude picks" and legitimate mailing list like announce@apache.org or whatever.
Writing an OS from scratch takes some talent, but mostly a *lot* of patience.
I once did that in a few years ago - in assembler. The debugging was the real pain : compile on computer A, load on a disk, move to computer B, boot, see how it behaves, then go back to computer A and iterate over and over. The most painfull was before I had a display driver written as the only way to get an info from the PC was thru the beeper (ie beeps : situation A happened, no beep : situation A didn't happen... why ?)
On the other hand I wouldn't dare writing for the Linux/*BSD kernel - way too much code written by others to understand before writing just one line.
Why is there not one workingd GUI/graphic engine on Unix that is not X11 (eventhough there are regulary some attemps at it that appear here and there), and why a guy alone manage to make one that fully work (from graphic driver to widgets and API) and an OS to go with it ? If it is feasible on a "made from scratch" it should be already done on Linux for a long time. I mean - X11 has it's strength, but nowhere near the responsiveness and lean of BeOS GUI (or some other OS I won't name because I can already feel the flames...)
Well there are really usefull functionnalities, that can be both powerfull yet simple to use. Then there's the bloat : not so usefull to completely useless thing, that make the interface very complex. I think bloat is more about the user interface that the value of the functionnalities (at least when talking about IM)
There's an old debate in the US (and nowhere else) - mainly between drivers of pickups/SUV and others. The drivers of big "cars" (truck) argue that smaller cars are more dangerous for their drivers/passengers, because they offer less protection.
This is pure bullshit. If this was true, we would all drive tanks with 3 mm thick steel plates. No one would die. The world would be wonderfull. Oh wait, this ain't so ! In fact, most cars are more to be less resistant, so that when they crash they fold. The car has to absorb the energy of the shock so that passengers are protected.
Suppose you drive a big tank, but crash. At 60 mph. The tank is a bit shocked, but doesn't fold. Since the tank takes no energy from the shock, all it's content (you) is propeled to the front of the tank at 60 mph. You are smashed like an old tomatoe and the tank inside is painted in your blood and guts. So the argument that a big car is more resistant than a smaller one is a lie - because both are made to fold and not resist to the shock.
But F150 drivers then pull up some stats saying you are less likely to die in a small car than a larger one. So if it's not the resistance of the car that save your life, why is it so ? Well, it is so because, when a Civic driver hit a F150, the heavy mass of the F150 kills the Civic driver, and not the opposite. So it's not small cars that are dangerous - it's big cars that kill small car drivers.
So your number saying that fuel economy standard will increase deads on the road is a lie. Plain and simple. It's the same kind of lies that economy standards are bad for citizens. They are lies made by the gas/car industry to defend their interests. They use short-sighted logic to support their claims. But in Europe those standards have long been in place, every drive smaller, more efficient cars, and there aren't more deads, and there isn't an economic recession either because of it (the car industry is even thriving).
Maybe by doing research on more energy efficient manufacturing ? Making the industry cleaner doesn't mean laying off people, if anything else it means investing in research and making new products, which can be good for the economy in the long run. When more energy efficient standards are made, they say "washing machine will cost X more". But 10 years later the price is the same and the machine use 1/2 as much energy... another big lie from businesses trying to make as believe more efficient products means more expensive products.
But of course, businesses would rather not invest a cent in anything and will say "look, if you regulate our industry, we will lay off lots of people, and then you'll loose the elections" and get by with it.
Except it's only a trade agreement (as the USA are only worried about economy), while EU is about a common governement, army and foreign policy too (in the making right now:)
The US population is about 275 M - Europe as a whole is 727 M, with about 300 M in the European Union (and more to come with the coming arrival of Poland and other eastern Europe countries).
That's according to the Population Reference Bureau at http://www.prb.org/
Such is IBM, Microsoft, McDonalds, Sony, etc... they are even much more self-perpetuating and powerfull that many third-world governement.
if you will, deciding with their pocketbook
I'd rather decide with votes - as pocketbook size vary from citizen to citizen (and then, why should Bill Gates have a higher decision power into those things than you or me ?)
Governments, by and large, don't respond to such economic factors as rapidly
And this is good - governement should care about people, not their pocketbook. Your idea of "democracy" is really sick if you believe money is the thing that matter.
We have less than 20 years worth of data. That is in no way conclusive.
20 years of data ? Are you sure you weren't sleeping during class ? Ever heard about digging ice in the antarctic and looking at air samples in it ? We have data over the air composition for several 1000's or years. There are very precise graphs showing the rise of carbon since the 19th century (industrial age).
The issue for Kyoto is being tied into something which is detrimental to our citizens.
No - it is detrimental to the businesses - not the citizens. What you say is a huge lie that trie to make business=citizens, and is widely used by corporations against any regulation. Saving the environement is about saving the life of those who live in it. I don't care if that means cutting by 2% the profits of Texaco.
