The thing is, you're comparing the value of gold against another currency. That currency is subject to a lot of inflation, so the value of gold going up indicates it's superiority as a container of value.
And you're assuming that gold has a set 'value' that the dollar or any other currency rises and falls against. If we found a mountain of easily-accessible gold tomorrow the price of gold would go waaaaay down... and not because the value of a dollar went waaaaay up.
Wait, so if the corn isn't capable of reproducing, then how would it spread over the globe in some kind of apocalyptic way?
Well, it's not apocalyptic, but if you planned on saving seed from your crop (which is a poor poor practice for western farmers, but I digress) and your crop gets pollinated by something with the terminator gene (very possible - it all just flies on the wind as far as the wind will take it) then next year your crop doesn't grow and you have to re-buy your seed stock. If there were enough terminator-including crops around then its possible that you couldn't successfully save seed ever and you'd have to buy it all - possibly contributing to a monoculture of plants that may all get wiped out by a disease.
Of course, if that happened to me I'd go to court with Monsanto, prove I actively attempted to cull their worthless half-breed seed out of my stock and failed, show monetary damage that wasn't covered by crop insurance and force them to pay me because they robbed me of value with their seed. You might win. Hint: the farmers who lose against Monsanto usually try to retain the GMO lines that accidentally breed their corn. It's a bit suspicious when your corn has strong GMO sequences in it 3 years after everyone around you stopped planting that strain...
One more thing: with corn at least the only reliable way to ensure that you don't cross-pollinate with anything else is to manually remove the tassles. By hand. In July. No one does that for non-seed crops (no one really saves seed either BTW).
There's something I've never understood coming from critics of the environmentalist movement: Where do you get the idea that people want to drag down the standard of living?
Generally I get it from the people in the environmentalist movement who seem to be against the application of power to solve everyday problems because it's 'wasteful' somehow. For many, their agenda is to push their own values on to me in the name of 'conserving' things - electricity, air, water, environment in general, etc. A small example: you should dry your clothes on a line to save the electricity a dryer would use (typically despite any other considerations: schedule, availability of clothes lines, it's raining outside, etc). Some environmentalists would deny me dry clothes for a day or more because its' raining outside. That lowers my standard of living.
Spending $3 on a light bulb will make me poor?
Not me, but someone much poorer than me. The shame of all of this CFL business is that it's a fairly large upfront cost: you'll spend hundreds of dollars to replace all of the bulbs in your house to save maybe $5-$10 a month. It's definitely a choice I'd make, but I have more than a hundred dollars sitting around. If you live in the People's Republic of California and you can't buy the $.50 incandescent anymore, suddenly the $3 you spent on the bulb is money you can't spend on gas or food or something else. The poor don't see the benefit of saving money on their bills monthly because they don't have the upfront money to invest in replacing all of their bulbs, and when push comes to shove the far left environmentalist position denies the poor folk $2.50 to spend on food. Or $2.50 to spend on cigarettes and booze - it's their money anyhow.
What exactly brings down my standard of living when I... drive in a more fuel-efficient manner (NOT buying a different car)? All of these are 'environmentalist' choices, yet they cost nothing except the effort required to modify my behavior slightly.
Are you serious? Do you know what a Prius costs in comparison to a cheap car? Add $10K or so. That's a car for the rich. And it's such a marginal improvement in gas mileage it's hardly worth it. Remember kids, you save a lot more gas going from 15MPG to 30MPG than you do from 30MPG to 60MPG. I can't believe any environmentalist would approve of that choice BTW.
For me it comes down to environmentalists NEVER performing a cost/benefit analysis on the measures they propose and the costs are always on the end user - us. Is $3 here and $10 there that bad? Not individually, but together, yes! Some people do NOT have the means to afford the difference between $.50 and $3, and not everyone can spend $10K more to have a car that saves you $5 on gas a month. But the furthest left environmentalists would make cheap incandescents and marginally less fuel-efficient cars illegal and push the cost onto the poor because they always assign a value of infinity to the smallest and most insignificant part of nature (of which man is obviously not a part) and assign next to nothing to the potential suffering of their fellow man.
Even the new testament criticises homosexual relationships (and the only laws of the old testament that were "updated" in the new testament were ones to do with sacrifices and what you could put into your body).
Incorrect - it was decided that new converts to Christianity who weren't Jews didn't have to follow ANY of the Jewish laws.
It also tries to claim that the passage about Sodom and Gomorrah is nothing to do with Sodomy and that "know" literally means know rather than "have sex with", when Lot clearly offers his daughters to "do with what you will" instead of the men.
'Know' in the Bible means have carnal relations with - I agree with you there. But according to Jewish interpretation of the Sodom and Gomorrah incident says that the sin of those cities was that they were unwelcoming of strangers - not necessarily teh buttsecks. Lot was allowed to live because he invited the angels in, fed them and protected them from the crowd who wanted to rape them. I guess if the crowd had chatted them up a bit before bringing up the topic of 'knowing' them it might have been better...
Not necessarily. The phone's Market app periodically polls the Android Market server for update information. If "delete immediately" is a possible update status in Market, they don't even need to know which users installed the app to remove it, much less have access to their phones. This seems like the more efficient approach, since trying to overtly contact and send "remove this app" commands to everyone who's installed the app individually would be a pain.
