Our economy is worth many, many times our debt. In fact, we are growing right now at such a rate that today's billions will be a drop in the bucket tomorrow. This is due to sheer growth and expansion, not based on inflation.
If you look at any good business out there, you will see it has a great deal of debt. My favorite example is Red Hat Inc. They have a huge chunk of debt. But guess what? They have the means to pay it off. Hence, they have a small fortune in cash assets that they are holding on to because it makes more sense to have the value of your company in cash and debt than to have no debt and no cash.
Short term, we believe it is logical to have a deficit based on our wartime situation and our (until recently) stagnate economy. Long term, once we get a handle on the war and its costs, once we are able to lower the tax rate due to economic growth, we will once again pull in the belt like the republican congress did back in 1994. We understand that once the money gets in DC, it is no doubt going to be spent somehow. So we are looking at ways to reduce the revenue of government so that the spending will be reduced as well.
Debt isn't universally bad. It's hard to find times in our history when we didn't have a debt (they are there, just rare). As long as the debt is manageable, we will do fine.
It's like taking out a home mortgage so you can buy a home. Do you go into debt? Of course, but you have the means to pay it off because you have a house and you have an income. Is it a good choice to go into debt to buy a house? Absolutely, especially if you need more than one or two bedrooms for your family.
If anything, the fact that we can float such a huge debt and that our debtors are fine with the rates is a testament to the power of our nation. Our credit score as a nation is so high that we can take our a loan on trillions of dollars without breaking a sweat. No other country can do that and get away with it.
So keeping a list of known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers is bad? And then using this list to prevent them from entering or leaving our country is bad? I'm sorry, but this is EXACTLY what our government should be doing.
Spying on your neighbor programs ("Information Awareness")
What is bad about spying on your neighbors? If I hear a gunshot in my next door neighbor's house, I would be stupid not to call the police and report it. If I see a guy talking about blowing up a building, I would be stupid not to report it to authorities, or even make the arrest myself and hold them until the police arrive. It's called PROTECTING YOUR COUNTRY FROM ITS ENEMIES, and it's a natural right.
Arresting people and holding them with due process ("The War on Terror")
The only due process enemy combatants get is listed in the Geneva Convention. Oh yeah, these aren't combatants becuase they aren't uniformed and they aren't part of any state. So we get to do with them whatever the heck we want, due process be damned. Better think twice before you decide to fight with the US, because we defend our country here from enemies here....and occasionally torturing them (ditto)
There are no substianted reports of torture. Not even what happened at Abu Ghraib is considered torture. It's called humiliation....that sometimes leading to them dying (oops)
There have been no substiantiated reports of torture, and thus no one has died from torture. There have been reports of injured people being taken captive and them dying in captivity, but that's not a bad thing. After all, we were trying to kill them in the first place. They were trying to kill us first.
Supression of dissent ("Free Speech Zones")
How has dissent been supressed? By saying you can't demonstrate withn X feet of an official who has substianted threats against his life? You should feel lucky you get the cordoned off Free Speech Zones in the first place. What you call I demonstration I call a riot and I don't see why they haven't thrown the lot of you in prison for disturbing the peace.
Orwellean double-speak (see above)
I didn't realize this was a crime? I guess you sure hate it now that we are using this tactic against you. After all, you call the murder of infants a "choice".
Supression of opposition (Locking the opposition out of the legislature)
Huh? Never heard of this. But let's pretend it did happen. Guess what? The minority HAS NO SAY IN HOW GOVERNMENT IS RUN. That's a fact of life. You lost, get over it. If you want to get back in power, you have to win elections like the rest of us. The people didn't choose you, so don't be upset when you don't have the power you used to have.
Arresting opposing party candidates weeks before the election (Clark & Badnarik)
Never heard of this, and it was probably because they were breaking the law. It's totally legal to arrest people for breaking the law. Like those democrats that slashed the tires of the vans on the day of the election, or those guys who drove by republican HQs and threw rocks through the windows or shot at the people inside.
Manipulation of the media (including paying analysts to "support" their policies)
This is not a crime either. People have the freedom to say whatever they want. They also have the freedom to pay people to say things you want them to say. It happens all the time. It's how you make movies and TV shows, and write newspaper articles. What is a crime is trying to shut down opposition by enacting the "Fairness Doctrine". The government has no right to LIMIT one's speech.
Fibing to start wars
I am sure you have heard this multiple time, but if you didn't understand it th
Back in the day, cowboys and their cowboy presidents (Teddy Roosevelt, for instance) were conservationalists. They wanted to preserve a part of nature for future generations. They did it by buying land and setting it up as a nature preserve. T. Roosevelt convinced the federal government to buy land like Yellowstone park, and set it up so that millions of people from America and around the world could enjoy it.
Nowadays, the environmentalists care nothing for the environment. Instead, they are using conservationalist sentiment to inspire communism. Rather than doing the obvious thing (Spotted Owls are endangered, and people like them. Why don't we set up a Spotted Owl nature preserve, or capture them and raise them in a zoo?), they go the anti-capitalist route. (Spotted Owls are in danger, so let's shut down the vital logging industry.)
