I used to live in Vientiane, Laos. I rented a two story house for $100/month. I had a perfectly good Chinese motorcycle that cost around $250. Laos is not an expensive place to live. My house wasn't that nice, but you can get a beautiful large house for around $400 - $600 per month in Vientiane, which of course is the most expensive part of the country.
Which is why we don't like to buy cars made in our own country. Maybe in some distant future our automotive engineers will discover the magical secrets of turning. Until then we just have to stick to European and (occassionally) Japanese cars.
Food can be preserved in cans, freeze dried in bags, or frozen. Since there aren't any bacteria floating around in space you might even be able to just leave the stuff outside the ship. It would certainly stay frozen. Of course you wouldn't want to have to open the airlock too often to get it.
When you get there you can continue to eat the stuff you brought with you until you can get your hydroponics lab going. Your nuclear reactor will supply the heat and power the grow lights within your superinsulated habitat.
That wasn't why. Imprisoning thousands of your own citizens because of something 3 of them did? Because 3 Japanese Americans aided an enemy (they didn't even kill or hurt anyone themselves) that explained why the US rounded up everyone of Japanese descent and put them in prison camps?
No, it was a simple knee jerk reaction. Some combination of racism and cowardice and a complete disregard for what this country stood for. It would be like imprisoning every Muslim or Arab American because of 9/11. I'm sure there are some Americans who think we should do exactly that, but people are individuals and should not be held responsible for actions taken by others just because they, or their parents/grandparents were born in the same geographical area. Human rights are human rights. Do you respect them and even fight to preserve them or do you give them up completely when they cause even the slightest danger or inconvenience?
So you are saying that discovering a new species of 100% honest and selfless humanoids is what is crucial? The real threat to liberty are the Authoritarians who want everybody else to follow rules that they get to make up and people who put all their trust in the government, thinking "government good, corporations bad" when the truth is that the government, corporations, and most people are bad. As far as morality, doesn't everyone have their own definition of right and wrong? Liberty is about protecting people from the forces that are most likely to hurt them. Corporations are evil concentrations of power and greed and take-whatever-you-can-grab morality. Governments are exactly the same, but they have more power, and the kind of power they possess is that of violence and murder and total control over everyone's lives.
Jupiter has plenty of it--more than that planet's inhabitants will ever need. Looks like we may finally have a financial motive for space travel. We just have to hope we don't get attacked for stealing their gas.
In another year, 500GB SSDs will be available for under $200 (that magic consumer price point), and only enthusiasts will be looking for bigger secondary drives to hold their games, music, movies and porn - and where will that leave platter vendors?
Affordable SSDs are always a year away. Vendors aren't going to lower their prices until people stop buying the $2/GB ones. I have been waiting for SSD prices to drop for years now, but prices seem to be holding steady.
There is not much consumers can do about having their card numbers stolen. They could never let the card leave their sight, only use Linux for online purchases, and use temporary card numbers for purchases from merchants they are not certain of, but even then their number could still be stolen. This problem is not one that the cardholder has created and it is not one that the cardholder can fix.
I think chip and pin was a great idea. Relying on it as perfect security and holding the user responsible for every transaction however was stupid. If Iived in the UK or another chip and pin EU country I would be way too paranoid to ever use my card. Instead of a credit card I'd probably use a debit card and transfer the exact amount needed from another account for every purchase. Thieves can't steal from you if there is nothing to steal.
US banks will generally cover you even if you knowingly gave away your ATM pin number in one of those ATM kidnappings so popular in certain parts of the world. The whole pin and chip thing was a raw deal for EU cardholders. They get no benefit, but all the risk. It's definitely not an equitable solution. Bank of America has a two factor authentication system for their online banking, but I don't think they hold the user responsible for fraudulent transactions.
So, aside from the thief, who is to blame for a fraudulent transaction? Almost never the cardholder or the merchant. The two parties at the point of sale are just using the system. They didn't create it and holding them responsible for the lax security of the system is absurd and unjust. All that consumers and merchants can really do is just stop using/accepting credit cards, and I don't think either the bank who issued the card or Visa/Mastercard want that.