You can bet it'd be a pain, but I'll bet that Steve Jobs wouldn't let that approach fly with the iPhone. 'Oh it's too hard to let the user know you're deleting an application from their phone so you elected not to tell them? No.' He'd make the programmer have the app store send a text message to each iPhone user who bought the app and bully AT&T into ensuring the text message was free. THAT is why the iPhone is better than your bog-average Android phone: attention to detail and dedication to user experience forced down the developers' throats by Steve Jobs.
Partially because teenage pregnancy wasn't particularly looked-down upon by Puritans - it's just that the teenagers got married when it happened and started their lives off. Apparently it was common to say that an eager young bride could do in 6 or 7 months what it took other wives 9 full months to do. I wonder why THAT was....
It is, unless you're on the receiving end of that $1 trillion. While I'm sure some folks working at military contracting companies are decent and hardworking folks, it's extremely profitable to get nice big contracts to produce something that (a) doesn't work and/or (b) isn't actually useful.
You seem to have an odd view of government contracting. It's not as if a contract entails little more than passing big bags of money back and forth and laughing maniacally all the way to the bank. A company would not place a bid on a system they knew was impossible. They have to be very detailed in their bid or they get reamed big time. The basis of estimates are very often questioned - how did you come up with these numbers? What are your assumptions? How can you justify this schedule, etc How could any company answer those questions if they legitimately thought the whole idea was impossible? They'd get caught with their pants down.
You do realize that most of the time the profit only comes when they deliver something right? As part of successful tests. Naturally, the company gets paid to do the work, but the profit margins are rigorously whittled down. You don't make billions of dollars just designing and testing these things - unless you actually deliver the product you're more likely to lose money - the equivalent of marking time until you run out of cash. And trust me, if the government doesn't see SOME results they will pull the plug.
I don't know why people always assume when they hear headlines like 'Billion dollar government project fails to work!' that they think the companies somehow pocketed one billion dollars of profit and ran off saying 'Hahaha, I KNEW it wasn't going to work all along SUCKERS!'
Unlike hot-vent extremophiles, it's hard to argue that these bacteria could be the source of life as they live in hydrocarbons, which are the result of a not-yet-fully-understood process involving dead organic matter.
HAL.
I'll assume you mean life on Earth. On Titan there are hydrocarbons without a bunch of dead dinosaurs, so it's a different story there.
If Mexico wanted to try a new tactic, they should start lobbying the USA to change their retarded drug laws.
See, I'm just not convinced of this. In the long term, yes, the cartels would go away. But in the short term let's say we open it up: drugs are legal - all of them, period. And anyone can make them, grow them, buy them, sell them or whatever. But not without a license of course. There's no way the US is going to treat things that can legitimately kill you more leniently than alcohol (which can kill you pretty easily). So the market gets opened up and anyone who wants to get into the (legitimate) drug dealing business needs to get the license, get the supply, and then set up a successful shop or whatnot to sell the stuff. But that takes time. It won't happen that the week after pot or anything else is legalized you'll be able to go down to your corner dealer and get legitimate drugs - those are still illegal! Those are still coming from the cartels and there's no way they are going to get the licenses and pass all the tests to import the stuff. The US doesn't look kindly on killings, kidnappings, and all of the other nastiness the cartels have been propagating for all these years - they still won't be allowed to sell drugs in the US. So in the short term - the absolute short term - the situation stays the same - shady drug dealers and money flowing to the cartels.
And where are we going to get our supply when we do get around to setting up legitimate supply chains? South America. True, you can cook up meth anywhere and grow pot anywhere, so we won't need to worry about that. But for some things you'll have to go where the supply is - right in the cartels back yard. And are the cartels going to like that? No - they hate competition and they have guns. This will bring the war to a head where legitimate drug suppliers want access to the growers that the cartel has under their thumbs so THEY can have their cut. In 25 years after legalization the cartels will be gone, but in the short term they won't go away because they have a stranglehold on the supply and don't want to give up their cash cow.
In short, even if we legalize drugs the cartels aren't going to pack up and go away. They aren't an advocacy group that disbands when their goal is achieved. Even if we legalize drugs they will still be a criminal organization with extensive supply and delivery operations that were just as illegal as the day before drugs were legalized. They don't benefit from the US legalizing drugs in any way. We still will have to deal with them no matter what changes we make to drug policy.
Replying to myself: A more generous interpretation of his actions is that he's trying to get the oddball statutory rape law of Wisconson changed. Wouldn't hurt his public image if he came out and said that.
I mean he's actually saying that teaching a kid how to use a condom encourages the kid to seek out becoming a rape victim?! HOW?!
Via statutory rape. Basically, any sex someone under 18 has with anyone is illegal - they can't legally consent so it's always rape. Two 17 year-olds consensually having sex? Illegal. a 40 year-old and a 10 year old? Same kind of illegal.
So the DA trots out 'contributing to the delinquency of a minor' because (with a little bit of ignorance and a little bit of legal sleight of hand) he figures that there's no legal method for a minor to use birth control, so they're instructing the students on how to commit illegal acts.
It's a hell of a reach and it seems the only reason he's doing it is to prevent sex ed from being taught because he has an agenda. I'm assuming he couldn't get himself elected to a body that makes laws, so he's modifying the definition of the job he has to include interpreting laws he doesn't like out of the books. And Republicans whined about 'legislating from the bench'. Only when it works against them I suppose.