You look at the base of any environmentalist movement and you will quickly realize a few facts. First, the hard-core base of all of these movements are hard-core communists. They hate America and all it stands for, and are quite willing to tell you how bad we are for exporting our freedom to people like Japan and Europe.
You'll notice another thing. They aren't concerned about the environment. Instead, they use the environment to whack the capitalists. That's why there are more rules to protect the environment where they have no effect on the environment - but they have a huge effect on the economy. For instance, after all is said and done, if the EPA got out of the gasoline refining business and left these people alone to refine to their hearts content, and if they stopped telling auto manufacturers how to make their cars, and if we went back to the fuel efficiency of the 60's and early 70's, then all of our cars would still produce an insignificant amount of pollution, compared to the power plants and other industries. But that is where environmentalists are focusing their attention, and are still focusing their attention, because they are more interested in shutting down our immensely valuable highway system and getting us all to ride community government subsidized sub-standard busses and trains.
Some of the reason you listed for gas prices are wrong.
(a) Crude oil costs only accounts for about 1/3 of the total price. If oil prices double, then you'll pay about 1/3 more at the pump. If they halve, you'll pay about 1/6 less at the pump. The price of crude is rising due to China and the rest of the world recovering from stagnation in the early 2000's. OPEC has been producing more to try and lower the price, but their supply cannot keep up.
(b) Federal and state taxes contribute about 1/3 of the cost as well. While these are fairly static, they are still gradually rising. Consider that many gas taxes are implemented over time (ie, a few cents more each year is taxed.)
(c) The remaining third go to the costs of distribution and profits for the companies involved. The reason this is so high is because of environmental regulations are very strict, requiring several different types of blends be used in different parts of the country at different times of the year. Combined with the bottleneck that you can't store gasoline and use it the next year, and it's really hard to build more refineries, we run into a bottle neck every summer where we just can't refine the oil fast enough.
As far as the oil supply being finite, that may or may not be true. But noone has suggested that supply is actually decreasing today, nor will it for the next several decades. More and more oil is discovered every year, and exciting new ways of extracting oil from previously useless sources are being explored. If crude prices remain above about $30, we can begin extracting it from shale and it will be profitable.
If we begin drilling in ANWR and restart the pumps throughout Texas, California, and other states, we can do a lot to lower the price of crude. But this won't solve the problem of refining. We need to lighten the regulation and we need to allow more and bigger refineries to be built. We should also allow people to stockpile refined gasoline to help smooth out the peaks and valleys of demand and supply. It would help a lot if we could build more supply lines and upgrade the ones we have now as well.
You'll notice a common thread: It is environmental activism that is really causing the most significant increase in your gas prices. Get rid of that and you can enjoy your sweet nectar for a more reasonable price. And remember: The purpose of the environmentalists wackos is not to fix the environment, but to shut down our economy and destroy our capitalism.
I remember one of the cool things about Scott Joplin was that he recorded his own song's player piano rolls. If you went to the store at that time and picked up a player piano rolls for one of his pieces, it was performed by him. So you were getting it exactly as he would've played it - within the parameters of what a player piano can do.
Player pianos could only record which notes were pressed and for how long. They couldn't reproduce the dynamics of the piece. MIDI is a huge step forward because you can record that nowadays.
I don't believe MIDI or anything like it will ever replace actual recordings of the music. There is just so much that happens beyond playing the notes of the song that MIDI will never be able to fully capture.
I had the opportunity to study a bit about the physics of music. I was surprise by how many different ways a simple instrument like a piano can be tuned. I'm not a very good piano player, but I can hear now what the difference is between tuned pianos. Frankly, the way modern pianos are tuned annoys me. None of the chords are very "pure". They are all equally bad. Not too long ago every piano was tuned by ear, and certain chords would be perfect or near perfect, while others would stink terribly. But that was part of the music. If you shift the key, all of a sudden everything sounds very very different. Shift it back and everything sounds good again.
I never really liked MIDI because you can't really take this into account easily. I know you can tune individual notes by cents, but I guess I never bothered to try to take a MIDI piece and play it in different tunes by tuning each note off by a couple of cents.
What I'm saying is that we can't really ask the piano player "For this piece, how would you like the piano tuned?"
Another spot I don't think they'll be able to hit is the fact that every piano is a little bit different. When you play a piece, you have to adapt to the piano. One friend of mine who played so much piano that he would go through several strings a month would complain endlessly about certain pianos ("You have to use a frigging sledgehammer to get that thing to forte") and others were magical for him. Needless to say, merely reproducing the mechanics of how someone performed a piece on a different piano (with a different room temperature and humidity and even different acoustics in the room) won't really do it justice in my mind.
I'd like to clarify this. Consider the problem that a big company like Amazon has. They have thousands of products. One day they will probably have millions. The problem they face is showing you the product you wanted to buy when you came to the site.
Now, I have no problem with honest PR. If a product or service or company really is good, then by all means, promote that to the ends of the earth using whatever legal methods you can think of. This is like taking all the computational and intellectual resources at a company like Amazon to find you the one product you are looking for. it's not a problem, and frankly, it provides a service for us "cattle".
