It's not so much that Americans are "made" to work hard, because they really aren't. Americans just are hard workers. I've worked in supermarkets, in construction (both field and office), in disaster relief (nonprofit), and in IT departments for a couple different architecture/engineering firms. My experience is that the greater part of people at all levels of pay and in each of the sectors where I've had experience (union jobs excepted) work hard because of their character and not because they are being yammered at.
Maybe I've just been lucky, or maybe it's different on the coasts, but I just can't buy your version of the US as a populace overworked by corporate overloads. Sure there are cases of that, or of slackers, but working hard is just part of the ethos for most people. And yet we don't have to work half as hard, on the whole, as the people who lived here 150 years ago.
"However, I also suspect that a serious cryptographer would have solved it by now:
Darn right they would have. Dude, it's a code, and you're upset that it doesn't look pretty??
Kryptos-4 is not much "fun" imo, as in, something you could crack in a week of spare time. And RSA?!? There's no 'solving' going on there, just a sifting through millions of possible keys... What's fun about that.
It's probably just like in that great volume of prophecy, the Tintin book Destination Moon! In which a foreign power overpowered the rocket's control radio signal with a more powerful signal, with a view to stealing the rocket and its secrets. Luckily Tintin and Calculus put a device on the rocket that allowed them to blow it up remotely before anyone else could get their hands on it. Probably a similar situation here.
"Back then, what did you get from Disney? Cute li'l films about cute fuzzy animals having some cute adventures. So people did not expect a 'serious' science fiction movie.
"Second, it was the wrong kind of science fiction for this time. Science fiction back then was either in a galaxy far, far away or equally far away in the future. But most certainly not NOW. How can you make science fiction in the NOW?"
NO! you are forgetting The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes, some of the most advanced science fiction set in the NOW (the 1969 now that is), pitting Dexter Riley against the evil AJ Arno. Disney WAS a scifi powerhouse!!!
Some commentators have read the constitutional text differently. They argue that the vesting of the power to declare war gives Congress the sole authority to decide whether to make war. (6) This view misreads the constitutional text and misunderstands the nature of a declaration of war. Declaring war is not tantamount to making war - indeed, the Constitutional Convention specifically amended the working draft of the Constitution that had given Congress the power to make war. An earlier draft of the Constitution had given to Congress the power to "make" war. When it took up this clause on August 17, 1787, the Convention voted to change the clause from "make" to "declare." 2 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 318-19 (Max Farrand ed., rev. ed. 1966) (1911). A supporter of the change argued that it would "leav[e] to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks." Id. at 318. Further, other elements of the Constitution describe "engaging" in war, which demonstrates that the Framers understood making and engaging in war to be broader than simply "declaring" war. See U.S. Const. art. I, 10, cl. 3 ("No State shall, without the Consent of Congress . . . engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."). A State constitution at the time of the ratification included provisions that prohibited the governor from "making" war without legislative approval, S.C. Const. art. XXVI (1776), reprinted in 6 The Federal and State Constitutions 3247 (Francis Newton Thorpe ed., 1909). (7) If the Framers had wanted to require congressional consent before the initiation of military hostilities, they knew how to write such provisions.
Finally, the Framing generation well understood that declarations of war were obsolete. Not all forms of hostilities rose to the level of a declared war: during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Great Britain and colonial America waged numerous conflicts against other states without an official declaration of war. (8) As Alexander Hamilton observed during the ratification, "the ceremony of a formal denunciation of war has of late fallen into disuse." The Federalist No. 25, at 133 (Alexander Hamilton). Instead of serving as an authorization to begin hostilities, a declaration of war was only necessary to "perfect" a conflict under international law. A declaration served to fully transform the international legal relationship between two states from one of peace to one of war. See 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries *249-50. Given this context, it is clear that Congress's power to declare war does not constrain the President's independent and plenary constitutional authority over the use of military force.
I don't have time to be part of a local online community. I'd rather be in the real one. And when I want to read the news, I'll sit down with a copy of the paper.
