Petter Reinholdtsen of Debian Edu/Skolelinux fame will have a lot of useful no-nonsense suggestions. Contact information at http://www.hungry.com/~pere/ .
Almost 20% more traffic deaths per km than Germany is 6085 people per year. That's more than two times 9/11 in number of casualties. I wouldn't just call that significantly higher accident rates. I would call that criminal neglect.
It even gets a lot more dramatic when you look at the important numbers: 12.3 versus 4.5 fatalities per 100000 inhabitants. Roughly three times the number of car traffic related deaths in the US compared to Germany.
21439 deaths per year can be avoided by doing whatever is done right in Germany. That's one Vietnam war every 2 years, 8 months and 2 weeks in number of casualties.
Even if you're a psychopath, and you don't care about the casulaties per se at all, it might make economic sense to make transportation safer!
One thing I didn't expect: there are walls along the road where there are no trees. When going 100+ mph, the wind is far more noticeable and those walls are very useful.
These walls are actually about reducing noise pollution for people living nearby.
Imagine you're a honest politician (they exist), and you want to do something about US citizens dying prematurely. You don't want to touch the guns issue because that's political suicide, so... What about traffic deaths then? Over 15000 people a year die in the US because of the inadequacy of the traffic system. US roads are over two times as dangerous as German roads, and almost three times Swedish or Dutch roads. And it's not as if Germany has some magic recipe. They just about make the OECD average.
33000 US citizens were road kill in 2009, and international experience shows that at least 15000 could have been avoided. How many US soldiers died in Vietnam?
One Vietnam of easily avoidable US traffic deaths every four years is low hanging fruit in comparison to gun control. But even that doesn't seem to be high on the political radar.
That's an old tactic used in political negotiations very often. It's very popular in scenarios where you don't trust al your negotiation partners. This makes it especially common in countries with coalition (multi-party) governments for example.
1. Extremely high taxes on the nuclear fuel (â145 per gram of Uranium or Plutonium). Despite them, nuclear energy stays profitable and has never received a single cent of subsidies.
Have a look at Archos tablets. They support Debian on their gen8 series, but those are still a bit slow. People are already running debian on their gen9 products, and official support for that is coming soon.
Contrary to your intuition, the maffia forcing voters to snap pictures of their vote/cast their vote in a certain way has been a tradition in certain parts of southern Italy. The Italian wikipedia has a short article on this "voto di scambio" practice.
Force MSFT to only sell Windows XP. Have them spin off new products into independent, 100% publicly held companies with no MSFT cash injection. Do this until MSFT market share drops under a random low percentage.
This would encourage investment in Windows XP compatibility layers. Wine, Crossover and new Windows XP competitors would benefit greatly.
Windows XP and clones would become a generic competitive unified technical layer offered by different parties.
This is not competition. This is anti-competitive behavior. A monopoly can't just selectively lower prices in one market segment. For a market economy to operate efficiently, a monopoly product may only have one price.
The idea behind this is simple: the monopolist can ask any price he wants in most of the monopoly market. Profits made doing this can be used to fend off potentially vulnerable parts of the monopoly market by preventively undercutting potential competitors.
There is a piece of non-free software that runs quite well under Wine and exports nice MusicXML. You will find it linked to from http://www.recordare.com/software.html .
I really should ask google to help buy this technology and set it free.
In Belgium, ad supported textbooks are illegal. Any publicity/sponsoring in education is illegal, in all three language communities, which is where the responsibility for education lies.
This is part of the very broad consensus in our country that education is a public good. Messing with that is guaranteed to get all kinds of people really angry.
Firestarter Software is probably not doing very well. Why else would they launch a software patent lawsuit? On top of that, they have actual products in the market. Seems to me that this makes them very vulnerable to countersuits.
Am I right thinking it shouldn't be too difficult to sue Firestarter Software into oblivion?
In France, as in the US, one wears a suit to meet with those in positions of respect or power (politicians, management, etc.).
Actually, the way I experienced it, it is far more accepted in France than in most of the US to not wear a suit when having a formal meeting with a politician. Insofar that it can actually convey a message of "I am not another monkey with a suit".
America is supposed to be the land of the free, etc. etc. I think it is time that American government representatives were reminded of this - specially with elections coming up. They will do anything to remain in power. If you all tell them you are not going to put up with this kind of BS, then maybe they will stand up for you.
Difficult in a country with a de facto political duopoly... Only in some states you can hope to vote a somewhat privacy minded duopoly member into a crumb of federal political power.
Yes, I know about arguments pro and contra majority systems, but this is most certainly to be counted on the contra side.
1. Annul all gas taxes 2. Get rid of boutique fuel mixes making refineries wealthy
A low gas price is just one possible political goal. Another one is energy price stability.