But the problem comes with dishonest advertising. When people are trying to sell something by calling it something it is not, then that is a serious problem. Take for instance the mail I get about home loans: "1%!" the tagline reads. But the reality is very different: "Prime + 1%, or about 6% right now, and maybe 20% in the future."
This would be like going to Amazon to look for a book, being shown a book that appears to meet your needs, buying that book, and discovering it isn't the book you wanted at all. That is bad. That is terrible.
I don't mind being cattle. As long as the farmer is honest, and I understand what I am getting out of the deal, and I can enter into it at my own free will, it isn't a bad thing. I do mind being told I will be a sheep and then being treated like a cow. That's the problem.
How do I prevent myself from being taken advantage of? By some fairly simple processes that I think everyone around here is familiar with. Enter into every deal cautiously. Look for 3rd party independent reports. Identify the spin for what it is, and question the motives of those who praise or detract from it. And never deal with dishonest people, period. This is all stuff we should be teaching our kids and we should be teaching at school.
The last thing we want is a judiciary accountable to the people! I mean, what do they think, that this government is formed by the consent of the governed? What kind of crazy idea is that? Why can't we be more like Iran where the unlected judges are the sole arbiters of government, and they control everything over there?
And the last thing we need is for judges to enforce the laws and constitution as it was written. I mean, why should we be bound by an agreement we made in the past? We should just be able to change the terms of the agreement whenever we feel like it, without the permission of the other parties, right?
Because, you know, why would we want to spend all that effort to change the constitution the way it was meant to be changed? It's just absurd man.
The question was: What evidence is there of the creation?
The answer is: The universe and everything in it.
If someone posed the question: What evidence is there that the creation occured according to the Bible and not some other method, such as science or other religions teach?
That is a more complicated question.
About circular logic: It isn't bad. Circular logic is merely a set of steps that gets you back to where you started. Being able to do such a thing doesn't show that the starting point (and thus the ending point) are incorrect. It only shows that you haven't made any progress.
There is a God because there is a God. Then you build on top of that, and you eventually reach the logical conclusion that the universe was created by a God. Sure, there is circular logic there, but just because it has circular logic doesn't mean it is incorrect.
Let's look at Quantum Mechanics. (I am a physicist by training, BTW.) The Schrodinger equation is the equation that determines the behavior of particles because it is the equation that determines the behavior of particles. (Circular logic!) The repercussions of this equation are the wave-particle duality of matter, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and so on. We know that Quantum Mechanics, for the most part, is very correct, because it happens to correlate well with reality. Circular logic doesn't mean QM is wrong. Instead, we turn to how the theory of QM maps to reality.
The same can be said for the argument I made above. There is a God because there is a God. God created the universe. The universe is here, so so far, everything makes a heck of a lot of sense. So we know that so far, everything is fine with this theory.
Now, I can build on this theory of God, incorporating pieces of information based on observations by myself or other people. We can come to a pretty reasonable view of the universe by tweaking parts of the theory, identifying weak and contradictory areas, and trying to resolve those areas with more solid foundations to build on.
As with most real scientific experiments, the results take a while to decipher. It's not a simple matter of finding the result. You also have to analyze the experiment and show what could've gone wrong throughout. If this is going to present a number (like the percentage chance that an AI can be mistaken for a human) then they have to show the error of that number. They are also going to suggest other experiments to do as part of the results.
I remember that the high-energy particle accelerators would generate terrabytes of data. While they could easily analyze those results and get something meaningful, they prefer to do everything at once and publish the results along with all the other information I listed above. That means that getting results for an experiment may take decades, even though the experiment itself only ran for a few days.
The Bible doesn't talk about other planets, except that there are stars and that they are created and move according to God's will. It is silent on whether or not there is more than just the race of humanity. All we know about is ourselves and our own history.
The one theory that was unacceptable hundreds of years ago but is more and more plausible today goes something like this.
(1) God is an infinite God.
(2) This earth is a finite earth - IE, definite beginning and end, limited scope.
(3) An infinite God cannot be satisfied with a finite creation. After all, to an infinite being, everything finite is nothing. Creating a single earth would be about as meaningful as doing nothing. We cannot imagine an intelligent God that does things without meaning or purpose (because lacking meaning and purpose is also a lack of intelligence).
(4) However, if God creates an infinite number of worlds, then it will be significant and meaningful and purposeful to an infinite God.
(5) Therefore, God is engaged in a process of creating worlds without end, and we are merely one of the worlds he has created and are not unique. This is the only logically consistant reasoning.
There are scriptures that seem to support this concept. For instance, we know that God is eternal and unchanging. How can this be if His sole earthly creation is definitely not eternal and unchanging? It makes more sense that He continually creates these worlds.
If you believe this idea, then it will be quite easy to accept that there was either at one point life on Mars, or there will be at one point life on Mars, or that there is life on Mars even as we speak. In fact, all planets at one point in their history may have been earths like our very own. (The concept of solar construction -- which is supported by direct observation! -- seems to support this. All planets grow and accumulate matter over time.) We know from observations here on earth that God's creations are not purposeless. Why have planets that are barren and pointless when they can just as easily be used for other things?