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And you Reagan was a Marx expert ? I doubt he has even read "The capital" when he said this sentenced. I'd think twice before quoting Reagan on anything. Remember this other one from Ronald Reagan :
Trees are the biggest cause of air-polution
Everyone knows Reagan IQ was well in the two to single digits and that he was a puppet president. Heck, he was already a lame actor. Reagan was one of the most incompetent and stupid president the US ever had. Heck, even Bush Junior is more intelligent (although another puppet).
Capitalism is a beautiful thing
It's a beautiful concept. But the implementation usually creates horrible things.
True - but US TV is also the crappiest because it has the highest ratio of commercials/content you'll ever find on earth. Dammit - when you watch a movie or serie there's as much commercials as actual content. It's just not worth it.
Given that the plausibility of a guy that is invisible, that no one has ever seen except as described in very old books, and that is supposed to have absolute power and knowledge is about the same as the plausibility that unicorns exists, I'd say this requires a whole lotta more brainwashing that any wrong-science could ever need. You can check that the world is round (despite what most religions were saying) - you still can't check that God said this or that or that he exists either. That's the difference between brainwashing and checking the facts.
Of course - use my dear hotmail spam mailbox (which get something like 50 spam/day now). But still a nuisance to install.
Actually it wouldn't be hard to write a book with only 7 letters long words only. As for as book without the letter 'e', Georges Perec (French author) has written a whole fiction without a single 'e', and if you know of often the 'e' is used in French you know what a feat this is.
Well given enough time, there's certainly a mathematical transformation that would change The Bible into Shakespear's "Romeo and Juliet", up to the comma.
:). Random chance ? Hell no ! The guys who found this first decided to look for the number 7, then arranged their method of searching/computing so that they would find lots of 7 in The Bible. I'm also sure the Bible is full of 7 letters long words. And 8 letters long word too. That's not a reason to claim that 7 (or 8 or 5) is "hiding" in this book either.
So one can always read a text in such a way as often to find the number 7 (or 9, 12 or even 42
is the number 7, which is mentioned over and over again in various relationships to God the number that this kind of numerology works with?
Hugh... 10 commandments anyone ? Anyway if there is an intent in putting "hiding" the number 7 in the Bible (which is doubtfull, as the only intent I'm sure is that people are looking for the number 7 and ready to use whatever skewed method of analysis to find it), it just shows the writers put the number 7 in there. Hey - I could write a text with the number 7 everywhere, it doesn't make me God or divine. It doesn't proove anything at all.
Given enough religious brainwashing, anything is possible. Heck, if you can manage people to believe that there's a guy high above with a white beard that created everything, you can lead those people to believe pretty much anything else (that pork is not good, that working on sunday is evil, etc...)
And we know the Bible is right because God wrote it, and we know God wrote it because that's what the Bible says... oh wait ;)
The PC is not such a mess as you describe. ISA being dead - you end up with PCI which is very clean. Aside from that there's the x86 CPU which, while having some quirks from the old day, can work as well as any other RISC provided you use it properly (32 bit protected mode, MMX & SSE instructions, etc...)
Frankly the idea that the PC is full of legagy shit is a real stereotype. Sure if you want to support every piece of ISA extension card that roamed the earth, you'll have to deal with lots of horrible legacy stuff. But if you drop ISA cards support everything is as clean as anywhere else (PPC Mac, Alpha, Sun, whatever as they all use PCI bus now too).
Actually Real Networks is a terrible company - their software is so full of marketing and commercial shit you have to click on a good hundred of checkboxes to NOT get spam and constant sollicitation.
If they don't teach a minimum "standard" dressing code in school - those kids are in a for a rought surprise once they look for a job (where having piercing all over your face is not really helpful to get a job at the Chase Manhattan Bank ;)
I think the author vastly overestimated the concern of society for the environment (or vastly underestimated the greed and strengh of economic lobbies..). With Bush Junior wanting to drill more petrol in Alaska, I don't see a "ban on coal burning" and such things as ubiquitous solar power coming anytime soon in USA.
Except that sometimes someone will forget that he subscribed to a mailing list or accepted received marketing emails. I've seen it - people who will create user accounts with all the details (name/adresse/phone/email) and check "send me some email", then 6 month later receive said email and will write to abuse@ complaining that they never heard about this website and never created any account. With this law they could sue for 500 $ (and loose, but then it's cost time and money to deal with).
If those things can happen with a 5000 addresses list - I shudder to think how costly it would be for amazon or other big serious online business to generate emails... I'm all in favor of jailing the "get rich quick" spams with bogus return adresses, but there must be protection for legitimate emails.
Well most companies and web sites have mailing list for customers/visitors to subscribe to. If those are counted as spam then you'll just restrict email to inter-person communication and kill all automatically generated email (mailing list, announce list, mail on demand, etc...). There's a difference between "I just turned 18 and made some nude picks" and legitimate mailing list like announce@apache.org or whatever.