I've long held that democracy actually only works in that context, when the voters are people with enough education and leisure time to care about the issues they're voting on.
Ugh, sounds like every homeowner's association here in Florida. Old people patrolling the subdivision looking for minor infractions and arguing endlessly at meetings about pointless and small issues because they have nothing better to do. Committees doing everything they can to write new rules to regulate how people live in their houses. A subclass of people who live in the subdivision but only rent and therefore have no say while their owners two states over don't care at all.
No. Thank. You.
Re:So why don't we try something else...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
So let's go back to why health insurance is flawed. Normal healthy individuals may make 3 (annual plus 2 cold/flu) trips to the doctor in a year. I pay 218$ per month for insurance through my employer (not counting the portion they pay). This means that I am effectively paying 872$ per trip to my doctor... ok... lets let that sink in... even if you count a nurse, doctor and receptionist out front splitting it and them only seeing 3 patients per hour (rough cases might take that long) we are still talking they would be making 1.74 MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR EACH! Now if you have any friends that are medical professionals I bet you know that there are VERY few that are making that much per year... especially receptionists:)
Now the argument is that "well this money helps balance out all the catastrophic claims"... fine then why are we using insurance for non-catastrophic claims?
Because catastrophic and non-catastrophic work differently for health than anything else. If I crash my car then yep, that's $20K. Catastrophic. However, I have choices. I can take the $20K and get a cheaper but equivalent used car, I can just not get a car at all and bank it, etc.
Health can be like that. Yeah, I'll go in for my 'maintenance' visits for physicals and my small problems like colds, infections, etc. I've got no problem with paying direct for that - I'm a proponent of HSAs. And then maybe I break my leg, oops, that's catastrophic, but it will heal. So insurance picks that one up and in a few months I'm good as new. But I don't really have the option not to fix my leg. It's rather necessary. So that comparison is broken - health insurance isn't car insurance.
But if I have AIDS, or Crohn's disease, how do you classify that? If you had a car that required thousands of dollars of repairs monthly, you'd just sell it for what you could and get a new one, or use a lemon law, or sue the bad repair man who screwed it up like that and get a new one. But of course, you can't get a new body.
So what do you do? You keep it going. If it gets really expensive, then you have to ask is it worth it? It's a big question, especially with human life.
So the question isn't catastrophic vs. maintenance because you can't just replace hardware (ie, your body) and get new. Well, not yet anyhow. It's the expensive maintenance that we have to pay for (because otherwise, someone will die) that's the problem.
Other insurances don't handle that. Flood insurance in the midwest? They got tired of reimbursing people who kept building on flood plains, so the state stepped in, bought the property and razed everything on it. That's the closest analogue I can think of and if we worked the same way with health insurance we'd just buy out the rest of the person's life and kill them. Dunno about that one.
A system of governance that is based upon "what is good for me personally" is simple anarchy. Forcing an insurance company to pay for a pre-existing condition is simple theft, regardless of how hard that makes your situation.
In some cases, but in this case it's really a fix for the insurance system. You see, insurance works in most places because of the large large number of people who have signed up, put in money and take a modest amount out (based on what those super-smart actuarials say). What happens now is that some people say 'Well, I don't go to the doctor, so I won't pay for health insurance!' thus depriving the system of healthy payers. Then the insurance company says 'Screw this, there aren't enough people paying in to support the diabetics and cancer patients. We've gotta cut them loose.'
So the bill does two things: Whoever you are, you MUST buy health insurance (and you get tax breaks for doing it, penalties for not). This brings the healthy people who didn't pay in before back. Then, it forces the insurance companies to actually cover people. Pre-existing conditions? Deathly illness? Doesn't matter - the insurance company now has all of the healthy people it needs to float the sick people, so the bill takes away the ability to perform some of the more dirty tricks.
The way I see it, the whole bill brings insurance closer back to how it it supposed to work. Health insurance is a necessity in the US today. I want the whole system to get revamped, costs to go down and people to have more choice and technology. But for right now it's inhuman to deny coverage because of preexisting conditions or because you actually got sick. At the same time, it's disingenuous to only buy health insurance when you get sick. This bill ought to head both of those problems in the right direction.
The difference in your car analogy is that the Hummer doesn't belong to you. It's more like leaving the vehicle with a valet. When you go to pick up the vehicle, the valet refuses because he doesn't think you can handle driving it.
Like if you were obviously drunk? He'd be well within his rights to withhold the keys in that situation - so it's not always wrong. Need a better analogy.
What isn't fine, however, is how often they then call asking for support after dismissing the error message.
Sadly, they're justified. How many 'error messages' do you get, click through and you can still do what you wanted to do? The users have more to gain from just trying to click it to go away than they do stopping, waiting for IT support on hold, reading the error, trying to keep their work from being erased and fixing the error at the same. Users just want to work and there's a good chance they'll be able to do that if they just click OK.
Moral of the story? I'd say
Data is key. If there is an 'error' that has the ability to cause lost work, make sure that as part of an error process all open files are saved with a different extension (ie, Really Important Letter.doc.crash)
Don't bother the user if it's not important. If they can still do their work after swatting away dialogs like flies then they will swat away dialogs like flies. Because they just want to get their work done.
