It pulls Palladium to shame since you can't install any apps except those provided by the Google overlords.
You don't know what you're talking about. I can install apps from anywhere on mine, and I haven't even put it in developer mode. That includes unpackaged apps I've developed on the device itself.
But even in countries with larger third parties, they're seldom major parts of government.
In Belgium we have the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, the Socialists, the Nationalists (two types, even), the Greens, and those are just the major parties of the north. I count 13 parties with seats in the federal government after the most recent election, and a coalition usually includes at least two northern parties and two southern parties, but often more.
The make-up of the government can change significantly, as well. For example, the big winner in the north of the country, the nationalist NVA party, didn't exist 15 years ago and now they've got the most seats of all parties (22%). Government negotiations this year are going to be a real pain because the Nationalists and the Northern Christian Democrats are at loggerheads with the Socialists and the Southern Christian Democrats, with the Liberals of both north and south are caught in between.
So far it doesn't seem to have led to a lot of radical change in outcomes other than making the election results take a couple of extra days due to the calculations involved when there's a dozen candidates.
If you want a laugh, look up the Belgian political crisis of 2010-11. It took the government 541 days of negotiations to form a coalition. I believe that's a modern world record.
We just started using ranked choice voting for elections in Minneapolis, which in theory eliminates the "lost vote" problem by allowing you to make third parties your first choice but still vote "defensively" by making some other candidate a secondary choice.
I support such voting systems, in the hope they will bring candidates to the center.
I agree with most of what you advise, and am encouraged by the fact that at least some high schools are looking to improve financial literacy. However...
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
Nonsense. Get a credit card, but also set up an automatic payment to pay it off in full each month. You then get the fraud protection and convenience of a credit card without having to pay any interest.
And for me, having been out of the country for quite a while, it's the only practical way to build up a credit history at the moment.
Many astrophysicists believe that supernovas can also undergo a second collapse, generating an additional burst of neutrinos. Thatâ(TM)s why the detectors on Earth spotted two bursts.
Or is this a minority theory? I'm no astrophysicist, so couldn't tell you myself.
HR departments requiring a BA for the most menial of office tasks makes it the point.
This is the problem, but isn't the fault of universities. Why you expect them to change to suit the HR department baffles me.
Requiring a fucking MA to work in a library as a salaried employee and not a volunteer (the US is the only country I know of that does this) makes it the point.
Again, not the university's problem.
But sure, it's/all/ the student's fault for expecting something in return for all that money./sneer
Monopoly is not a problem per se, and there's plenty of entities that have a monopoly. The issue is when they use the power of monopoly in one area to gain an unfair advantage in another area where they have no monopoly.
Would you believe that I honestly wasn't trying to rant or troll? I don't understand what the streaming service has to do with Youtube, and was under the impression that they were two separate business segments. Please correct me if this impression is mistaken.
How is this not an abuse of monopoly regulations? They're using their influence in one sector - online videos - to strong-arm customers in another sector. That's what Microsoft got in trouble for with Windows and IE, right?
Try to find an e-mail address that a live human will read at Google.
That's reserved for paying customers, as it is with many other major businesses. I've twice had technical issues with a Chromebook, and both times have gotten a reasonably prompt email response that helped me fix the problem.
If it's safe for a bike to glide through stopsigns or treat all stoplights as signs, then it's safe for motor vehicles to do the same. In fact, it's recognized that this is sometimes the case - that's why there are blinking red lights. There's no reason to give bikes any special treatment.
You clearly did not RTFA, and the summary's lousy.
Bikes go slower, can stop faster, and have a better view of the road than cars do. A biker's acceleration is significantly lower than that of a car, so one way to get them through the intersection as fast as a car is is to let them retain their speed and roll through a stop. And, to quote the article:
In many cities, the low-traffic routes that are safer for bikes are the kinds of roads with many stop signs. Currently, some cyclists avoid these routes and take faster, higher-traffic streets. If the Idaho stop were legalized, it'd get cyclists off these faster streets and funnel the bikes on to safer, slower roads.
since by scientific definition life begins at conception, and by genetic definition the fetus is a human being.
By scientific definition life began somewhere 3.5 billion years ago, just once, and we are all just a continuation of that one single starting point. Life replicates by splitting a living part of itself off into a separate entity, not by jump-starting new life in a separate piece of inert matter.
The question is when the mother and child become separate beings, rather than just the one being a growth in the other. That line tends to get drawn at the point of viability, when you could remove the child from the mother's body and still have it survive. That's not at conception, however.
Smart watches are coming, in some variety. In the end, they will be far superior then a standard watch.
Except in battery life. Same problem as with a smartphone vs a dumb phone: you can do more with the former, but the latter's battery will last you a week.
So, if you prioritize reliability above functionality...
Interesting... So you have an interesting environment locally, and easy transport to the city core? Sounds ideal.
