Playing the stock market is like every other form of gambling: The house always wins. You lose.
I do not believe that I have seen such a completely misleading and or misinformed statement in a very long time. If you have no idea what you are doing, yeah, you could get burned. If you are smart, do your research and invest wisely, such as by diversifying, you can come out pretty darn well.
Biting the bullet & a major re-write worked pretty well for Apple.
That's not what Apple did at all.
What's now MacOS X started as an entirely different operating system from NeXT, and went through a decade or so of development and public release before Apple acquired it.
Apple fucked around internally trying to do ground-up rewrites for years and failed. (See the histories of Taligent and Copland for details.) By the time NeXT got done eating Apple from the inside out, hardware had advanced so much that they could afford to run most of the previous OS inside a virtualization layer within a moderately improved NeXT OS and have it seen as a step forward.
And really, a lot of the NeXT work was firmly in the Unix tradition, so even that wasn't a burn-it-down-and-start-fresh approach to things. The kernel was new, but like Linux, an awful lot of the ideas and user-space tools are borrowed.
Personally, I don't see what the big problems with the registry are. The registry is a hierarchial database system provided by the OS designed to store configuration information.
I'm not a Windows programmer, but the practical problem I see is that a filesystem is *already* a hierarchical database, one for which there is already widespread existing knowledge and many handy tools.
It seems to me that they could have accomplished everything they did but in a backward-compatible way by providing a nice library for config file managment. By making their own (very limited) database, they forced everybody to reinvent or do without things you can easily do with text files. E.g., backups, version control, network shares, searching, auditing, editing, diffing, and commenting.
I think that last one, commenting, is particularly important and particularly overlooked. Looking at my apache and postfix/etc directories, I'd guess that they are respectively 80% and 95% comments and examples. By making it so that I never have to even look at the manual for common operations, they radically increase my ability to learn about and maintain the software.
I'd like to see ANY real evidence for this rhetoric that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Seriously. Those are the people making bold claims that need to be proved.
It sounds like you already agree that a large minimum-wage increase would decrease employment. For example, if we made the minimum wage $20 per hour, you can bet that McDonald's would put a bunch more money into labor-saving devices to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce a burger. This is Econ 101: raise the price of something, and people will use less, often substituting another good.
It's also pretty obvious that dropping the minimum wage can increase employment. Consider when you drop it to zero, for example. Companies regularly take interns (and non-profits regularly take volunteers) to do scut work that they'd never bother paying anybody to do. It is also the logic behind a lot of worker retraining programs; the government will pay part or all of somebody's salary while they come up to speed in a new job. The subsidy, by reducing the cost to the employer, creates new jobs.
So you agree that a large raise in the minimum wage will cause a loss of jobs. You presumably agree that a large drop in wages can increase jobs. It sounds like your only disagreement is whether the effect appears at sufficiently small values. Or, put another way, you a proposing a novel theory that, unlike a normal market, the effect sometimes disappears for labor. Shouldn't you be the one coming up with proof for your bold claim?
As you'd hopefully expect, there's a fair bit of proof for what you're calling a bold claim. See, for example, "Do Minimum Wages Raise the NAIRU?" by Peter Tulip, Federal Reserve Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2000-38. He concludes that the difference in minimum wages between the US and Europe (where they are much higher) explain a lot of the difference in unemployment (which is much lower in the US).
Mr. Frost says they get a lot of info from baby monitors... they'd have to be pretty close to the originating house to do that, because even if the range extends far enough (which it probably doesn't, it costs money and takes fcc licenses to do long range broadcasting), baby monitors are on a band that is used by a lot of other things as well, and their transmissions would join a flood of others.
The FCC rules are there to prevent interference with other off-the-shelf technologies. For the billions we give them each year, I'm hoping the NSA is using something to eavesdrop besides the baby monitor and cordless phone base stations available at Walmart.
Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
Hey! Don't post things like this on Slashdot. If people here catch on to that and start behaving decently, tens of thousands of jerks may take their arrogance, trolling, and dramatic bickering elsewhere. It'd be like unleashing a plague of locusts on the Internet.
But is this enough? It's not at all difficult to make a bunch of Wikipedia accounts and store them for use in later vandalism.