If the error is important enough that they can't get their work done, the error had damn well better not run until the problem is fixed. Otherwise you'll have people using a potentially unstable program, wasting their time and possibly their data.
Maybe we do need stuff like clippy or that puppy dog Windows has now as its "helping toon". Imagine a puppy with an error message in its mouth, looking at you from biiiiiig puppy eyes, think that might make users read the message, if only so they don't disappoint the cute puppy?
Well, I always figured the puppy scheme wasn't to engender good feelings in the users, but instead to increase the message distance (communication theory term) between similar messages for the user. Thus a 'PC LOAD LETTER' type message is rightly gibberish to them, and who can tell one gibberish from another? But a puppy.. everyone knows puppies! Plus it's odd enough to get your attention... what does a puppy have to do with my program? They just might read it out of curiosity and fix their own problem.
There are literally billions of acres of farmland in the US that aren't in production. The US farm bank (subsidies paid to farmers to NOT grow anything) is several million acres alone.
True, but keep in mind that this land isn't necessarily large, contiguous tracts of land sitting idle. Much of it is 'buffer' land along the edges of current farmland. Consider a plot of farmland next to a lake: you could either farm right up to the edge of the lake or leave a buffer strip to help control erosion. A lot of the money that the government provides is for such strips to help control erosion. So it's not necessarily true that all of that land could be put to good use - it's already being used to help increase the value of the farmland around it.
You know what that means, don't you? The only option left is to go prehistoric, and introduce Stonepunk. Advanced technology, built from nothing but wood and chipped stone lashed together with vines or sinews, and occasionally powered by Fire!
Where's Oog the Open Source Caveman when you need him?
Haven't you noticed that all of the Ancients advanced technology on Stargate-SG1 looks like it's made of stone? Super-advanced wormhole-creating intergalactic transportation device? Yeah, made of stone. Control panel for said device? Big stone buttons. Transport rings? Stone. Arguably, the stone and wood look has been done by sci-fi for a while.
Snapshot what you get - don't change it, don't even look at it. As soon as you get it, check it in, binaries and all, to a change tracking system (eg, CVS, SVN, etc).
This I agree with but for one thing: Verify that the binaries you are given correspond to the code you are given. I've seen it too many times where they release a binary, then go back and do 'minor' bug fixes and don't recompile before handing it off to you.
Save the binaries you've been given, then do a clean recompile and compare the two versions as well!
If they use an oscilloscope, do they have to publish full details of its internal structure? Or can we just assume that it behaves in a certain, standard way?
Are you purposefully putting a strawman out there so you can 'prove' you're right? Do it the same way you do it in industry: document the model number of the oscilloscope, the firmware revision and every important setting you can get your hands on. Then someone can buy the same scope, put the same firmware on it, load the same settings and get the same results. If they don't there's two options: you left something out of your description (purposefully or not) or there's some voodoo happening on the manufacturer's part.
Documentation is not rocket surgery. It's standard practice everywhere people don't like wasting their time. Who's the bad person in this exchange:
Player 1: 'Hi, I used the same data you did and the same algorithm but I didn't get the same results you did. Do you know what version of PROGRAM you used?'
Player 2: 'Uh, nope'
Player 1: 'Well, do you have the test setup you used so we can take a look?'
Player 2: 'Naw, the university tore it down to use it for someone else after I was done.'
Player 1: 'So... you couldn't even reproduce the results if you wanted to?'
Player 2: 'LOL NOPE BUT I'M SO RIGHT!111'
Why do we expect in this situation that the bullies are the ones doing the ostracizing and not the ones being ostracized? No one likes bullies. No one! Not teachers, not parents, not unpopular students, not popular students!
In my experience, there's two kinds of 'bullying'. One is the type that I had which is 'not knowing when to stop pestering people.' People (some people anyhow) didn't like me in grade school. But that didn't stop me from trying to be their friends - repeatedly, ineffectively and annoyingly. So, they started making fun of me. And when that didn't work, they started beating me up. I'm glad I got the hint because I don't know what would have happened next (perhaps gunplay?). Once I found a group of people who actually liked me and stopped pestering people who didn't the 'bullying' stopped.
The second type of bullying that happened to me is the excessive, unrelenting kind where you try to separate yourself from the bully but he just keeps coming back and picking on you. That happened to me too.
But the guy who was doing it wasn't exactly well-liked. In fact, very few people liked him. And probably not many in my group of friends (of which he was a part - yes, difficult to try to avoid a bully while being friends with his friends). He had a bad home life, bad grades, bad social skills, bad hygiene, bad everything. Inability to find solutions to social problems? Yeah, that was him. And guess what? He got picked on! That probably turned him into one of the meanest examples of humanity in my childhood.
But to me it's pretty obvious that he is the focus of the article, not me. Bullies are social outcasts who are unable to relate to their peers except through terror and intimidation. They are broken. They need help. Think about that before you bemoan how horrible your childhood was.
Free speech for individuals is great. The problem is that corporations are not people and money is not speech.
The supreme court just decided that both things you said are wrong. I mean, they should be wrong, but current interpretation of the law of the country we live in says that they're wrong. But this is what we should be fixing. Let's focus on the root of this: corporate personhood. That has to be expressly limited somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, you're comparing the value of gold against another currency. That currency is subject to a lot of inflation, so the value of gold going up indicates it's superiority as a container of value.