As a Libertarian I would only vote Libertarian. If I voted Republican or Democrat I would no longer consider myself to be a Libertarian. The 70s was before my time, but I have noticed that both the Democrats and the Republicans have become more and more hostile toward freedoms of any kind. In the 80s Republicans seemed to represent financial freedom and personal tyranny and Democrats seemed to represent personal freedom and financial tyranny.
It still amazes me that the ACLU used to be considered a Democratic institution. In terms of personal freedoms they actually used to represent mainstream Democrats. Now Democrats are nearly as enthusiastic as the Republicans in pushing toward a 1984-ish, constant surveillance police state. When discussing personal freedoms 80s Democrats used to sound an awful lot like Libertarians. I would have thought that preserving our right to be left alone in our personal lives would be more important to Democrats than their class war, but it wasn't. Now class warfare is the only thing they seem to stand for. I wish Democrats had the equivalent of the Tea Party to Republicans, a group whose only interest was in defending personal liberty.
As for Republicans, they are as enthusiastic as ever about stomping out even the slightest hint of personal freedom in people's lives, but no longer even remotely stand for financial freedom. Financially they don't seem to really represent anything anymore accept maybe a preference for borrowing the money to pay for their pet programs instead of raising taxes to pay for them.
At this point neither party represents freedom in any way whatsoever and neither party would ever dream of selecting a presidential candidate with any sort of philosophy. Instead we get politicians with empty heads who simply don't care about any kind of idea.
Now the only reason to vote Democrat is out of pure, blind hatred for anyone who makes more money than they do, hoping, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a Democratic president will hurt rich people in some way. The fact that the presidential candidate himself is rich and that most of his campaign money and bribe money is from rich corporations seems to escape their notice.
The only reason to vote Republican is out of pure blind hatred for freedom of any kind. The current Republican model of an ideal society is 1984 meets Deutsche Demokratische Republik meets Abu Ghraib. Democrats tend to accept torture as a necessary evil, but Republicans seem to relish it. As long as they are not the ones being tortured of course. They have always been enthusiastic executioners. Their love for torture seems to have been an acquired taste.
Life in the US is fucking GREAT. Not perfect, no place is, but if you think things are so terrible, you have absolutely no idea what the rest of the world is like.
Have you ever actually lived outside of the US? I have noticed that most people who say such things have not. I've traveled to many countries and the only country I found to be worse than the US is Cuba, where owning a computer was against the law and the average salary was around $15/month. Hell. Even Canada is better. After living abroad you also may start to realize how much more free you feel outside of this rat's cage of a country.
If you want to cherry pick a few awful countries in the middle east you might find somewhere worse, but as someone who actually has left the US and lived in several other countries for long periods I can tell you that the US actually sucks pretty bad in the scheme of things.
The US is really only good for two things: making money and buying either computer parts or really weird esoteric tech stuff. Go spend a year outside of your little nest of familiarity and see how wrong you really are. The US is a country of immigrants who usually came here out of greed because they hoped to make giant piles of gold and lounge in bean bag sized piles of diamonds and our culture, what little there is of it, is based on that. A country of merchants.
If all you care about in life is getting rich then the US is probably in the top 10 countries, but if you judge your life by more than the size of your bank account and you are actually interested in being happy the US is close to the bottom and only benefits from comparisons to a few Middle Eastern and African countries. Proud Americans like yourself like to boast about all the (always poor) immigrants who want to come here and then ignore the fact that as soon as they make some real money they can't get out of here fast enough. Of those who stay it is nearly always for financial reasons. They'd be just as happy to live in East Germany if they thought it would increase their income by a few dollars.
It was never the intention of the founding fathers for the constitution to be read literally.
Oh yes it was. They thought that would protect their new republic against tyranny. They were so naive. But, to be fair, their noble experiment had never really been tried before.