And despite its other faults, the Minneapolis Star Tribune does a great job of keeping local news to the forefront, alongside national stories.
Are these politicians-turned-unwilling-bloggers allowed to have private lives too? If so, how do you define that? Do you make them blog just what happened during normal business hours? Anything that might be job-related? What if a candidate happens to be good friends with a business man and has lunch with him on the weekend - who decides whether that falls on the side of public or private conduct? How many spies will it take to enforce this rule? And who will provide oversight for the spies?
Unless you provide a MASSIVE enforcement mechanism for this enforced-blogging thing, you're back to blind trust in the guy to be truthful about his day-to-day conduct, so what did it get you? I'll give you a hint: nothing.
A classic big-government solution to any kind of moral vacuum: create a law that does nothing but waste people's time. problem solved.
"holding politicians accountable and knowing what they are up to definately [sic] makes sense, it will just never happen."
I think the first idea is called Elections and the second is called Journalism.
"If 500 people all write in support of an issue and it turns out that they have been paid to all support that issue, it isn't really a grass roots support movement, is it?"
Yep, definitely sounds like a case for more laws to enforce.
Yes, citizens should have to do this too. That way we could all be accountable to People's Republic, minimize all shady dealings and help out with law enforcement, you bet.
"Fair enough, but the millions of zombies hosted by comcast, bellsouth.net, or SBC doesn't interest them, the massive security flaws that allow any Microsoft machine to become a zombie just by connecting it to the internet and going for a pizza don't interest them, but a Van Zant (and other) CDs elicit a response from the tier 1 level?"
How do you know these things don't interest them as well? Just because they didn't say so in the article?
Do you have a statement from them showing this supposed lack of interest?
Sorry but I beg to differ on that one. Other than get its OS installed on every new PC, Microsoft does nothing to incent programmers to write for Windows.
That ended when they stopped including QBasic and started selling VB for $100-$700.
PHP might well succeed where java has failed, but it will be because:
- it's used on its merits, not because of hype, or a New Gospel of Platform Independence - it's simpler and faster - it's not being touted by a huge company such that it shows up on MS's radar as a challenge...which are also things that Ruby has going for it. Or Python. The point isn't that PHP succeeded, the point is that java failed (at becoming kingathehill) and why it failed.
Though a few KB doesn't sound like a lot of bandwidth, let's add it up. Slashdot's FAQ, last updated 13 June 2000, states that they serve 50 million pages in a month. When you break down the figures, that's ~1,612,900 pages per day or ~18 pages per second. Bandwidth savings are as follows:
* Savings per day without caching the CSS files: ~3.15 GB bandwidth
* Savings per day with caching the CSS files: ~14 GB bandwidth
Most Slashdot visitors would have the CSS file cached, so we could ballpark the daily savings at ~10 GB bandwidth. A high volume of bandwidth from an ISP could be anywhere from $1 - $5 cost per GB of transfer, but let's calculate it at $1 per GB for an entire year. For this example, the total yearly savings for Slashdot would be: $3,650 USD!
Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should let a real writer do those next time around. Very poorly done...you can tell they have now idea how to emulate anything literary...
It's not so much that Americans are "made" to work hard, because they really aren't. Americans just are hard workers. I've worked in supermarkets, in construction (both field and office), in disaster relief (nonprofit), and in IT departments for a couple different architecture/engineering firms. My experience is that the greater part of people at all levels of pay and in each of the sectors where I've had experience (union jobs excepted) work hard because of their character and not because they are being yammered at.
Maybe I've just been lucky, or maybe it's different on the coasts, but I just can't buy your version of the US as a populace overworked by corporate overloads. Sure there are cases of that, or of slackers, but working hard is just part of the ethos for most people. And yet we don't have to work half as hard, on the whole, as the people who lived here 150 years ago.
because they cost too much.
Darn right they would have. Dude, it's a code, and you're upset that it doesn't look pretty??
Kryptos-4 is not much "fun" imo, as in, something you could crack in a week of spare time. And RSA?!? There's no 'solving' going on there, just a sifting through millions of possible keys... What's fun about that.
someone would take a crack at this.
it's been more than two years and no one has solved it yet.