And you're assuming that gold has a set 'value' that the dollar or any other currency rises and falls against. If we found a mountain of easily-accessible gold tomorrow the price of gold would go waaaaay down... and not because the value of a dollar went waaaaay up.
Wait, so if the corn isn't capable of reproducing, then how would it spread over the globe in some kind of apocalyptic way?
Well, it's not apocalyptic, but if you planned on saving seed from your crop (which is a poor poor practice for western farmers, but I digress) and your crop gets pollinated by something with the terminator gene (very possible - it all just flies on the wind as far as the wind will take it) then next year your crop doesn't grow and you have to re-buy your seed stock. If there were enough terminator-including crops around then its possible that you couldn't successfully save seed ever and you'd have to buy it all - possibly contributing to a monoculture of plants that may all get wiped out by a disease.
Of course, if that happened to me I'd go to court with Monsanto, prove I actively attempted to cull their worthless half-breed seed out of my stock and failed, show monetary damage that wasn't covered by crop insurance and force them to pay me because they robbed me of value with their seed. You might win. Hint: the farmers who lose against Monsanto usually try to retain the GMO lines that accidentally breed their corn. It's a bit suspicious when your corn has strong GMO sequences in it 3 years after everyone around you stopped planting that strain...
One more thing: with corn at least the only reliable way to ensure that you don't cross-pollinate with anything else is to manually remove the tassles. By hand. In July. No one does that for non-seed crops (no one really saves seed either BTW).
There's something I've never understood coming from critics of the environmentalist movement: Where do you get the idea that people want to drag down the standard of living?
Generally I get it from the people in the environmentalist movement who seem to be against the application of power to solve everyday problems because it's 'wasteful' somehow. For many, their agenda is to push their own values on to me in the name of 'conserving' things - electricity, air, water, environment in general, etc. A small example: you should dry your clothes on a line to save the electricity a dryer would use (typically despite any other considerations: schedule, availability of clothes lines, it's raining outside, etc). Some environmentalists would deny me dry clothes for a day or more because its' raining outside. That lowers my standard of living.
Spending $3 on a light bulb will make me poor?
Not me, but someone much poorer than me. The shame of all of this CFL business is that it's a fairly large upfront cost: you'll spend hundreds of dollars to replace all of the bulbs in your house to save maybe $5-$10 a month. It's definitely a choice I'd make, but I have more than a hundred dollars sitting around. If you live in the People's Republic of California and you can't buy the $.50 incandescent anymore, suddenly the $3 you spent on the bulb is money you can't spend on gas or food or something else. The poor don't see the benefit of saving money on their bills monthly because they don't have the upfront money to invest in replacing all of their bulbs, and when push comes to shove the far left environmentalist position denies the poor folk $2.50 to spend on food. Or $2.50 to spend on cigarettes and booze - it's their money anyhow.
What exactly brings down my standard of living when I ... drive in a more fuel-efficient manner (NOT buying a different car)? All of these are 'environmentalist' choices, yet they cost nothing except the effort required to modify my behavior slightly.
Are you serious? Do you know what a Prius costs in comparison to a cheap car? Add $10K or so. That's a car for the rich. And it's such a marginal improvement in gas mileage it's hardly worth it. Remember kids, you save a lot more gas going from 15MPG to 30MPG than you do from 30MPG to 60MPG. I can't believe any environmentalist would approve of that choice BTW.
For me it comes down to environmentalists NEVER performing a cost/benefit analysis on the measures they propose and the costs are always on the end user - us. Is $3 here and $10 there that bad? Not individually, but together, yes! Some people do NOT have the means to afford the difference between $.50 and $3, and not everyone can spend $10K more to have a car that saves you $5 on gas a month. But the furthest left environmentalists would make cheap incandescents and marginally less fuel-efficient cars illegal and push the cost onto the poor because they always assign a value of infinity to the smallest and most insignificant part of nature (of which man is obviously not a part) and assign next to nothing to the potential suffering of their fellow man.
You take them in, feed them, and so on. Even offer them one (or some) of your women.
BEST... RELIGION... EVER! That's some hospitality right there. Where do I join, and who can I be a stranger to today?
No! Don't join! If you join you're not a stranger! Just visit once in a while and... enjoy ;)
Even the new testament criticises homosexual relationships (and the only laws of the old testament that were "updated" in the new testament were ones to do with sacrifices and what you could put into your body).
Incorrect - it was decided that new converts to Christianity who weren't Jews didn't have to follow ANY of the Jewish laws.
It also tries to claim that the passage about Sodom and Gomorrah is nothing to do with Sodomy and that "know" literally means know rather than "have sex with", when Lot clearly offers his daughters to "do with what you will" instead of the men.
'Know' in the Bible means have carnal relations with - I agree with you there. But according to Jewish interpretation of the Sodom and Gomorrah incident says that the sin of those cities was that they were unwelcoming of strangers - not necessarily teh buttsecks. Lot was allowed to live because he invited the angels in, fed them and protected them from the crowd who wanted to rape them. I guess if the crowd had chatted them up a bit before bringing up the topic of 'knowing' them it might have been better...