Any problems with noise, or feeling crowded?
I wonder if part of what's pushing the price up is that there are so few places like that. If people had multiple minicities to chose from, that might help relieve the price pressure.
Sure, I understand that. I love going to Santa Fe, hiking in the mountains. I enjoy gardening, and growing my own chiles. I don't do that every day, however, whereas I do use the places created by my fellows most days.
Yeah, we have "townhouses" in America too. They're for people still trying to realize the American Dream.
See, I think that's where you're wrong. Quite a few people would be perfectly happy with a nice town house in a decent but not necessarily gentrified part of the city. The shortage of that kind of housing drives people either into apartments or into the suburbs.
But it's not the suburbs per se that are the problem, it's the sprawl: subdivision-style houses with single-use low-density zoning. It means the only thing there is to do in the suburbs is sleep and garden, and everything else is far away. Mixed zoning, and a move away from developers building cookie-cutter subdivisions would be a start in fixing this, and would actually make the suburbs an interesting place to live rather than just a residential wasteland. Build some row houses in the heart of the suburb together with some commercial streets and you've got a micro city, without many of the big city problems.
I'd rather live in my car than in a subdivision house.
I have no problem with it, if it means I get to live in the city. It's a compromise.
I personally was so happy when I could afford to live in stand alone houses. I now, don't have to listen to other peoples noise (stereo, crying babies, fscking, etc)...and I don't have to be terribly cognizant of my own levels of noise production.
You need to insulate your walls better.
I like having a back yard, where I can plant and grow a nice sized vegetable garden, where I can set up my smoker and my grills....where I can set up my homebrewing apparatus, where I can set up and invite friends over for a large crawfish boil, etc.
You can do that in terraced houses as well. Most in Belgium have a yard extending straight back from the rear of the house, the same width. It's not huge, I'll give you that, but plenty large enough for most activities.
Why would I possibly, want to live in a smaller box, share walls, and have to squeeze all my outdoor fun on some small balcony, that in some places has regulations against open flame outdoor cooking?
Because a city is one of the few places that has anything interesting within walking or biking distance. I don't want to have to drive half an hour to get to the nearest restaurant, cinema, museum, or even the supermarket. There's more to cities than just partying, and I want to live in a place where I don't *have* to use my car if I want to do anything besides stay at home.
No, it's because those of us who have bought such homes do not want to follow the Japanese model. It's the only thing I've ever heard a frenchman say that I will quote - "the Japanese? Why would we want to live like the Japanese? They live like ants!".
There is a middle ground, you know?
That Frenchman probably lived in a "row" or "terraced" house: each house shares two walls with two neighbors. Very common in Belgium in all but the rural areas, and a far more efficient use of space. The houses are larger than those in Japan, so you don't feel like an ant.
With regards to making only certain lasers legal, what happens when someone imports one from another country that doesn't ban them? You have to find and prosecute them anyway.
But more importantly, just filtering out a few specific frequencies but leaving the rest of the spectrum unaffected is not something you "just" do, but is a technically challenging problem. You're also filtering out primary colors, so that's gonna affect color vision of the pilots. I'd rather give the pilots an unimpaired view, on the off chance they need it, and just go after the idiots misusing the pointers.
Shouldn't they be looking at a different solution here?
Care to suggest one?
It's not like there's a technical solution on the laser pointer end, and as long as pilots use windows there isn't one on the plane end. You could try education, but there will always be idiots.
We rarely got 6-8" in Belgium, but usually at least an inch or two, and I've biked through that many times. It's simply a matter of clearing the sidewalks and bike path as well, and not only the road.
Dunno what kind of car you have, but unless it's a truck it probably can't handle half a foot of uncleared snow very well either.
Ah, I've never driven that far south, so you could be right in that.
In any case, there's always hope that as gas becomes more expensive, municipalities will pay more attention to planning for traffic. Europe will have to build higher, and the US more compactly I think. Otherwise I guess we could always move to Singapore, enjoy the growth that part of the world is experiencing.
Triggered lights done right should still allow flow along the major route short of some messed up traffic pattern situations. You still have the lights timed to allow flow, just don't change if there is not some one actually there, or have the option for a shorter change if there are not many people there. I've seen bad designed traffic signals in about every country and US state I've traveled too, but I've also seen plenty of well designed ones. It isn't about getting used to one style or another, but about some amount of luck that went into whoever constructed the system and if the municipality ever bothers to do studies and improvements to places after they have been constructed.
True, they may just be badly designed. It may even be on purpose - lights that I'd breeze through in the week would often stop me in the weekend, oddly enough. Traffic patterns are different in the US than in Europe, however, so it would surprise me if they use the same approach with regards to duration, relative timing, etc. Getting used to the average behavior of lights in a certain place, good or bad, is what I mean by becoming accustomed to the style.