Even if one focuses solely on the economical benefits of such a policy, it could make sense to:
* cut energy consumption where the net economic effect is positive * raise energy taxes where the net economic effect is positive * invest in very long term local energy production (think 100+ years or renewable: wind, solar, nuclear) * invest in small scale local energy production (think straight vegetable oil instead of biodiesel) * invest in the reliability of partners on which your rely as external energy sources
the analog broadcast channel was for one political party Actually, this point should be irrelevant to the discussion.
I think it is a valid point of discussion. Things like these need _very_ careful consideration before any changes are made.
So what if it was a radio station operated by a political party, a member of a party (as is the case here) or by a private person that may or may not have a privately held preference for a party?
Obviously, there is a real danger of abuse here. Same problem with too little government interference. Minimising potential dangers is the real problem.
The problem is that the government systematically tries to cut off media access to an opinion and a person holding it. Especially when the point of view of this person is already constantly targeted for vilification in the left-wing biased media, this constitutes plain censorship.
Error 404. Conspiracy not found.
The World War 2 arguments are plain Godwinesque and could just as well apply to the government's point of view: unlicensed radio receivers for the British broadcasts would also spell trouble with the "acting government" back then.
I was citing historical reasons, not using arguments.
And indeed, the air time on public television was a fact. Until the government parties decided to scrap it... because *they* had all the media access they needed and wanted to deprive that other party that didn't. Guess which party that was...... because no one was watching them? Actually, I regularly watched these. They suited my rather weird taste of humour quite well. On the public radio, there are still some of this kind of funny shows left. Try listening to "De protestantse stem", "Het vrije woord",... on Radio 1 around 19.20. Real fun!
And it will be called "campaign finance reform".
Party financing is quite transparent in Belgium. Quite a lot of public money is spent on it, with _very_ strict limits on commercial sources of income. It's quite difficult for companies to buy laws this way in Belgium.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to have my tax rate fall to 39.6%! Alas... here, it's more like 53.5%.
Petter Reinholdtsen of Debian Edu/Skolelinux fame will have a lot of useful no-nonsense suggestions. Contact information at http://www.hungry.com/~pere/ .
Almost 20% more traffic deaths per km than Germany is 6085 people per year. That's more than two times 9/11 in number of casualties. I wouldn't just call that significantly higher accident rates. I would call that criminal neglect.
It even gets a lot more dramatic when you look at the important numbers: 12.3 versus 4.5 fatalities per 100000 inhabitants. Roughly three times the number of car traffic related deaths in the US compared to Germany.
21439 deaths per year can be avoided by doing whatever is done right in Germany. That's one Vietnam war every 2 years, 8 months and 2 weeks in number of casualties.
Even if you're a psychopath, and you don't care about the casulaties per se at all, it might make economic sense to make transportation safer!
One thing I didn't expect: there are walls along the road where there are no trees. When going 100+ mph, the wind is far more noticeable and those walls are very useful.
These walls are actually about reducing noise pollution for people living nearby.
Hah, the wikileaks "insurance" file!
Imagine you're a honest politician (they exist), and you want to do something about US citizens dying prematurely. You don't want to touch the guns issue because that's political suicide, so... What about traffic deaths then? Over 15000 people a year die in the US because of the inadequacy of the traffic system. US roads are over two times as dangerous as German roads, and almost three times Swedish or Dutch roads. And it's not as if Germany has some magic recipe. They just about make the OECD average.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~International%20comparisons~191
33000 US citizens were road kill in 2009, and international experience shows that at least 15000 could have been avoided. How many US soldiers died in Vietnam?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_US_soldiers_died_in_the_Vietnam_War
One Vietnam of easily avoidable US traffic deaths every four years is low hanging fruit in comparison to gun control. But even that doesn't seem to be high on the political radar.
That's an old tactic used in political negotiations very often. It's very popular in scenarios where you don't trust al your negotiation partners. This makes it especially common in countries with coalition (multi-party) governments for example.
1. Extremely high taxes on the nuclear fuel (â145 per gram of Uranium or Plutonium). Despite them, nuclear energy stays profitable and has never received a single cent of subsidies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Indirect_nuclear_insurance_subsidy
Have a look at Archos tablets. They support Debian on their gen8 series, but those are still a bit slow. People are already running debian on their gen9 products, and official support for that is coming soon.
See also:
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet
http://dev.openaos.org/wiki/Debian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Lupo
There's two entirely different beasts in copyright:
* Composers and lyricists get a monopoly until 70 years after the death of the longest living author.
* Performers get a 50 year monopoly from the moment the recording was published.
Contrary to your intuition, the maffia forcing voters to snap pictures of their vote/cast their vote in a certain way has been a tradition in certain parts of southern Italy. The Italian wikipedia has a short article on this "voto di scambio" practice.