Both. The customer gets a fairly useful device for a fraction of the price that the most popular competitor asks
Nice weasel phrasing there. Are you a professional? What about all the other competitors that are not "the most popular"? I will consider purchasing an ad supported ebook reader when the device itself is given away for free. Until then I'll let someone else suck their corporate dick and bend over to get fucked in the ass.
I've never seen ads on Slashdot which is why I find that ad-free checkbox to be amusing.
Industrial espionage is against the law. Neither iSuppli nor the Christian Science Monitor have any idea what Amazon's cost is. There is no way that Amazon is selling them below cost. The actual cost is probably less than $100. No matter what tech product is released there are always some gullible people who feel the need to believe that their money is not going toward obscene corporate profits. That they are paying less than it cost to make the device.
Considering that fully assembled 10" Chinese tablets with IPS screens sell for considerably less than $200 I think you will have a tough time arguing the parts cost the same. Good luck with that though.
Why is it only the fast drivers that are rationalizing? When the slow drivers argue that everyone should drive at the speed they feel comfortable at it is a rational argument, but when fast drivers argue the same it is a rationalization? There are rational arguments for forcing everyone to drive slow, for forcing everyone to drive fast, or for just letting people do what they want. All have rational arguments behind them. Although the fact that 'slow' and 'fast' are completely relative and mean different things to different people doesn't help matters. I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that people on either side are rationalizing, unless of course you are just projecting.
Is that not exactly what you want to do to fast drivers? Pressure them to drive at whatever speed you are comfortable with? Pot, meet kettle.
Having said that I think a slow lane makes sense even if it makes driving more dangerous. On a divided multilane highway I think people should have the right to drive slow if they want to--as long as they don't do it in the fast lane and as long as there isn't an equivalent route on back roads that they could be taking.Freedom trumps safety. The left two lanes can be forbidden to any vehicle/driver that cannot exceed 60 mph, but the right lane should be for the snail drivers. Note also that driving slower uses less gas. A poor person may only be able to afford a particular trip if they drive slowly or they may just be hypermiling. Driving fast is much more expensive even in a very aerodynamic vehicle. On back roads however obstructing traffic by not driving at a reasonable speed should get result in an automatic ticket. Wouldn't slow speed cameras be refreshing? So that slow drivers get the ticket in the mail for a change?
So driving fast on some long straight road in the middle of nowhere is a menace, but not looking at the road while you're driving is perfectly safe? Riiight.
Why not just drive at a reasonable speed so that you don't have to murder anyone to prove some point about your right to drive slow? Or, FFS, pull over and let the line of cars behind you pass. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in the past quarter century that some considerate person pulled over to let me pass them and it always gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling for our species...for about a millisecond until I encounter the next selfish asshole. Texans are starting to seem awfully nice to me all of a sudden.
You just reminded me of another peeve I have with slow drivers. Many of the slowest ones don't look both ways before merging onto a road. They just jump out before they proceed to create a 1/4 mile line of cars behind them while they drive "safely" at 20 mph. Sometimes I could swear that it resembles a suicide attempt.
And you're welcome to drive as slow as you want, or even just to park, on your road. At least there you won't be an annoyance and a hazard to everyone else.
Interesting. As a New Englander I had no idea that things were so bad in PA. I can definitely vouch for the fact that at least the left lane is typically moving at around 80 mph when traffic is light enough. During rush hours things slow down to bicycle speeds of course. In the 55mph zones sometimes the left lane will slow to 70-75. All it takes is one scared driver to slow the whole lane down for a while when the traffic is heavy.
In my state there is actually a law about not just habitually driving in the left lane when you are not passing and other lanes are free, but it's rarely enforced. When I was in court one time I actually saw a guy come to dispute a ticket for left lane cruising. The guy hadn't realized there actually was such a law and neither did I, but it is on the books. I checked.