It also explains why there is an infinite expanse in the heavens with an infinite number of stars and apparently an infinite number of planets orbiting those stars. An infinite God would need that many planets to keep himself from going insane with boredom.
What I believe is more interesting is how evolutionists will explain how evolution occured on two planets within the same solar system. I can understand evolutionists imagining that somewhere in the expanse of the cosmos there are other planets with evolved life, but to find such a case in the same solar system? Should we actually find this life, and determine that it is similar to life on earth, the evolutionists will be left trying to explain how life from earth travelled to Mars without spacecraft to carry it there. (There are plausible explanations for this.)
Creationists can easily explain it as being created on Mars by the same God that created it here.
Let's apply a little logic to your first statement. You claim that "centrigul force is not a force" and also that "centrifugal force exists". These are simple assertions, but they cannot work together.
How can a force that is not a force exist? It is a paradox. The only reasonable conclusion of a force that is not a force is that such a thing cannot exist. Claiming that such a thing does exist is like claiming that a man that is not a man exists, or that matter that is not matter exists. That is contradictory.
So, there is no such thing as "centrifugal force". Instead, we call the sensation of acceleration a "pseudo-force" which is not a real force, but a perceived force.
Gravity is not a force. It is a "pseudo-force" or a perceived force. We can write down equations and diagrams that include centrifugal and gravitational pseudo-forces, but we understand that we are using a short-hand that is not a true representation of reality. We understand that the accelerations are not caused by these forces but by other phenomena. In the case of centrifugal force, it is momentum. In the case of gravity, it is the curvature of space-time caused by objects with mass.
Oh, and your observation that things that spin have masses that fly outwards is incorrect. They do not fly outwards, but proceed according to Newton's law of motion, in a straight line at the same velocity until a force acts on them and they accelerate.
And remember, you cannot perceive forces directly. We only deduce forces based on the motions of the objects.
You have apparently misjudged the entire Christian world, and perhaps the other religions, if you think that reason and religion are mutually exclusive.
Don't Christians believe in a just and wise God? Doesn't this imply that laws and order govern Him? Otherwise, how can one be just if there are no laws to be justified by? And isn't the Christian God a God of order and uniformity and compliance? Doesn't this imply that there are some rules and guidelines that determine what is order and uniform and how to comply?
In my religion, I believe in a God who has dictated that a man who must be commanded in all things is slothful and not a good servant. Instead, we should be anxiously engaged in a good cause. This implies that I should be going above and beyond my current duties and discovering with my own wee little mind what is good and what I should spend my spare time doing.
My religion also dictates that I study the laws of God, or the laws that govern how He operates. Understanding these laws will allow me to behave more righteously and justly, and will help me draw closer to Him.
I'll admit there isn't much reason or logic behind being told the fundamentals. But when you start putting the pieces together, it all makes a whole lot of sense. The evidences that we piece together go beyond the natural world and extend into the supernatural. For instance, Christians believe that revelation - or in scientific parlance, facts - can come from a variety of sources. It is our job to correlate these facts into sound theories of doctrine.
Remember that the entire field of science was formalized by faithful Christians applying their principles of religion and understanding of Diety. The shoulders of the giants you are standing on include saints. Don't understimate their contribution - and their continuing contribution - to the field of science.
People who claim that religion and reason are mutually exclusive are themselves ignorant about what religion is. They haven't taken the time to dive beyond the surface and immerse themselves in teh culture, writings, and behavior of true religionists. Instead, they rely on popular culture and second-hand lies based on misrepresentations to determine their attitudes - which is exactly contrary to the scientific method.
They have no correlation. Creationists can be evolutionists. There're not mutually exclusive.
Using evolution to try to refute religion is equally absurd as using religion to try and refute evolution. The problem isn't creationism or evolution"ism", it's evolutionists and creationists who argue one with another.
The purpose of religion is to extend one's ability beyond the natural or "worldly" state. It has to do with reliance on principles that cannot be proven by normal scientific methods. Ask anyone who spends a great deal of time praying or pondering theology, and they will say they're doing it for the joy and hope and betterment it brings themselves.
The purpose of science, on the other hand, is to try and make sense out of the nonsense around us. It's all a game trying to piece together the world. The problem about this game is that there is no pre-defined endpoint. Rather, it is a process, wherein old theories are overturned by the new. Anyone in a science field who becomes attached to any theory beyond its practicality has fallen victim to turning science into something more than it is.
You're missing the point. This law is forbidding the FEC from getting involved with the matter. In other words, it is government saying, "We won't approach this; we don't have a right to."
I mean, you have heard of Albert Einstein and the general theory of relativity? Gravity doesn't exist. It's not a force. It's a pseudo- or false force.
Timespace is curved, and it's that curvature that gives the acceleration. There is no such thing as gravity, just as there is no such thing as centrifugal force.
So there is a consensus on gravity - and that is that it isn't a valid theory.
I'd like to point out that there is no real discussion between evolution vs. creationism, except in the minds of people who misunderstand science. Evolution is a really great theory, just like the General Theory of Relativity is a really great theory. You do know that physicists do not accept it as gospel truth and in fact are looking for a better theory to replace it, right? Aren't biologists looking for a better theory than evolution to replace it one day, or have they accepted it as a religion and begun treating it like a faith?