Yes, but that sort of purposeful, constructive activity is generally beyond most vandals. I just can't see people saying, "Hey, let me create an account so a month from now I can put the word 'poo' at the beginning of this random article."
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In other words, if they want to be treated as a real encyclopaedia then they need to act like one.
I imagine you're just another one of the armchair quarterbacks that far prefers grousing and belittling others to actually making a difference. But on the slim chance that I'm wrong, I'll point out that you can make this happen yourself. You can copy both the software and the content and start your own version at any time. Restricted editing roles would take maybe a week to add.
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
It had the same number of major mistakes as the EB. It has more minor mistakes, though. Also, I'd say that the Wikipedia's strongest area is technology and internet culture, followed by the sciences.
If you respond well to people, then hire somebody you know and like to bug you at the end of every day to send him or her a summary of the time you've worked that day. Give them carte blanche to bug you by any means necessary until they get that email. You should be able to remember things adequately at the end of every day. Anyhow, it'll be better than trying to remember weeks later. And having regular feedback will give you an incentive to develop the disciplne needed to use a time-tracking tool.
You're probably better off coming up with better up-front estimates on how long a project will take and then billing against that, or just billing on a per-project or per-milestone project.
Unless the projects or milestones are pretty small and the clients are pretty sane and experienced, this is a dangerous approach. Estimates get proportionally more wrong as the scale goes up; programmers are notorious for saying that any given thing would take them two weeks to make. By working to fixed bid you are taking on most of the project risk, including risks that clients were saying one thing but meaning another.
By a disclaimer, I'm talking about something more direct and like: "This page was written by several people (some of whom are anonymous) working together and could contain factual errors."
Well, you got your wish. Every page now says at the top, "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit".
My reading was that Brittanica has 2 centuries head start on developing a good process (ie. editing, review etc). If the process has had so much time to mature then you might expect the result to be of a higher quality[...]
Yes, that's exactly my point.
When you hear the anti-Wikipedia crowd rant, they suggest that the process of building the encyclopedia is the important thing, that an open effort could never come close. If Wikipedia has gotten this far with only a few years of process innovation, it's very reasonable to think that they're still on the low end of the improvement curve.
Looking at Britannica's history, that's certainly plausible. I have a reproduction of the first edition of the EB, and the thing seems hopelessly crude compared with a modern version.
The interesting part is that Wikipedia did so well so quickly. Wikipedia's only been around since 2001, but they wrote the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1771. Britannica has had more than 200 years to get their process together, and their accuracy rates are still pretty close to Wikipedia's.
We can't just assume that everyone who reads Wikipedia will bother to figure out what a wiki is and appreciate the consequences.
The don't need to. What they should already be aware of is that on the Internet anybody can publish anything, so they should exercise appropriate caution. This is not a particularly new problem; "you can't believe everything you read" is a phrase that long predates the Internet.
Wikipedia, by making it very easy to check exactly what the scoop is with the Wikipedia as a whole and any particular page in specific, goes much farther than most pages on the Internet. I'm not worried about people getting bad information from Wikipedia nearly as much as I am from email forwards, blogs, or Fox News.
Since when is a wiki "obvious"? Wikis are far too new for the *general public* that reads Wikipedia to be aware of their consequences.
[...]
How about a disclaimer on *every single Wikipedia page*?
You want a disclaimer on every single page on the Internet that might have incorrect information? Lordy. It's easier to send out stickers to every rube to put on their monitor: "Caution: Don't Believe Everything You Read on the Intarweb".
The third, fourth, and fifth word on every Wikipedia page is "edit this page". The last three words are "About Wikipedia | Disclaimers". Anybody who wants to know what Wikipedia is has ample opportunity to find out. For the rest of humanity, I promise that you could put a warning in 48-point letters of fire and people would still not engage their brains.
mysql's lack of transations didn't matter because they can easily roll their own. This is nonsense, you cannot roll your own because if your app dies, or the db dies in the middle of one of your pseudo-transactions, then your data is left in an inconsistant state.
I couldn't easily find his comment, so perhaps I'm missing something, but depending on the problem, a transactional system really isn't all that hard to write. Take a look at Prevayler, for example.
If i were an advertiser I would want to be able to to verify that the bills Google sends me are indeed correct. Right now it seems that advertisers have no way of doing that?