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I used to live in Vientiane, Laos. I rented a two story house for $100/month. I had a perfectly good Chinese motorcycle that cost around $250. Laos is not an expensive place to live. My house wasn't that nice, but you can get a beautiful large house for around $400 - $600 per month in Vientiane, which of course is the most expensive part of the country.
Name one American "sports" car that can do more than drive in a straight line?
Which is why we don't like to buy cars made in our own country. Maybe in some distant future our automotive engineers will discover the magical secrets of turning. Until then we just have to stick to European and (occassionally) Japanese cars.
His brain. A Martian delicacy.
Food can be preserved in cans, freeze dried in bags, or frozen. Since there aren't any bacteria floating around in space you might even be able to just leave the stuff outside the ship. It would certainly stay frozen. Of course you wouldn't want to have to open the airlock too often to get it.
When you get there you can continue to eat the stuff you brought with you until you can get your hydroponics lab going. Your nuclear reactor will supply the heat and power the grow lights within your superinsulated habitat.
Don't you ever read science fiction?
That wasn't why. Imprisoning thousands of your own citizens because of something 3 of them did? Because 3 Japanese Americans aided an enemy (they didn't even kill or hurt anyone themselves) that explained why the US rounded up everyone of Japanese descent and put them in prison camps?
No, it was a simple knee jerk reaction. Some combination of racism and cowardice and a complete disregard for what this country stood for. It would be like imprisoning every Muslim or Arab American because of 9/11. I'm sure there are some Americans who think we should do exactly that, but people are individuals and should not be held responsible for actions taken by others just because they, or their parents/grandparents were born in the same geographical area. Human rights are human rights. Do you respect them and even fight to preserve them or do you give them up completely when they cause even the slightest danger or inconvenience?
So you are saying that discovering a new species of 100% honest and selfless humanoids is what is crucial? The real threat to liberty are the Authoritarians who want everybody else to follow rules that they get to make up and people who put all their trust in the government, thinking "government good, corporations bad" when the truth is that the government, corporations, and most people are bad. As far as morality, doesn't everyone have their own definition of right and wrong? Liberty is about protecting people from the forces that are most likely to hurt them. Corporations are evil concentrations of power and greed and take-whatever-you-can-grab morality. Governments are exactly the same, but they have more power, and the kind of power they possess is that of violence and murder and total control over everyone's lives.
Then how about Argon, Krypton, or Neon?
Jupiter has plenty of it--more than that planet's inhabitants will ever need. Looks like we may finally have a financial motive for space travel. We just have to hope we don't get attacked for stealing their gas.
In another year, 500GB SSDs will be available for under $200 (that magic consumer price point), and only enthusiasts will be looking for bigger secondary drives to hold their games, music, movies and porn - and where will that leave platter vendors?
Affordable SSDs are always a year away. Vendors aren't going to lower their prices until people stop buying the $2/GB ones. I have been waiting for SSD prices to drop for years now, but prices seem to be holding steady.
There is not much consumers can do about having their card numbers stolen. They could never let the card leave their sight, only use Linux for online purchases, and use temporary card numbers for purchases from merchants they are not certain of, but even then their number could still be stolen. This problem is not one that the cardholder has created and it is not one that the cardholder can fix.
I think chip and pin was a great idea. Relying on it as perfect security and holding the user responsible for every transaction however was stupid. If Iived in the UK or another chip and pin EU country I would be way too paranoid to ever use my card. Instead of a credit card I'd probably use a debit card and transfer the exact amount needed from another account for every purchase. Thieves can't steal from you if there is nothing to steal.
US banks will generally cover you even if you knowingly gave away your ATM pin number in one of those ATM kidnappings so popular in certain parts of the world. The whole pin and chip thing was a raw deal for EU cardholders. They get no benefit, but all the risk. It's definitely not an equitable solution. Bank of America has a two factor authentication system for their online banking, but I don't think they hold the user responsible for fraudulent transactions.