Creationism is a completely different concept. It doesn't try to explain the origin of the diverse creatures. Believers of creationism instead look towards all things in the world around them and accept it as testament of the glory and intelligence of God. They also accept themselves as created in the image of God as children of God. Many scientists are creationists. That isn't contradictory. They treat science the same way as people did from previous generations: By understanding the natural world around us, we will understand the nature of God, and thus ourselves, better. In fact, for many of these scientist, it was a sort of divine inspiration to discover new intelligence or knowledge. Each point of science, each bit of evidence, each theory that seemed to work, was treated as a gift from God.
Do you see how evolution doesn't even really enter the argument for creationists?
Instead of trying to fight IP theft, make the sharing of your software permissible and even encourage it. License your software under an open source license.
In the end, you'll realize that the cost of understanding the complete codebase is high enough that it doesn't make sense to try and "steal" the code once you open source it.
(the public accounting version of an Executive Board) of their Accounting firms and decided to use every loophole and deregulation trick that the glorious Republican Party gave us in order stuff their pockets with money and buy $16,000 umbrella stands.
Sadly, though, those Arthur Anderson A-2s are the ones who hit the streets searching for new jobs while a handful of George "Kenny Boy" W. Bush's buddies got off scott-free.
Highly unethical, but then again, we can thank Republican-backed deregulation and rapacious partners for that greed-inspired business practice.
You obviously have a bias against the Republican party. Too bad it is all inaccurate and incorrect.
When did the scandals hit? Who was president? Who ran congress? The heyday of the scandals and the dot-com bubble were during the Clinton administration. President Bush comes in, appoints John Ashcroft, and now these people are hunted down and brought to justice. Now you're hearing about the scandals committed during the 90's. You're forgetting that part of the story.
And you're also forgetting the follow-up. Who reformed the way accounting is done, held the CEOs and CFOs responsible for shoddy accounting, and is still hunting down and prosecuting the criminals on high? One hint: It ain't the democrats, because they are nowhere to be found in Washington DC ever since Bush swept the elections of '04.
Remember the house banking scandals before the republicans took the majority in the 80's temporarily? Democrats were bouncing checks left and right and making the public pay for it. Now that doesn't happen anymore because Republicans came in and cleaned house.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Republicans are business-friendly---as long as that business is legit. Democrats, on the other hand, thrive on scandal after scandal after scandal. (Enron and AA were major democrat businesses, and in no way associated with Bush or the republican party, thankfully.)
They'll probably implement the transparent background technology before PNG compatibility in IE.
Meanwhile, by the time they get it working, the OS community will have 16 different implementations of the TDT (Transparent DeskTop) standard, and SVG will have been extended to include it.
People NEVER verify the card holders name to the ID these days so having the actual card stolen from someone is just about as safe.
Maybe it's because our new city police chief (who has reduced car theft by almost 50% in one year), but every time I buy something in town, I always get carded. And every clerk so far has been careful. The only time they don't is when it is something small, usually less than $20.
Granted, we don't have an identify theft or credit card problem around here. Maybe it's because our chief is so awesome and she's got everyone being proactive, though.
Just tonight I ate a good dinner with five and they asked for my ID. They took about 10 seconds to check then recheck it too.
If you're wondering, Federal Way Washington, and yes, there are tech jobs here and in the surrounding areas.
Oh, and the car thefts? She has her boys follow the top car thieves around town, all day, and all night. No special tech, no special investigators. Just footwork. And the bastards are dumb enough to try it anyways, even though they know they are being watched.
Oh, and if you report drugs on the street, they'll post a car in the area at night time. First they track them, then they tag them, and then one night you'll see cop cars busting into houses all over town. Those nights are very quiet except for the police activity. Usually they do it on a Thursday. I guess that's when they find the most stash.
Why not ask for checks in the mail? It seems to work for the credit card companies. It doesn't sound like you want to hide your sneakernet address.
If the contributions were going to be typically large and more numerous (more than $20 and thousands a month), then it would make sense to talk to your bank to get one of those machines to make CC transactions. Then ask for their credit card information on a secure section of the site. Store the transactions in a database, and then type them all in at the end of the day. It's not too difficult to do many an hour if you have a fast connection to your bank. I know because I used to deliver pizzas and we'd have to type in tips at the end of the day.
If you're going to have more than that, then it makes sense to get involved with one of the online credit card companies. They have some pretty strict requirements but it isn't too difficult to get into business with them. And it would save you a lot of time over driving to the bank to deposit checks or typing in CC transactions.
As far as I can tell, they are only limiting the rights to books that have copyright issues. They are making these books more accessible than before, but without violating the wishes of the copyright holders.
I wouldn't blame Amazon for this because they are merely respecting what the authors intended and upholding the law.
If you want to fight Stallman's bleak vision of the future, the important thing to do is to ensure that there are no limitations on what code you can read, write, examine, and execute. Make sure that when information is published, it is always published with the same rights or more rights than the author allows, but never in the opposite direction.