Force MSFT to only sell Windows XP. Have them spin off new products into independent, 100% publicly held companies with no MSFT cash injection. Do this until MSFT market share drops under a random low percentage. This would encourage investment in Windows XP compatibility layers. Wine, Crossover and new Windows XP competitors would benefit greatly. Windows XP and clones would become a generic competitive unified technical layer offered by different parties.
There is no simlocking in Belgium. Bundle sales of phones and phone contracts are illegal here.
This is not competition. This is anti-competitive behavior. A monopoly can't just selectively lower prices in one market segment. For a market economy to operate efficiently, a monopoly product may only have one price. The idea behind this is simple: the monopolist can ask any price he wants in most of the monopoly market. Profits made doing this can be used to fend off potentially vulnerable parts of the monopoly market by preventively undercutting potential competitors.
At least so called cow bar bumpers are illegal in Belgium because of the damage they are proven to do to pedestrians and cyclists.
There is a piece of non-free software that runs quite well under Wine and exports nice MusicXML. You will find it linked to from http://www.recordare.com/software.html .
I really should ask google to help buy this technology and set it free.
In Belgium, ad supported textbooks are illegal. Any publicity/sponsoring in education is illegal, in all three language communities, which is where the responsibility for education lies.
This is part of the very broad consensus in our country that education is a public good. Messing with that is guaranteed to get all kinds of people really angry.
Firestarter Software is probably not doing very well. Why else would they launch a software patent lawsuit? On top of that, they have actual products in the market. Seems to me that this makes them very vulnerable to countersuits.
Am I right thinking it shouldn't be too difficult to sue Firestarter Software into oblivion?
In France, as in the US, one wears a suit to meet with those in positions of respect or power (politicians, management, etc.). Actually, the way I experienced it, it is far more accepted in France than in most of the US to not wear a suit when having a formal meeting with a politician. Insofar that it can actually convey a message of "I am not another monkey with a suit".
America is supposed to be the land of the free, etc. etc. I think it is time that American government representatives were reminded of this - specially with elections coming up. They will do anything to remain in power. If you all tell them you are not going to put up with this kind of BS, then maybe they will stand up for you.
Difficult in a country with a de facto political duopoly... Only in some states you can hope to vote a somewhat privacy minded duopoly member into a crumb of federal political power.
Yes, I know about arguments pro and contra majority systems, but this is most certainly to be counted on the contra side.
One cannot patent algorithms in the EU. Well, big business has of course been trying to monopolise software ideas, but so far, they've mostly failed.
l
See amongst others http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/epc52/index.en.htm
If New York wants cheaper fuel, do two things:
1. Annul all gas taxes
2. Get rid of boutique fuel mixes making refineries wealthy
A low gas price is just one possible political goal. Another one is energy price stability.
Even if one focuses solely on the economical benefits of such a policy, it could make sense to:
* cut energy consumption where the net economic effect is positive
* raise energy taxes where the net economic effect is positive
* invest in very long term local energy production (think 100+ years or renewable: wind, solar, nuclear)
* invest in small scale local energy production (think straight vegetable oil instead of biodiesel)
* invest in the reliability of partners on which your rely as external energy sources
the analog broadcast channel was for one political party
... because *they* had all the media access they needed and wanted to deprive that other party that didn't. Guess which party that was... ... because no one was watching them? Actually, I regularly watched these. They suited my rather weird taste of humour quite well. On the public radio, there are still some of this kind of funny shows left. Try listening to "De protestantse stem", "Het vrije woord", ... on Radio 1 around 19.20. Real fun!
Actually, this point should be irrelevant to the discussion.
I think it is a valid point of discussion. Things like these need _very_ careful consideration before any changes are made.
So what if it was a radio station operated by a political party, a member of a party (as is the case here) or by a private person that may or may not have a privately held preference for a party?
Obviously, there is a real danger of abuse here. Same problem with too little government interference. Minimising potential dangers is the real problem.
The problem is that the government systematically tries to cut off media access to an opinion and a person holding it. Especially when the point of view of this person is already constantly targeted for vilification in the left-wing biased media, this constitutes plain censorship.
Error 404. Conspiracy not found.
The World War 2 arguments are plain Godwinesque and could just as well apply to the government's point of view: unlicensed radio receivers for the British broadcasts would also spell trouble with the "acting government" back then.
I was citing historical reasons, not using arguments.
And indeed, the air time on public television was a fact. Until the government parties decided to scrap it
And it will be called "campaign finance reform". Party financing is quite transparent in Belgium. Quite a lot of public money is spent on it, with _very_ strict limits on commercial sources of income. It's quite difficult for companies to buy laws this way in Belgium.