If I were in business and didn't trust a vendor, I'd find a different vendor. How going to court is supposed to help anything, I dunno. If the vendor wasn't playing nice before, how will they treat me after I've dragged them through a couple years of litigation?
As an aside, I'm shocked by the number of people arguing against having after hours fun with such toys. Is the slashdot readership really so cowardly and unimaginative? Sure, one has to be careful and should avoid pissing off the bosses [...]
Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. I do a lot of work for startups, and I would never hire a geek that wasn't inclined to play with the toys. They should be smart enough not to break anything expensive. But if I want a job done in a perfectly regular fashion with no thinking or backtalk, I'll teach a computer to do it.
The current cable paradigm is a pretty good example of market failure - of market forces failing to produce optimal consumer outcomes or even providing coherent and significant choices for the consumer.
What market are you talking about? Most cable companies are local monopolies. And they "compete" with television stations paid for by advertisers. For broadcast and cable, you aren't the customer: you're the product that is packaged and sold.
Compare this with actual markets, like those for books or DVDs. They're still a little distorted by media concentration and marketing pushes, but by and large you can get whatever you want at reasonable prices.
My point is that central planning actually did allow for tremendous leaps in industrial capacity in very short periods of time. Of course, the human cost was staggering, and it was probably not efficiently done.
Yes. I agree that central leadership and central spending of money can push things along. But market mechanisms are the way to make things happen efficiently. Counting raw industrial capacity misses that industrial capacity is useless unless it is making the right things.
With regards to the specific issue of finding a sustainable energy source, it is pretty clear to me that some form of active government intervention is necessary, if for no other reason than that the initial investment in R&D is larger than what the private sector can provide.
It depends on the kind of government intervention you mean. But we should first start by changing the policies that tilt the playing field in favor of unsustainable energy sources.
Right now we charge for or regulate some pollutants but we let people emit CO2 for free, and our pollution charges are probably lower than the net societal cost. If we charge fairly for the use of common resources like we do with radio spectrum auctions, that would go a long way to helping things. Eliminating subsidies for coal, oil, and nuclear wouldn't be a bad thing. We can make it easier to allow grassroots adoption of sustainable power, which is currently way too hard. And we should allow individual consumers to pay extra for sustainable power when they want.
The prooof is obvious - if it had been possible it would have been done by now.;) That last is not as glib as it sounds: a sustainable energy solution will have to be better (cheaper, less polluting) than fossil fuels in order to be adopted at all. If it is better, then there is no reason it couldn't be adopted now. In which case the question is: then why hasn't some entrepreneur already found it?
Once the playing field is made level, we may need to do little else. Even with the modest R&D we've been doing, the cost of solar power has been dropping steadily for quite a while; for some people it's already economical. And beyond that, it might be sufficient for government intervention to be more in terms of providing leadership. The people that I know who work on this kind of thing have been pretty disheartened lately by Bush and Cheney's obvious bias for traditional energy corporations. Just declaring and promoting a goal of national energy independence might be enough to make big changes. If not, you can always tip the playing field in the other direction by over-taxing unsustainable energy.
But none of that requires letting politicians force particular technologies on us.
I'm gonna wager that the womens' restrooms do not have flushless urinals.
You'd be surprised. At the University of Michigan they built at least one of the dorms so that it could be used by either gender. I presume that was to give them extra flexibility in deciding which sections were which, but I definitely saw girls-only sections with urinals in the bathrooms.
It took me a while to parse that. I first thought that the University of North Texas had to be some sort of strict Baptist school with a hillbilly English department.
And neither did Clinton. [...] Sorry for this temporary insertion of non-slanted facts. You can resume your regular misinformed spin now.
I note during the time Kyoto was open for signing, Clinton had to work with an opposition-controlled legislature that had developed an unfortunate obsession with his penis. Bush, on the other hand, has had an unusally firm grip on Congress. And I note that although Clinton didn't campaign promising to sign Kyoto, Bush did. Plus, there have been several more years of science mainly backing it. Oh, and the treaty came into effect after that paragon of environmental sensitivity, Russia, got in ahead of us.
But otherwise, the two situations are completely equivalent: Bush and Clinton have both been president, and neither signed the Kyoto treaty. And since you put it that way, neither FDR nor Lincoln did anything about global warming, either. How dare people suggest that Bush is at fault when so many great leaders have done just what he's doing?