If Amazon took books that don't have copyrights, or have copyrights that expired, and applied this kind of scheme, I would be upset. But they are not. They are in fact trying to give the readers more rights, because the readers didn't previously have the options Amazon is providing.
As a physicist, I can tell you there are two important qualities for the wires, both of which won't affect the sound quality. Those two factors is how well the wires connect to the posts, and how well the wires transmit the signal.
If there were some frequency dependencies, then you would see a degradation of sound. But there isn't. If there were some variability of resistance based on current, then there would be a degradation of sound. But there isn't.
The only benefit your get from monster cables is a perhaps slightly lower resistance. That is all. The higher resistance of standard wires can easily be overcome by "turning up the volume".
So, Monster Cables are not worth it, strictly speaking. The only reason people get Monster Cables is the same reason people get gold-plated pens. Other than a status symbol, it is meaningless.
And besides, people who sport jewelry or expensive toys tend to be poorer than those who are more modest. (Case in point: It seems these spinners people buy for their cars are bought by the lower class in my town. Where they get the money for this, yet can't pay for their children's college education, is a question I don't think they'd want to answer.)
My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do.
This is curious. Which database are you using?
PostgreSQL was designed for low-memory situations, and if you fill up all the available RAM and start using the OS swap, then you will get killed. If you limit it to a reasonable range, it won't use the OS swap but its own and it does quite well because it can predict what it needs to swap or not quite well compared to the OS trying to guess. PostgreSQL will really suck every ounce of performance from your box in more ways than one (memory, HD read and writes, etc...) It has some pretty neat algorithms for figuring out how to approach tasks in the best way possible.
I imagine Oracle has a pretty good database on low-memory systems, but I've never had the opportunity to play around with it. I do know that the rollback segments will kill you (which PostgreSQL doesn't have.)
If you're using SQL Server or MySQL, I would consider switching DBs. Those aren't known for great performance with large datasets, and you probable want the increased reliability that Oracle or PostgreSQL can offer.
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Our economy is worth many, many times our debt. In fact, we are growing right now at such a rate that today's billions will be a drop in the bucket tomorrow. This is due to sheer growth and expansion, not based on inflation.
If you look at any good business out there, you will see it has a great deal of debt. My favorite example is Red Hat Inc. They have a huge chunk of debt. But guess what? They have the means to pay it off. Hence, they have a small fortune in cash assets that they are holding on to because it makes more sense to have the value of your company in cash and debt than to have no debt and no cash.
Short term, we believe it is logical to have a deficit based on our wartime situation and our (until recently) stagnate economy. Long term, once we get a handle on the war and its costs, once we are able to lower the tax rate due to economic growth, we will once again pull in the belt like the republican congress did back in 1994. We understand that once the money gets in DC, it is no doubt going to be spent somehow. So we are looking at ways to reduce the revenue of government so that the spending will be reduced as well.
Debt isn't universally bad. It's hard to find times in our history when we didn't have a debt (they are there, just rare). As long as the debt is manageable, we will do fine.
It's like taking out a home mortgage so you can buy a home. Do you go into debt? Of course, but you have the means to pay it off because you have a house and you have an income. Is it a good choice to go into debt to buy a house? Absolutely, especially if you need more than one or two bedrooms for your family.
If anything, the fact that we can float such a huge debt and that our debtors are fine with the rates is a testament to the power of our nation. Our credit score as a nation is so high that we can take our a loan on trillions of dollars without breaking a sweat. No other country can do that and get away with it.
Let's examine your claims one-by-one. You'll note that all of them are baseless.
...and occasionally torturing them (ditto)
...that sometimes leading to them dying (oops)
1. Internal travel documents/no fly lists ("Transportation safety")
So keeping a list of known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers is bad? And then using this list to prevent them from entering or leaving our country is bad? I'm sorry, but this is EXACTLY what our government should be doing.
Spying on your neighbor programs ("Information Awareness")
What is bad about spying on your neighbors? If I hear a gunshot in my next door neighbor's house, I would be stupid not to call the police and report it. If I see a guy talking about blowing up a building, I would be stupid not to report it to authorities, or even make the arrest myself and hold them until the police arrive. It's called PROTECTING YOUR COUNTRY FROM ITS ENEMIES, and it's a natural right.
Arresting people and holding them with due process ("The War on Terror")
The only due process enemy combatants get is listed in the Geneva Convention. Oh yeah, these aren't combatants becuase they aren't uniformed and they aren't part of any state. So we get to do with them whatever the heck we want, due process be damned. Better think twice before you decide to fight with the US, because we defend our country here from enemies here.
There are no substianted reports of torture. Not even what happened at Abu Ghraib is considered torture. It's called humiliation.
There have been no substiantiated reports of torture, and thus no one has died from torture. There have been reports of injured people being taken captive and them dying in captivity, but that's not a bad thing. After all, we were trying to kill them in the first place. They were trying to kill us first.
Supression of dissent ("Free Speech Zones")
How has dissent been supressed? By saying you can't demonstrate withn X feet of an official who has substianted threats against his life? You should feel lucky you get the cordoned off Free Speech Zones in the first place. What you call I demonstration I call a riot and I don't see why they haven't thrown the lot of you in prison for disturbing the peace.