Writing an OS from scratch takes some talent, but mostly a *lot* of patience.
I once did that in a few years ago - in assembler. The debugging was the real pain : compile on computer A, load on a disk, move to computer B, boot, see how it behaves, then go back to computer A and iterate over and over. The most painfull was before I had a display driver written as the only way to get an info from the PC was thru the beeper (ie beeps : situation A happened, no beep : situation A didn't happen... why ?)
On the other hand I wouldn't dare writing for the Linux/*BSD kernel - way too much code written by others to understand before writing just one line.
Why is there not one workingd GUI/graphic engine on Unix that is not X11 (eventhough there are regulary some attemps at it that appear here and there), and why a guy alone manage to make one that fully work (from graphic driver to widgets and API) and an OS to go with it ? If it is feasible on a "made from scratch" it should be already done on Linux for a long time. I mean - X11 has it's strength, but nowhere near the responsiveness and lean of BeOS GUI (or some other OS I won't name because I can already feel the flames...)
Well there are really usefull functionnalities, that can be both powerfull yet simple to use. Then there's the bloat : not so usefull to completely useless thing, that make the interface very complex. I think bloat is more about the user interface that the value of the functionnalities (at least when talking about IM)
This - again - is a lie. Big time.
There's an old debate in the US (and nowhere else) - mainly between drivers of pickups/SUV and others. The drivers of big "cars" (truck) argue that smaller cars are more dangerous for their drivers/passengers, because they offer less protection.
This is pure bullshit. If this was true, we would all drive tanks with 3 mm thick steel plates. No one would die. The world would be wonderfull. Oh wait, this ain't so ! In fact, most cars are more to be less resistant, so that when they crash they fold. The car has to absorb the energy of the shock so that passengers are protected.
Suppose you drive a big tank, but crash. At 60 mph. The tank is a bit shocked, but doesn't fold. Since the tank takes no energy from the shock, all it's content (you) is propeled to the front of the tank at 60 mph. You are smashed like an old tomatoe and the tank inside is painted in your blood and guts. So the argument that a big car is more resistant than a smaller one is a lie - because both are made to fold and not resist to the shock.
But F150 drivers then pull up some stats saying you are less likely to die in a small car than a larger one. So if it's not the resistance of the car that save your life, why is it so ? Well, it is so because, when a Civic driver hit a F150, the heavy mass of the F150 kills the Civic driver, and not the opposite. So it's not small cars that are dangerous - it's big cars that kill small car drivers.
So your number saying that fuel economy standard will increase deads on the road is a lie. Plain and simple. It's the same kind of lies that economy standards are bad for citizens. They are lies made by the gas/car industry to defend their interests. They use short-sighted logic to support their claims. But in Europe those standards have long been in place, every drive smaller, more efficient cars, and there aren't more deads, and there isn't an economic recession either because of it (the car industry is even thriving).
Maybe by doing research on more energy efficient manufacturing ? Making the industry cleaner doesn't mean laying off people, if anything else it means investing in research and making new products, which can be good for the economy in the long run. When more energy efficient standards are made, they say "washing machine will cost X more". But 10 years later the price is the same and the machine use 1/2 as much energy... another big lie from businesses trying to make as believe more efficient products means more expensive products.
But of course, businesses would rather not invest a cent in anything and will say "look, if you regulate our industry, we will lay off lots of people, and then you'll loose the elections" and get by with it.
Except it's only a trade agreement (as the USA are only worried about economy), while EU is about a common governement, army and foreign policy too (in the making right now :)
European Union is not 300 M but 368.7 M people right now - so it's already well ahead of USA :)
The US population is about 275 M - Europe as a whole is 727 M, with about 300 M in the European Union (and more to come with the coming arrival of Poland and other eastern Europe countries).
That's according to the Population Reference Bureau at http://www.prb.org/
Governments are self-perpetuating
Such is IBM, Microsoft, McDonalds, Sony, etc... they are even much more self-perpetuating and powerfull that many third-world governement.
if you will, deciding with their pocketbook
I'd rather decide with votes - as pocketbook size vary from citizen to citizen (and then, why should Bill Gates have a higher decision power into those things than you or me ?)
Governments, by and large, don't respond to such economic factors as rapidly
And this is good - governement should care about people, not their pocketbook. Your idea of "democracy" is really sick if you believe money is the thing that matter.
We have less than 20 years worth of data. That is in no way conclusive.
20 years of data ? Are you sure you weren't sleeping during class ? Ever heard about digging ice in the antarctic and looking at air samples in it ? We have data over the air composition for several 1000's or years. There are very precise graphs showing the rise of carbon since the 19th century (industrial age).
The issue for Kyoto is being tied into something which is detrimental to our citizens.
No - it is detrimental to the businesses - not the citizens. What you say is a huge lie that trie to make business=citizens, and is widely used by corporations against any regulation. Saving the environement is about saving the life of those who live in it. I don't care if that means cutting by 2% the profits of Texaco.