Slashdot Mirror
Biting the bullet & a major re-write worked pretty well for Apple.
That's not what Apple did at all.
What's now MacOS X started as an entirely different operating system from NeXT, and went through a decade or so of development and public release before Apple acquired it.
Apple fucked around internally trying to do ground-up rewrites for years and failed. (See the histories of Taligent and Copland for details.) By the time NeXT got done eating Apple from the inside out, hardware had advanced so much that they could afford to run most of the previous OS inside a virtualization layer within a moderately improved NeXT OS and have it seen as a step forward.
And really, a lot of the NeXT work was firmly in the Unix tradition, so even that wasn't a burn-it-down-and-start-fresh approach to things. The kernel was new, but like Linux, an awful lot of the ideas and user-space tools are borrowed.
Personally, I don't see what the big problems with the registry are. The registry is a hierarchial database system provided by the OS designed to store configuration information.
/etc directories, I'd guess that they are respectively 80% and 95% comments and examples. By making it so that I never have to even look at the manual for common operations, they radically increase my ability to learn about and maintain the software.
I'm not a Windows programmer, but the practical problem I see is that a filesystem is *already* a hierarchical database, one for which there is already widespread existing knowledge and many handy tools.
It seems to me that they could have accomplished everything they did but in a backward-compatible way by providing a nice library for config file managment. By making their own (very limited) database, they forced everybody to reinvent or do without things you can easily do with text files. E.g., backups, version control, network shares, searching, auditing, editing, diffing, and commenting.
I think that last one, commenting, is particularly important and particularly overlooked. Looking at my apache and postfix
I'd like to see ANY real evidence for this rhetoric that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Seriously. Those are the people making bold claims that need to be proved.
It sounds like you already agree that a large minimum-wage increase would decrease employment. For example, if we made the minimum wage $20 per hour, you can bet that McDonald's would put a bunch more money into labor-saving devices to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce a burger. This is Econ 101: raise the price of something, and people will use less, often substituting another good.
It's also pretty obvious that dropping the minimum wage can increase employment. Consider when you drop it to zero, for example. Companies regularly take interns (and non-profits regularly take volunteers) to do scut work that they'd never bother paying anybody to do. It is also the logic behind a lot of worker retraining programs; the government will pay part or all of somebody's salary while they come up to speed in a new job. The subsidy, by reducing the cost to the employer, creates new jobs.
So you agree that a large raise in the minimum wage will cause a loss of jobs. You presumably agree that a large drop in wages can increase jobs. It sounds like your only disagreement is whether the effect appears at sufficiently small values. Or, put another way, you a proposing a novel theory that, unlike a normal market, the effect sometimes disappears for labor. Shouldn't you be the one coming up with proof for your bold claim?
As you'd hopefully expect, there's a fair bit of proof for what you're calling a bold claim. See, for example, "Do Minimum Wages Raise the NAIRU?" by Peter Tulip, Federal Reserve Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2000-38. He concludes that the difference in minimum wages between the US and Europe (where they are much higher) explain a lot of the difference in unemployment (which is much lower in the US).
Mr. Frost says they get a lot of info from baby monitors... they'd have to be pretty close to the originating house to do that, because even if the range extends far enough (which it probably doesn't, it costs money and takes fcc licenses to do long range broadcasting), baby monitors are on a band that is used by a lot of other things as well, and their transmissions would join a flood of others.
The FCC rules are there to prevent interference with other off-the-shelf technologies. For the billions we give them each year, I'm hoping the NSA is using something to eavesdrop besides the baby monitor and cordless phone base stations available at Walmart.
Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
Hey! Don't post things like this on Slashdot. If people here catch on to that and start behaving decently, tens of thousands of jerks may take their arrogance, trolling, and dramatic bickering elsewhere. It'd be like unleashing a plague of locusts on the Internet.
But is this enough? It's not at all difficult to make a bunch of Wikipedia accounts and store them for use in later vandalism.
Yes, but that sort of purposeful, constructive activity is generally beyond most vandals. I just can't see people saying, "Hey, let me create an account so a month from now I can put the word 'poo' at the beginning of this random article."
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In other words, if they want to be treated as a real encyclopaedia then they need to act like one.