Orwellean double-speak (see above)
I didn't realize this was a crime? I guess you sure hate it now that we are using this tactic against you. After all, you call the murder of infants a "choice".
Supression of opposition (Locking the opposition out of the legislature)
Huh? Never heard of this. But let's pretend it did happen. Guess what? The minority HAS NO SAY IN HOW GOVERNMENT IS RUN. That's a fact of life. You lost, get over it. If you want to get back in power, you have to win elections like the rest of us. The people didn't choose you, so don't be upset when you don't have the power you used to have.
Arresting opposing party candidates weeks before the election (Clark & Badnarik)
Never heard of this, and it was probably because they were breaking the law. It's totally legal to arrest people for breaking the law. Like those democrats that slashed the tires of the vans on the day of the election, or those guys who drove by republican HQs and threw rocks through the windows or shot at the people inside.
Manipulation of the media (including paying analysts to "support" their policies)
This is not a crime either. People have the freedom to say whatever they want. They also have the freedom to pay people to say things you want them to say. It happens all the time. It's how you make movies and TV shows, and write newspaper articles. What is a crime is trying to shut down opposition by enacting the "Fairness Doctrine". The government has no right to LIMIT one's speech.
Fibing to start wars
I am sure you have heard this multiple time, but if you didn't understand it th
Back in the day, cowboys and their cowboy presidents (Teddy Roosevelt, for instance) were conservationalists. They wanted to preserve a part of nature for future generations. They did it by buying land and setting it up as a nature preserve. T. Roosevelt convinced the federal government to buy land like Yellowstone park, and set it up so that millions of people from America and around the world could enjoy it.
Nowadays, the environmentalists care nothing for the environment. Instead, they are using conservationalist sentiment to inspire communism. Rather than doing the obvious thing (Spotted Owls are endangered, and people like them. Why don't we set up a Spotted Owl nature preserve, or capture them and raise them in a zoo?), they go the anti-capitalist route. (Spotted Owls are in danger, so let's shut down the vital logging industry.)
You look at the base of any environmentalist movement and you will quickly realize a few facts. First, the hard-core base of all of these movements are hard-core communists. They hate America and all it stands for, and are quite willing to tell you how bad we are for exporting our freedom to people like Japan and Europe.
You'll notice another thing. They aren't concerned about the environment. Instead, they use the environment to whack the capitalists. That's why there are more rules to protect the environment where they have no effect on the environment - but they have a huge effect on the economy. For instance, after all is said and done, if the EPA got out of the gasoline refining business and left these people alone to refine to their hearts content, and if they stopped telling auto manufacturers how to make their cars, and if we went back to the fuel efficiency of the 60's and early 70's, then all of our cars would still produce an insignificant amount of pollution, compared to the power plants and other industries. But that is where environmentalists are focusing their attention, and are still focusing their attention, because they are more interested in shutting down our immensely valuable highway system and getting us all to ride community government subsidized sub-standard busses and trains.
Some of the reason you listed for gas prices are wrong.
(a) Crude oil costs only accounts for about 1/3 of the total price. If oil prices double, then you'll pay about 1/3 more at the pump. If they halve, you'll pay about 1/6 less at the pump. The price of crude is rising due to China and the rest of the world recovering from stagnation in the early 2000's. OPEC has been producing more to try and lower the price, but their supply cannot keep up.
(b) Federal and state taxes contribute about 1/3 of the cost as well. While these are fairly static, they are still gradually rising. Consider that many gas taxes are implemented over time (ie, a few cents more each year is taxed.)
(c) The remaining third go to the costs of distribution and profits for the companies involved. The reason this is so high is because of environmental regulations are very strict, requiring several different types of blends be used in different parts of the country at different times of the year. Combined with the bottleneck that you can't store gasoline and use it the next year, and it's really hard to build more refineries, we run into a bottle neck every summer where we just can't refine the oil fast enough.
As far as the oil supply being finite, that may or may not be true. But noone has suggested that supply is actually decreasing today, nor will it for the next several decades. More and more oil is discovered every year, and exciting new ways of extracting oil from previously useless sources are being explored. If crude prices remain above about $30, we can begin extracting it from shale and it will be profitable.
If we begin drilling in ANWR and restart the pumps throughout Texas, California, and other states, we can do a lot to lower the price of crude. But this won't solve the problem of refining. We need to lighten the regulation and we need to allow more and bigger refineries to be built. We should also allow people to stockpile refined gasoline to help smooth out the peaks and valleys of demand and supply. It would help a lot if we could build more supply lines and upgrade the ones we have now as well.
You'll notice a common thread: It is environmental activism that is really causing the most significant increase in your gas prices. Get rid of that and you can enjoy your sweet nectar for a more reasonable price. And remember: The purpose of the environmentalists wackos is not to fix the environment, but to shut down our economy and destroy our capitalism.
I remember one of the cool things about Scott Joplin was that he recorded his own song's player piano rolls. If you went to the store at that time and picked up a player piano rolls for one of his pieces, it was performed by him. So you were getting it exactly as he would've played it - within the parameters of what a player piano can do.