And for you young smart/dumb-asses who think I'm a cranky old fart (which I am) I also still make my living writing a variety of relatively smart software - networking, complex computation algorithms, 3D graphics, etc.
You *are* a cranky old fart, and a pretty poor networking guy if you've never heard of power over ethernet. Fiber's a different story, but as long as you have copper you can transmit power. It's just that the companies are not required to provide power as they are with POTS, and it's the same deal with regards to quality of service, length of downtime, etc.
Update the laws, rather than sticking obstinately with obsolete tech.
What irks me is the lack of town planning for cars in European cities then the incompetent authorities act like it is all the citizens fault. I get that they have ancient medieval town centers that are almost impossible to modify - but that is no excuse for not providing adequate amounts of free to almost free just out-of-town parking and efficient cheap public transport into the centers (efficient does not mean it has to be profitable in the direct sense).
You're not looking hard enough. Most of the major cities I've driven to in the EU (Belgium and the Netherlands, primarily, over five years) had significant parking on the outskirts of town (never free, land costs money) near the end of the city metro lines. Drop the car there, take the tram, and enjoy a city built at a human scale. Or even better, take the train right into downtown.
I've moved back to the US recently, and I dearly miss those compact cities. I'm in a small city in Georgia now and it's disgusting how much prime downtown space is wasted on empty parking lots. I'd much rather have no parking at all rather than too much, as then you can at least walk or bike.
Don't get me started on the last century traffic lights on timers and no trigger sensors of any kind in sight even at the pedestrian crossings.
Traffic lights is a different matter, and apparently depends on your driving style. I never had a problem flowing through light after light back home, but here I'm constantly being stopped. I'm sure I'll eventually get used to the timing here, as you would over there.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know what you're talking about. I can install apps from anywhere on mine, and I haven't even put it in developer mode. That includes unpackaged apps I've developed on the device itself.
In Belgium we have the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, the Socialists, the Nationalists (two types, even), the Greens, and those are just the major parties of the north. I count 13 parties with seats in the federal government after the most recent election, and a coalition usually includes at least two northern parties and two southern parties, but often more.
The make-up of the government can change significantly, as well. For example, the big winner in the north of the country, the nationalist NVA party, didn't exist 15 years ago and now they've got the most seats of all parties (22%). Government negotiations this year are going to be a real pain because the Nationalists and the Northern Christian Democrats are at loggerheads with the Socialists and the Southern Christian Democrats, with the Liberals of both north and south are caught in between.
If you want a laugh, look up the Belgian political crisis of 2010-11. It took the government 541 days of negotiations to form a coalition. I believe that's a modern world record.
I support such voting systems, in the hope they will bring candidates to the center.
I agree with most of what you advise, and am encouraged by the fact that at least some high schools are looking to improve financial literacy. However...
Nonsense. Get a credit card, but also set up an automatic payment to pay it off in full each month. You then get the fraud protection and convenience of a credit card without having to pay any interest.
And for me, having been out of the country for quite a while, it's the only practical way to build up a credit history at the moment.
Manually set your area, and all ISPs in that area should pop up below the graph.
To quote the article...
Or is this a minority theory? I'm no astrophysicist, so couldn't tell you myself.
This is the problem, but isn't the fault of universities. Why you expect them to change to suit the HR department baffles me.
Again, not the university's problem.
Go fuck yourself.
Monopoly is not a problem per se, and there's plenty of entities that have a monopoly. The issue is when they use the power of monopoly in one area to gain an unfair advantage in another area where they have no monopoly.
Would you believe that I honestly wasn't trying to rant or troll? I don't understand what the streaming service has to do with Youtube, and was under the impression that they were two separate business segments. Please correct me if this impression is mistaken.
How is this not an abuse of monopoly regulations? They're using their influence in one sector - online videos - to strong-arm customers in another sector. That's what Microsoft got in trouble for with Windows and IE, right?
That's reserved for paying customers, as it is with many other major businesses. I've twice had technical issues with a Chromebook, and both times have gotten a reasonably prompt email response that helped me fix the problem.
You clearly did not RTFA, and the summary's lousy.
Bikes go slower, can stop faster, and have a better view of the road than cars do. A biker's acceleration is significantly lower than that of a car, so one way to get them through the intersection as fast as a car is is to let them retain their speed and roll through a stop. And, to quote the article:
None of these reasons apply to cars.
By scientific definition life began somewhere 3.5 billion years ago, just once, and we are all just a continuation of that one single starting point. Life replicates by splitting a living part of itself off into a separate entity, not by jump-starting new life in a separate piece of inert matter.
The question is when the mother and child become separate beings, rather than just the one being a growth in the other. That line tends to get drawn at the point of viability, when you could remove the child from the mother's body and still have it survive. That's not at conception, however.