I imagine you're just another one of the armchair quarterbacks that far prefers grousing and belittling others to actually making a difference. But on the slim chance that I'm wrong, I'll point out that you can make this happen yourself. You can copy both the software and the content and start your own version at any time. Restricted editing roles would take maybe a week to add.
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
It had the same number of major mistakes as the EB. It has more minor mistakes, though. Also, I'd say that the Wikipedia's strongest area is technology and internet culture, followed by the sciences.
If you respond well to people, then hire somebody you know and like to bug you at the end of every day to send him or her a summary of the time you've worked that day. Give them carte blanche to bug you by any means necessary until they get that email. You should be able to remember things adequately at the end of every day. Anyhow, it'll be better than trying to remember weeks later. And having regular feedback will give you an incentive to develop the disciplne needed to use a time-tracking tool.
Two books that have helped me in this regard are Organizing from the Inside Out and Time Management from the Inside Out.
You're probably better off coming up with better up-front estimates on how long a project will take and then billing against that, or just billing on a per-project or per-milestone project.
Unless the projects or milestones are pretty small and the clients are pretty sane and experienced, this is a dangerous approach. Estimates get proportionally more wrong as the scale goes up; programmers are notorious for saying that any given thing would take them two weeks to make. By working to fixed bid you are taking on most of the project risk, including risks that clients were saying one thing but meaning another.
By a disclaimer, I'm talking about something more direct and like: "This page was written by several people (some of whom are anonymous) working together and could contain factual errors."
Well, you got your wish. Every page now says at the top, "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit".
My reading was that Brittanica has 2 centuries head start on developing a good process (ie. editing, review etc). If the process has had so much time to mature then you might expect the result to be of a higher quality[...]
Yes, that's exactly my point.
When you hear the anti-Wikipedia crowd rant, they suggest that the process of building the encyclopedia is the important thing, that an open effort could never come close. If Wikipedia has gotten this far with only a few years of process innovation, it's very reasonable to think that they're still on the low end of the improvement curve.
Looking at Britannica's history, that's certainly plausible. I have a reproduction of the first edition of the EB, and the thing seems hopelessly crude compared with a modern version.
The interesting part is that Wikipedia did so well so quickly. Wikipedia's only been around since 2001, but they wrote the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1771. Britannica has had more than 200 years to get their process together, and their accuracy rates are still pretty close to Wikipedia's.
We can't just assume that everyone who reads Wikipedia will bother to figure out what a wiki is and appreciate the consequences.
The don't need to. What they should already be aware of is that on the Internet anybody can publish anything, so they should exercise appropriate caution. This is not a particularly new problem; "you can't believe everything you read" is a phrase that long predates the Internet.
Wikipedia, by making it very easy to check exactly what the scoop is with the Wikipedia as a whole and any particular page in specific, goes much farther than most pages on the Internet. I'm not worried about people getting bad information from Wikipedia nearly as much as I am from email forwards, blogs, or Fox News.
Since when is a wiki "obvious"? Wikis are far too new for the *general public* that reads Wikipedia to be aware of their consequences.
[...]
How about a disclaimer on *every single Wikipedia page*?
You want a disclaimer on every single page on the Internet that might have incorrect information? Lordy. It's easier to send out stickers to every rube to put on their monitor: "Caution: Don't Believe Everything You Read on the Intarweb".
The third, fourth, and fifth word on every Wikipedia page is "edit this page". The last three words are "About Wikipedia | Disclaimers". Anybody who wants to know what Wikipedia is has ample opportunity to find out. For the rest of humanity, I promise that you could put a warning in 48-point letters of fire and people would still not engage their brains.
mysql's lack of transations didn't matter because they can easily roll their own. This is nonsense, you cannot roll your own because if your app dies, or the db dies in the middle of one of your pseudo-transactions, then your data is left in an inconsistant state.
I couldn't easily find his comment, so perhaps I'm missing something, but depending on the problem, a transactional system really isn't all that hard to write. Take a look at Prevayler, for example.
If i were an advertiser I would want to be able to to verify that the bills Google sends me are indeed correct. Right now it seems that advertisers have no way of doing that?
If I were in business and didn't trust a vendor, I'd find a different vendor. How going to court is supposed to help anything, I dunno. If the vendor wasn't playing nice before, how will they treat me after I've dragged them through a couple years of litigation?