Not necessarily. The phone's Market app periodically polls the Android Market server for update information. If "delete immediately" is a possible update status in Market, they don't even need to know which users installed the app to remove it, much less have access to their phones. This seems like the more efficient approach, since trying to overtly contact and send "remove this app" commands to everyone who's installed the app individually would be a pain.
You can bet it'd be a pain, but I'll bet that Steve Jobs wouldn't let that approach fly with the iPhone. 'Oh it's too hard to let the user know you're deleting an application from their phone so you elected not to tell them? No.' He'd make the programmer have the app store send a text message to each iPhone user who bought the app and bully AT&T into ensuring the text message was free. THAT is why the iPhone is better than your bog-average Android phone: attention to detail and dedication to user experience forced down the developers' throats by Steve Jobs.
Partially because teenage pregnancy wasn't particularly looked-down upon by Puritans - it's just that the teenagers got married when it happened and started their lives off. Apparently it was common to say that an eager young bride could do in 6 or 7 months what it took other wives 9 full months to do. I wonder why THAT was....
It is, unless you're on the receiving end of that $1 trillion. While I'm sure some folks working at military contracting companies are decent and hardworking folks, it's extremely profitable to get nice big contracts to produce something that (a) doesn't work and/or (b) isn't actually useful.
You seem to have an odd view of government contracting. It's not as if a contract entails little more than passing big bags of money back and forth and laughing maniacally all the way to the bank. A company would not place a bid on a system they knew was impossible. They have to be very detailed in their bid or they get reamed big time. The basis of estimates are very often questioned - how did you come up with these numbers? What are your assumptions? How can you justify this schedule, etc How could any company answer those questions if they legitimately thought the whole idea was impossible? They'd get caught with their pants down.
You do realize that most of the time the profit only comes when they deliver something right? As part of successful tests. Naturally, the company gets paid to do the work, but the profit margins are rigorously whittled down. You don't make billions of dollars just designing and testing these things - unless you actually deliver the product you're more likely to lose money - the equivalent of marking time until you run out of cash. And trust me, if the government doesn't see SOME results they will pull the plug.
I don't know why people always assume when they hear headlines like 'Billion dollar government project fails to work!' that they think the companies somehow pocketed one billion dollars of profit and ran off saying 'Hahaha, I KNEW it wasn't going to work all along SUCKERS!'
Unlike hot-vent extremophiles, it's hard to argue that these bacteria could be the source of life as they live in hydrocarbons, which are the result of a not-yet-fully-understood process involving dead organic matter.
HAL.
I'll assume you mean life on Earth. On Titan there are hydrocarbons without a bunch of dead dinosaurs, so it's a different story there.
If Mexico wanted to try a new tactic, they should start lobbying the USA to change their retarded drug laws.
See, I'm just not convinced of this. In the long term, yes, the cartels would go away. But in the short term let's say we open it up: drugs are legal - all of them, period. And anyone can make them, grow them, buy them, sell them or whatever. But not without a license of course. There's no way the US is going to treat things that can legitimately kill you more leniently than alcohol (which can kill you pretty easily). So the market gets opened up and anyone who wants to get into the (legitimate) drug dealing business needs to get the license, get the supply, and then set up a successful shop or whatnot to sell the stuff. But that takes time. It won't happen that the week after pot or anything else is legalized you'll be able to go down to your corner dealer and get legitimate drugs - those are still illegal! Those are still coming from the cartels and there's no way they are going to get the licenses and pass all the tests to import the stuff. The US doesn't look kindly on killings, kidnappings, and all of the other nastiness the cartels have been propagating for all these years - they still won't be allowed to sell drugs in the US. So in the short term - the absolute short term - the situation stays the same - shady drug dealers and money flowing to the cartels.
And where are we going to get our supply when we do get around to setting up legitimate supply chains? South America. True, you can cook up meth anywhere and grow pot anywhere, so we won't need to worry about that. But for some things you'll have to go where the supply is - right in the cartels back yard. And are the cartels going to like that? No - they hate competition and they have guns. This will bring the war to a head where legitimate drug suppliers want access to the growers that the cartel has under their thumbs so THEY can have their cut. In 25 years after legalization the cartels will be gone, but in the short term they won't go away because they have a stranglehold on the supply and don't want to give up their cash cow.
In short, even if we legalize drugs the cartels aren't going to pack up and go away. They aren't an advocacy group that disbands when their goal is achieved. Even if we legalize drugs they will still be a criminal organization with extensive supply and delivery operations that were just as illegal as the day before drugs were legalized. They don't benefit from the US legalizing drugs in any way. We still will have to deal with them no matter what changes we make to drug policy.
Replying to myself: A more generous interpretation of his actions is that he's trying to get the oddball statutory rape law of Wisconson changed. Wouldn't hurt his public image if he came out and said that.
I mean he's actually saying that teaching a kid how to use a condom encourages the kid to seek out becoming a rape victim?! HOW?!
Via statutory rape. Basically, any sex someone under 18 has with anyone is illegal - they can't legally consent so it's always rape. Two 17 year-olds consensually having sex? Illegal. a 40 year-old and a 10 year old? Same kind of illegal.
So the DA trots out 'contributing to the delinquency of a minor' because (with a little bit of ignorance and a little bit of legal sleight of hand) he figures that there's no legal method for a minor to use birth control, so they're instructing the students on how to commit illegal acts.