So, aside from the thief, who is to blame for a fraudulent transaction? Almost never the cardholder or the merchant. The two parties at the point of sale are just using the system. They didn't create it and holding them responsible for the lax security of the system is absurd and unjust. All that consumers and merchants can really do is just stop using/accepting credit cards, and I don't think either the bank who issued the card or Visa/Mastercard want that.
As a Libertarian I would only vote Libertarian. If I voted Republican or Democrat I would no longer consider myself to be a Libertarian. The 70s was before my time, but I have noticed that both the Democrats and the Republicans have become more and more hostile toward freedoms of any kind. In the 80s Republicans seemed to represent financial freedom and personal tyranny and Democrats seemed to represent personal freedom and financial tyranny.
It still amazes me that the ACLU used to be considered a Democratic institution. In terms of personal freedoms they actually used to represent mainstream Democrats. Now Democrats are nearly as enthusiastic as the Republicans in pushing toward a 1984-ish, constant surveillance police state. When discussing personal freedoms 80s Democrats used to sound an awful lot like Libertarians. I would have thought that preserving our right to be left alone in our personal lives would be more important to Democrats than their class war, but it wasn't. Now class warfare is the only thing they seem to stand for. I wish Democrats had the equivalent of the Tea Party to Republicans, a group whose only interest was in defending personal liberty.
As for Republicans, they are as enthusiastic as ever about stomping out even the slightest hint of personal freedom in people's lives, but no longer even remotely stand for financial freedom. Financially they don't seem to really represent anything anymore accept maybe a preference for borrowing the money to pay for their pet programs instead of raising taxes to pay for them.
At this point neither party represents freedom in any way whatsoever and neither party would ever dream of selecting a presidential candidate with any sort of philosophy. Instead we get politicians with empty heads who simply don't care about any kind of idea.
Now the only reason to vote Democrat is out of pure, blind hatred for anyone who makes more money than they do, hoping, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a Democratic president will hurt rich people in some way. The fact that the presidential candidate himself is rich and that most of his campaign money and bribe money is from rich corporations seems to escape their notice.
The only reason to vote Republican is out of pure blind hatred for freedom of any kind. The current Republican model of an ideal society is 1984 meets Deutsche Demokratische Republik meets Abu Ghraib. Democrats tend to accept torture as a necessary evil, but Republicans seem to relish it. As long as they are not the ones being tortured of course. They have always been enthusiastic executioners. Their love for torture seems to have been an acquired taste.
Life in the US is fucking GREAT. Not perfect, no place is, but if you think things are so terrible, you have absolutely no idea what the rest of the world is like.
Have you ever actually lived outside of the US? I have noticed that most people who say such things have not. I've traveled to many countries and the only country I found to be worse than the US is Cuba, where owning a computer was against the law and the average salary was around $15/month. Hell. Even Canada is better. After living abroad you also may start to realize how much more free you feel outside of this rat's cage of a country.
If you want to cherry pick a few awful countries in the middle east you might find somewhere worse, but as someone who actually has left the US and lived in several other countries for long periods I can tell you that the US actually sucks pretty bad in the scheme of things.
The US is really only good for two things: making money and buying either computer parts or really weird esoteric tech stuff. Go spend a year outside of your little nest of familiarity and see how wrong you really are. The US is a country of immigrants who usually came here out of greed because they hoped to make giant piles of gold and lounge in bean bag sized piles of diamonds and our culture, what little there is of it, is based on that. A country of merchants.
If all you care about in life is getting rich then the US is probably in the top 10 countries, but if you judge your life by more than the size of your bank account and you are actually interested in being happy the US is close to the bottom and only benefits from comparisons to a few Middle Eastern and African countries. Proud Americans like yourself like to boast about all the (always poor) immigrants who want to come here and then ignore the fact that as soon as they make some real money they can't get out of here fast enough. Of those who stay it is nearly always for financial reasons. They'd be just as happy to live in East Germany if they thought it would increase their income by a few dollars.
It was never the intention of the founding fathers for the constitution to be read literally.
Oh yes it was. They thought that would protect their new republic against tyranny. They were so naive. But, to be fair, their noble experiment had never really been tried before.