Are these people just repackaging news from the mainstream news sources?
I ask the same thing about my local paper every time I pick it up.
As an aside, I'm shocked by the number of people arguing against having after hours fun with such toys. Is the slashdot readership really so cowardly and unimaginative? Sure, one has to be careful and should avoid pissing off the bosses [...]
Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. I do a lot of work for startups, and I would never hire a geek that wasn't inclined to play with the toys. They should be smart enough not to break anything expensive. But if I want a job done in a perfectly regular fashion with no thinking or backtalk, I'll teach a computer to do it.
The current cable paradigm is a pretty good example of market failure - of market forces failing to produce optimal consumer outcomes or even providing coherent and significant choices for the consumer.
What market are you talking about? Most cable companies are local monopolies. And they "compete" with television stations paid for by advertisers. For broadcast and cable, you aren't the customer: you're the product that is packaged and sold.
Compare this with actual markets, like those for books or DVDs. They're still a little distorted by media concentration and marketing pushes, but by and large you can get whatever you want at reasonable prices.
My point is that central planning actually did allow for tremendous leaps in industrial capacity in very short periods of time. Of course, the human cost was staggering, and it was probably not efficiently done.
;) That last is not as glib as it sounds: a sustainable energy solution will have to be better (cheaper, less polluting) than fossil fuels in order to be adopted at all. If it is better, then there is no reason it couldn't be adopted now. In which case the question is: then why hasn't some entrepreneur already found it?
Yes. I agree that central leadership and central spending of money can push things along. But market mechanisms are the way to make things happen efficiently. Counting raw industrial capacity misses that industrial capacity is useless unless it is making the right things.
With regards to the specific issue of finding a sustainable energy source, it is pretty clear to me that some form of active government intervention is necessary, if for no other reason than that the initial investment in R&D is larger than what the private sector can provide.
It depends on the kind of government intervention you mean. But we should first start by changing the policies that tilt the playing field in favor of unsustainable energy sources.
Right now we charge for or regulate some pollutants but we let people emit CO2 for free, and our pollution charges are probably lower than the net societal cost. If we charge fairly for the use of common resources like we do with radio spectrum auctions, that would go a long way to helping things. Eliminating subsidies for coal, oil, and nuclear wouldn't be a bad thing. We can make it easier to allow grassroots adoption of sustainable power, which is currently way too hard. And we should allow individual consumers to pay extra for sustainable power when they want.
The prooof is obvious - if it had been possible it would have been done by now.
Once the playing field is made level, we may need to do little else. Even with the modest R&D we've been doing, the cost of solar power has been dropping steadily for quite a while; for some people it's already economical. And beyond that, it might be sufficient for government intervention to be more in terms of providing leadership. The people that I know who work on this kind of thing have been pretty disheartened lately by Bush and Cheney's obvious bias for traditional energy corporations. Just declaring and promoting a goal of national energy independence might be enough to make big changes. If not, you can always tip the playing field in the other direction by over-taxing unsustainable energy.
But none of that requires letting politicians force particular technologies on us.
I'm gonna wager that the womens' restrooms do not have flushless urinals.
You'd be surprised. At the University of Michigan they built at least one of the dorms so that it could be used by either gender. I presume that was to give them extra flexibility in deciding which sections were which, but I definitely saw girls-only sections with urinals in the bathrooms.
The mens, can't speak to the womens
It took me a while to parse that. I first thought that the University of North Texas had to be some sort of strict Baptist school with a hillbilly English department.
And neither did Clinton. [...] Sorry for this temporary insertion of non-slanted facts. You can resume your regular misinformed spin now.
I note during the time Kyoto was open for signing, Clinton had to work with an opposition-controlled legislature that had developed an unfortunate obsession with his penis. Bush, on the other hand, has had an unusally firm grip on Congress. And I note that although Clinton didn't campaign promising to sign Kyoto, Bush did. Plus, there have been several more years of science mainly backing it. Oh, and the treaty came into effect after that paragon of environmental sensitivity, Russia, got in ahead of us.
But otherwise, the two situations are completely equivalent: Bush and Clinton have both been president, and neither signed the Kyoto treaty. And since you put it that way, neither FDR nor Lincoln did anything about global warming, either. How dare people suggest that Bush is at fault when so many great leaders have done just what he's doing?