It's a hell of a reach and it seems the only reason he's doing it is to prevent sex ed from being taught because he has an agenda. I'm assuming he couldn't get himself elected to a body that makes laws, so he's modifying the definition of the job he has to include interpreting laws he doesn't like out of the books. And Republicans whined about 'legislating from the bench'. Only when it works against them I suppose.
Indeed. I accept anthropomorphic climate change, but the idea of suspending democracy is just plain vile...
It's anthropogenic climate change. It doesn't like it when you say it's anthropomorphic.
I've long held that democracy actually only works in that context, when the voters are people with enough education and leisure time to care about the issues they're voting on.
Ugh, sounds like every homeowner's association here in Florida. Old people patrolling the subdivision looking for minor infractions and arguing endlessly at meetings about pointless and small issues because they have nothing better to do. Committees doing everything they can to write new rules to regulate how people live in their houses. A subclass of people who live in the subdivision but only rent and therefore have no say while their owners two states over don't care at all.
No. Thank. You.
So let's go back to why health insurance is flawed. Normal healthy individuals may make 3 (annual plus 2 cold/flu) trips to the doctor in a year. I pay 218$ per month for insurance through my employer (not counting the portion they pay). This means that I am effectively paying 872$ per trip to my doctor... ok... lets let that sink in... even if you count a nurse, doctor and receptionist out front splitting it and them only seeing 3 patients per hour (rough cases might take that long) we are still talking they would be making 1.74 MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR EACH! Now if you have any friends that are medical professionals I bet you know that there are VERY few that are making that much per year... especially receptionists :)
Now the argument is that "well this money helps balance out all the catastrophic claims"... fine then why are we using insurance for non-catastrophic claims?
Because catastrophic and non-catastrophic work differently for health than anything else. If I crash my car then yep, that's $20K. Catastrophic. However, I have choices. I can take the $20K and get a cheaper but equivalent used car, I can just not get a car at all and bank it, etc.
Health can be like that. Yeah, I'll go in for my 'maintenance' visits for physicals and my small problems like colds, infections, etc. I've got no problem with paying direct for that - I'm a proponent of HSAs. And then maybe I break my leg, oops, that's catastrophic, but it will heal. So insurance picks that one up and in a few months I'm good as new. But I don't really have the option not to fix my leg. It's rather necessary. So that comparison is broken - health insurance isn't car insurance.
But if I have AIDS, or Crohn's disease, how do you classify that? If you had a car that required thousands of dollars of repairs monthly, you'd just sell it for what you could and get a new one, or use a lemon law, or sue the bad repair man who screwed it up like that and get a new one. But of course, you can't get a new body.
So what do you do? You keep it going. If it gets really expensive, then you have to ask is it worth it? It's a big question, especially with human life.
So the question isn't catastrophic vs. maintenance because you can't just replace hardware (ie, your body) and get new. Well, not yet anyhow. It's the expensive maintenance that we have to pay for (because otherwise, someone will die) that's the problem.
Other insurances don't handle that. Flood insurance in the midwest? They got tired of reimbursing people who kept building on flood plains, so the state stepped in, bought the property and razed everything on it. That's the closest analogue I can think of and if we worked the same way with health insurance we'd just buy out the rest of the person's life and kill them. Dunno about that one.
A system of governance that is based upon "what is good for me personally" is simple anarchy. Forcing an insurance company to pay for a pre-existing condition is simple theft, regardless of how hard that makes your situation.
In some cases, but in this case it's really a fix for the insurance system. You see, insurance works in most places because of the large large number of people who have signed up, put in money and take a modest amount out (based on what those super-smart actuarials say). What happens now is that some people say 'Well, I don't go to the doctor, so I won't pay for health insurance!' thus depriving the system of healthy payers. Then the insurance company says 'Screw this, there aren't enough people paying in to support the diabetics and cancer patients. We've gotta cut them loose.'
So the bill does two things: Whoever you are, you MUST buy health insurance (and you get tax breaks for doing it, penalties for not). This brings the healthy people who didn't pay in before back. Then, it forces the insurance companies to actually cover people. Pre-existing conditions? Deathly illness? Doesn't matter - the insurance company now has all of the healthy people it needs to float the sick people, so the bill takes away the ability to perform some of the more dirty tricks.
The way I see it, the whole bill brings insurance closer back to how it it supposed to work. Health insurance is a necessity in the US today. I want the whole system to get revamped, costs to go down and people to have more choice and technology. But for right now it's inhuman to deny coverage because of preexisting conditions or because you actually got sick. At the same time, it's disingenuous to only buy health insurance when you get sick. This bill ought to head both of those problems in the right direction.
The difference in your car analogy is that the Hummer doesn't belong to you. It's more like leaving the vehicle with a valet. When you go to pick up the vehicle, the valet refuses because he doesn't think you can handle driving it.
Like if you were obviously drunk? He'd be well within his rights to withhold the keys in that situation - so it's not always wrong. Need a better analogy.
What isn't fine, however, is how often they then call asking for support after dismissing the error message.