Both. The customer gets a fairly useful device for a fraction of the price that the most popular competitor asks
Nice weasel phrasing there. Are you a professional? What about all the other competitors that are not "the most popular"? I will consider purchasing an ad supported ebook reader when the device itself is given away for free. Until then I'll let someone else suck their corporate dick and bend over to get fucked in the ass.
I've never seen ads on Slashdot which is why I find that ad-free checkbox to be amusing.
Industrial espionage is against the law. Neither iSuppli nor the Christian Science Monitor have any idea what Amazon's cost is. There is no way that Amazon is selling them below cost. The actual cost is probably less than $100. No matter what tech product is released there are always some gullible people who feel the need to believe that their money is not going toward obscene corporate profits. That they are paying less than it cost to make the device.
Yes. Yes, I do actually, Mr. Iknowexactlywhateveryproductcoststomake.
Considering that fully assembled 10" Chinese tablets with IPS screens sell for considerably less than $200 I think you will have a tough time arguing the parts cost the same. Good luck with that though.
Why is it only the fast drivers that are rationalizing? When the slow drivers argue that everyone should drive at the speed they feel comfortable at it is a rational argument, but when fast drivers argue the same it is a rationalization? There are rational arguments for forcing everyone to drive slow, for forcing everyone to drive fast, or for just letting people do what they want. All have rational arguments behind them. Although the fact that 'slow' and 'fast' are completely relative and mean different things to different people doesn't help matters. I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that people on either side are rationalizing, unless of course you are just projecting.
Is that not exactly what you want to do to fast drivers? Pressure them to drive at whatever speed you are comfortable with? Pot, meet kettle.
Having said that I think a slow lane makes sense even if it makes driving more dangerous. On a divided multilane highway I think people should have the right to drive slow if they want to--as long as they don't do it in the fast lane and as long as there isn't an equivalent route on back roads that they could be taking.Freedom trumps safety. The left two lanes can be forbidden to any vehicle/driver that cannot exceed 60 mph, but the right lane should be for the snail drivers. Note also that driving slower uses less gas. A poor person may only be able to afford a particular trip if they drive slowly or they may just be hypermiling. Driving fast is much more expensive even in a very aerodynamic vehicle. On back roads however obstructing traffic by not driving at a reasonable speed should get result in an automatic ticket. Wouldn't slow speed cameras be refreshing? So that slow drivers get the ticket in the mail for a change?
So driving fast on some long straight road in the middle of nowhere is a menace, but not looking at the road while you're driving is perfectly safe? Riiight.
Why not just drive at a reasonable speed so that you don't have to murder anyone to prove some point about your right to drive slow? Or, FFS, pull over and let the line of cars behind you pass. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in the past quarter century that some considerate person pulled over to let me pass them and it always gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling for our species...for about a millisecond until I encounter the next selfish asshole. Texans are starting to seem awfully nice to me all of a sudden.
You just reminded me of another peeve I have with slow drivers. Many of the slowest ones don't look both ways before merging onto a road. They just jump out before they proceed to create a 1/4 mile line of cars behind them while they drive "safely" at 20 mph. Sometimes I could swear that it resembles a suicide attempt.
And you're welcome to drive as slow as you want, or even just to park, on your road. At least there you won't be an annoyance and a hazard to everyone else.
Interesting. As a New Englander I had no idea that things were so bad in PA. I can definitely vouch for the fact that at least the left lane is typically moving at around 80 mph when traffic is light enough. During rush hours things slow down to bicycle speeds of course. In the 55mph zones sometimes the left lane will slow to 70-75. All it takes is one scared driver to slow the whole lane down for a while when the traffic is heavy.
In my state there is actually a law about not just habitually driving in the left lane when you are not passing and other lanes are free, but it's rarely enforced. When I was in court one time I actually saw a guy come to dispute a ticket for left lane cruising. The guy hadn't realized there actually was such a law and neither did I, but it is on the books. I checked.