It's probably just like in that great volume of prophecy, the Tintin book Destination Moon ! In which a foreign power overpowered the rocket's control radio signal with a more powerful signal, with a view to stealing the rocket and its secrets. Luckily Tintin and Calculus put a device on the rocket that allowed them to blow it up remotely before anyone else could get their hands on it. Probably a similar situation here.
NO! you are forgetting The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes , some of the most advanced science fiction set in the NOW (the 1969 now that is), pitting Dexter Riley against the evil AJ Arno. Disney WAS a scifi powerhouse!!!
"All they will get you is a beautifully designed, perfectly coded boneheaded security hole."
- at best.
It might have bugs, which might close the security hole.
I don't have time to be part of a local online community. I'd rather be in the real one. And when I want to read the news, I'll sit down with a copy of the paper.
And despite its other faults, the Minneapolis Star Tribune does a great job of keeping local news to the forefront, alongside national stories.
And then you turn around and say we need to be more understanding of Muslim terrorists.
Are these politicians-turned-unwilling-bloggers allowed to have private lives too? If so, how do you define that? Do you make them blog just what happened during normal business hours? Anything that might be job-related? What if a candidate happens to be good friends with a business man and has lunch with him on the weekend - who decides whether that falls on the side of public or private conduct? How many spies will it take to enforce this rule? And who will provide oversight for the spies?
Unless you provide a MASSIVE enforcement mechanism for this enforced-blogging thing, you're back to blind trust in the guy to be truthful about his day-to-day conduct, so what did it get you? I'll give you a hint: nothing.
A classic big-government solution to any kind of moral vacuum: create a law that does nothing but waste people's time. problem solved.
"holding politicians accountable and knowing what they are up to definately [sic] makes sense, it will just never happen."
I think the first idea is called Elections and the second is called Journalism.
"If 500 people all write in support of an issue and it turns out that they have been paid to all support that issue, it isn't really a grass roots support movement, is it?"
Yep, definitely sounds like a case for more laws to enforce.
Yes, citizens should have to do this too. That way we could all be accountable to People's Republic, minimize all shady dealings and help out with law enforcement, you bet.
"Fair enough, but the millions of zombies hosted by comcast, bellsouth.net, or SBC doesn't interest them, the massive security flaws that allow any Microsoft machine to become a zombie just by connecting it to the internet and going for a pizza don't interest them, but a Van Zant (and other) CDs elicit a response from the tier 1 level?"
How do you know these things don't interest them as well? Just because they didn't say so in the article?
Do you have a statement from them showing this supposed lack of interest?
except that this implies that their other OSs emphasized performance over dependability.
The best solution to this problem isn't regulation, it's the replacement of DNS with something non-centralized.
This would not only avoid similar disruptions in the future, it would make this whole US/UN control debate meaningless.
DNS undermines the whole goal of the Internet's architecture. It must go.
First of all, an intern under your desk will get you immediately fired in almost any business.
Second, the intern was not the president's biggest problem. The biggest problem was perjury in the sexual harrassment trial of a sitting president.
Sorry but I beg to differ on that one. Other than get its OS installed on every new PC, Microsoft does nothing to incent programmers to write for Windows.
That ended when they stopped including QBasic and started selling VB for $100-$700.
PHP might well succeed where java has failed, but it will be because:
...which are also things that Ruby has going for it. Or Python. The point isn't that PHP succeeded, the point is that java failed (at becoming kingathehill) and why it failed.
- it's used on its merits, not because of hype, or a New Gospel of Platform Independence
- it's simpler and faster
- it's not being touted by a huge company such that it shows up on MS's radar as a challenge
I think you missed the joke.
He was more likely referring to Sen. Wellstone's death in a plane crash just before the 2002 elections. (and if he was, it was in poor taste.)
The quote was from an article, which I linked, that was written two years ago.
2005 - 2 - 2000 = 3
well...let's not push our luck :)
Um, because:
Irregardless.