Except in battery life. Same problem as with a smartphone vs a dumb phone: you can do more with the former, but the latter's battery will last you a week.
So, if you prioritize reliability above functionality...
Interesting... So you have an interesting environment locally, and easy transport to the city core? Sounds ideal.
Any problems with noise, or feeling crowded?
I wonder if part of what's pushing the price up is that there are so few places like that. If people had multiple minicities to chose from, that might help relieve the price pressure.
Sure, I understand that. I love going to Santa Fe, hiking in the mountains. I enjoy gardening, and growing my own chiles. I don't do that every day, however, whereas I do use the places created by my fellows most days.
See, I think that's where you're wrong. Quite a few people would be perfectly happy with a nice town house in a decent but not necessarily gentrified part of the city. The shortage of that kind of housing drives people either into apartments or into the suburbs.
But it's not the suburbs per se that are the problem, it's the sprawl: subdivision-style houses with single-use low-density zoning. It means the only thing there is to do in the suburbs is sleep and garden, and everything else is far away. Mixed zoning, and a move away from developers building cookie-cutter subdivisions would be a start in fixing this, and would actually make the suburbs an interesting place to live rather than just a residential wasteland. Build some row houses in the heart of the suburb together with some commercial streets and you've got a micro city, without many of the big city problems.
I'd rather live in my car than in a subdivision house.
I have no problem with it, if it means I get to live in the city. It's a compromise.
You need to insulate your walls better.
You can do that in terraced houses as well. Most in Belgium have a yard extending straight back from the rear of the house, the same width. It's not huge, I'll give you that, but plenty large enough for most activities.
Because a city is one of the few places that has anything interesting within walking or biking distance. I don't want to have to drive half an hour to get to the nearest restaurant, cinema, museum, or even the supermarket. There's more to cities than just partying, and I want to live in a place where I don't *have* to use my car if I want to do anything besides stay at home.
There is a middle ground, you know?
That Frenchman probably lived in a "row" or "terraced" house: each house shares two walls with two neighbors. Very common in Belgium in all but the rural areas, and a far more efficient use of space. The houses are larger than those in Japan, so you don't feel like an ant.
With regards to making only certain lasers legal, what happens when someone imports one from another country that doesn't ban them? You have to find and prosecute them anyway.
But more importantly, just filtering out a few specific frequencies but leaving the rest of the spectrum unaffected is not something you "just" do, but is a technically challenging problem. You're also filtering out primary colors, so that's gonna affect color vision of the pilots. I'd rather give the pilots an unimpaired view, on the off chance they need it, and just go after the idiots misusing the pointers.
Care to suggest one?
It's not like there's a technical solution on the laser pointer end, and as long as pilots use windows there isn't one on the plane end. You could try education, but there will always be idiots.
Swift justice will do more to get the word out.
We rarely got 6-8" in Belgium, but usually at least an inch or two, and I've biked through that many times. It's simply a matter of clearing the sidewalks and bike path as well, and not only the road.
Dunno what kind of car you have, but unless it's a truck it probably can't handle half a foot of uncleared snow very well either.
And 10 F isn't bad, as long as you dress for it.
Ah, I've never driven that far south, so you could be right in that.
In any case, there's always hope that as gas becomes more expensive, municipalities will pay more attention to planning for traffic. Europe will have to build higher, and the US more compactly I think. Otherwise I guess we could always move to Singapore, enjoy the growth that part of the world is experiencing.
True, they may just be badly designed. It may even be on purpose - lights that I'd breeze through in the week would often stop me in the weekend, oddly enough. Traffic patterns are different in the US than in Europe, however, so it would surprise me if they use the same approach with regards to duration, relative timing, etc. Getting used to the average behavior of lights in a certain place, good or bad, is what I mean by becoming accustomed to the style.
You *are* a cranky old fart, and a pretty poor networking guy if you've never heard of power over ethernet. Fiber's a different story, but as long as you have copper you can transmit power. It's just that the companies are not required to provide power as they are with POTS, and it's the same deal with regards to quality of service, length of downtime, etc.
Update the laws, rather than sticking obstinately with obsolete tech.
You're not looking hard enough. Most of the major cities I've driven to in the EU (Belgium and the Netherlands, primarily, over five years) had significant parking on the outskirts of town (never free, land costs money) near the end of the city metro lines. Drop the car there, take the tram, and enjoy a city built at a human scale. Or even better, take the train right into downtown.
I've moved back to the US recently, and I dearly miss those compact cities. I'm in a small city in Georgia now and it's disgusting how much prime downtown space is wasted on empty parking lots. I'd much rather have no parking at all rather than too much, as then you can at least walk or bike.
Traffic lights is a different matter, and apparently depends on your driving style. I never had a problem flowing through light after light back home, but here I'm constantly being stopped. I'm sure I'll eventually get used to the timing here, as you would over there.