Sadly, they're justified. How many 'error messages' do you get, click through and you can still do what you wanted to do? The users have more to gain from just trying to click it to go away than they do stopping, waiting for IT support on hold, reading the error, trying to keep their work from being erased and fixing the error at the same. Users just want to work and there's a good chance they'll be able to do that if they just click OK.
Moral of the story? I'd say
Maybe we do need stuff like clippy or that puppy dog Windows has now as its "helping toon". Imagine a puppy with an error message in its mouth, looking at you from biiiiiig puppy eyes, think that might make users read the message, if only so they don't disappoint the cute puppy?
Well, I always figured the puppy scheme wasn't to engender good feelings in the users, but instead to increase the message distance (communication theory term) between similar messages for the user. Thus a 'PC LOAD LETTER' type message is rightly gibberish to them, and who can tell one gibberish from another? But a puppy.. everyone knows puppies! Plus it's odd enough to get your attention... what does a puppy have to do with my program? They just might read it out of curiosity and fix their own problem.
There are literally billions of acres of farmland in the US that aren't in production. The US farm bank (subsidies paid to farmers to NOT grow anything) is several million acres alone.
True, but keep in mind that this land isn't necessarily large, contiguous tracts of land sitting idle. Much of it is 'buffer' land along the edges of current farmland. Consider a plot of farmland next to a lake: you could either farm right up to the edge of the lake or leave a buffer strip to help control erosion. A lot of the money that the government provides is for such strips to help control erosion. So it's not necessarily true that all of that land could be put to good use - it's already being used to help increase the value of the farmland around it.
You know what that means, don't you? The only option left is to go prehistoric, and introduce Stonepunk. Advanced technology, built from nothing but wood and chipped stone lashed together with vines or sinews, and occasionally powered by Fire!
Where's Oog the Open Source Caveman when you need him?
Haven't you noticed that all of the Ancients advanced technology on Stargate-SG1 looks like it's made of stone? Super-advanced wormhole-creating intergalactic transportation device? Yeah, made of stone. Control panel for said device? Big stone buttons. Transport rings? Stone. Arguably, the stone and wood look has been done by sci-fi for a while.
Snapshot what you get - don't change it, don't even look at it. As soon as you get it, check it in, binaries and all, to a change tracking system (eg, CVS, SVN, etc).
This I agree with but for one thing: Verify that the binaries you are given correspond to the code you are given. I've seen it too many times where they release a binary, then go back and do 'minor' bug fixes and don't recompile before handing it off to you.
Save the binaries you've been given, then do a clean recompile and compare the two versions as well!
If they use an oscilloscope, do they have to publish full details of its internal structure? Or can we just assume that it behaves in a certain, standard way?
Are you purposefully putting a strawman out there so you can 'prove' you're right? Do it the same way you do it in industry: document the model number of the oscilloscope, the firmware revision and every important setting you can get your hands on. Then someone can buy the same scope, put the same firmware on it, load the same settings and get the same results. If they don't there's two options: you left something out of your description (purposefully or not) or there's some voodoo happening on the manufacturer's part.
Documentation is not rocket surgery. It's standard practice everywhere people don't like wasting their time. Who's the bad person in this exchange:
Player 1: 'Hi, I used the same data you did and the same algorithm but I didn't get the same results you did. Do you know what version of PROGRAM you used?'
Player 2: 'Uh, nope'
Player 1: 'Well, do you have the test setup you used so we can take a look?'
Player 2: 'Naw, the university tore it down to use it for someone else after I was done.'
Player 1: 'So... you couldn't even reproduce the results if you wanted to?'
Player 2: 'LOL NOPE BUT I'M SO RIGHT!111'
Why do we expect in this situation that the bullies are the ones doing the ostracizing and not the ones being ostracized? No one likes bullies. No one! Not teachers, not parents, not unpopular students, not popular students!
In my experience, there's two kinds of 'bullying'. One is the type that I had which is 'not knowing when to stop pestering people.' People (some people anyhow) didn't like me in grade school. But that didn't stop me from trying to be their friends - repeatedly, ineffectively and annoyingly. So, they started making fun of me. And when that didn't work, they started beating me up. I'm glad I got the hint because I don't know what would have happened next (perhaps gunplay?). Once I found a group of people who actually liked me and stopped pestering people who didn't the 'bullying' stopped.
The second type of bullying that happened to me is the excessive, unrelenting kind where you try to separate yourself from the bully but he just keeps coming back and picking on you. That happened to me too.
But the guy who was doing it wasn't exactly well-liked. In fact, very few people liked him. And probably not many in my group of friends (of which he was a part - yes, difficult to try to avoid a bully while being friends with his friends). He had a bad home life, bad grades, bad social skills, bad hygiene, bad everything. Inability to find solutions to social problems? Yeah, that was him. And guess what? He got picked on! That probably turned him into one of the meanest examples of humanity in my childhood.
But to me it's pretty obvious that he is the focus of the article, not me. Bullies are social outcasts who are unable to relate to their peers except through terror and intimidation. They are broken. They need help. Think about that before you bemoan how horrible your childhood was.
Free speech for individuals is great. The problem is that corporations are not people and money is not speech.
The supreme court just decided that both things you said are wrong. I mean, they should be wrong, but current interpretation of the law of the country we live in says that they're wrong. But this is what we should be fixing. Let's focus on the root of this: corporate personhood. That has to be expressly limited somehow.