Player pianos could only record which notes were pressed and for how long. They couldn't reproduce the dynamics of the piece. MIDI is a huge step forward because you can record that nowadays.
I don't believe MIDI or anything like it will ever replace actual recordings of the music. There is just so much that happens beyond playing the notes of the song that MIDI will never be able to fully capture.
I had the opportunity to study a bit about the physics of music. I was surprise by how many different ways a simple instrument like a piano can be tuned. I'm not a very good piano player, but I can hear now what the difference is between tuned pianos. Frankly, the way modern pianos are tuned annoys me. None of the chords are very "pure". They are all equally bad. Not too long ago every piano was tuned by ear, and certain chords would be perfect or near perfect, while others would stink terribly. But that was part of the music. If you shift the key, all of a sudden everything sounds very very different. Shift it back and everything sounds good again.
I never really liked MIDI because you can't really take this into account easily. I know you can tune individual notes by cents, but I guess I never bothered to try to take a MIDI piece and play it in different tunes by tuning each note off by a couple of cents.
What I'm saying is that we can't really ask the piano player "For this piece, how would you like the piano tuned?"
Another spot I don't think they'll be able to hit is the fact that every piano is a little bit different. When you play a piece, you have to adapt to the piano. One friend of mine who played so much piano that he would go through several strings a month would complain endlessly about certain pianos ("You have to use a frigging sledgehammer to get that thing to forte") and others were magical for him. Needless to say, merely reproducing the mechanics of how someone performed a piece on a different piano (with a different room temperature and humidity and even different acoustics in the room) won't really do it justice in my mind.
I'd like to clarify this. Consider the problem that a big company like Amazon has. They have thousands of products. One day they will probably have millions. The problem they face is showing you the product you wanted to buy when you came to the site.
Now, I have no problem with honest PR. If a product or service or company really is good, then by all means, promote that to the ends of the earth using whatever legal methods you can think of. This is like taking all the computational and intellectual resources at a company like Amazon to find you the one product you are looking for. it's not a problem, and frankly, it provides a service for us "cattle".
But the problem comes with dishonest advertising. When people are trying to sell something by calling it something it is not, then that is a serious problem. Take for instance the mail I get about home loans: "1%!" the tagline reads. But the reality is very different: "Prime + 1%, or about 6% right now, and maybe 20% in the future."
This would be like going to Amazon to look for a book, being shown a book that appears to meet your needs, buying that book, and discovering it isn't the book you wanted at all. That is bad. That is terrible.
I don't mind being cattle. As long as the farmer is honest, and I understand what I am getting out of the deal, and I can enter into it at my own free will, it isn't a bad thing. I do mind being told I will be a sheep and then being treated like a cow. That's the problem.
How do I prevent myself from being taken advantage of? By some fairly simple processes that I think everyone around here is familiar with. Enter into every deal cautiously. Look for 3rd party independent reports. Identify the spin for what it is, and question the motives of those who praise or detract from it. And never deal with dishonest people, period. This is all stuff we should be teaching our kids and we should be teaching at school.
The last thing we want is a judiciary accountable to the people! I mean, what do they think, that this government is formed by the consent of the governed? What kind of crazy idea is that? Why can't we be more like Iran where the unlected judges are the sole arbiters of government, and they control everything over there?
And the last thing we need is for judges to enforce the laws and constitution as it was written. I mean, why should we be bound by an agreement we made in the past? We should just be able to change the terms of the agreement whenever we feel like it, without the permission of the other parties, right?
Because, you know, why would we want to spend all that effort to change the constitution the way it was meant to be changed? It's just absurd man.
The question was: What evidence is there of the creation?
The answer is: The universe and everything in it.
If someone posed the question: What evidence is there that the creation occured according to the Bible and not some other method, such as science or other religions teach?
That is a more complicated question.
About circular logic: It isn't bad. Circular logic is merely a set of steps that gets you back to where you started. Being able to do such a thing doesn't show that the starting point (and thus the ending point) are incorrect. It only shows that you haven't made any progress.
There is a God because there is a God. Then you build on top of that, and you eventually reach the logical conclusion that the universe was created by a God. Sure, there is circular logic there, but just because it has circular logic doesn't mean it is incorrect.
Let's look at Quantum Mechanics. (I am a physicist by training, BTW.) The Schrodinger equation is the equation that determines the behavior of particles because it is the equation that determines the behavior of particles. (Circular logic!) The repercussions of this equation are the wave-particle duality of matter, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and so on. We know that Quantum Mechanics, for the most part, is very correct, because it happens to correlate well with reality. Circular logic doesn't mean QM is wrong. Instead, we turn to how the theory of QM maps to reality.
The same can be said for the argument I made above. There is a God because there is a God. God created the universe. The universe is here, so so far, everything makes a heck of a lot of sense. So we know that so far, everything is fine with this theory.
Now, I can build on this theory of God, incorporating pieces of information based on observations by myself or other people. We can come to a pretty reasonable view of the universe by tweaking parts of the theory, identifying weak and contradictory areas, and trying to resolve those areas with more solid foundations to build on.
As with most real scientific experiments, the results take a while to decipher. It's not a simple matter of finding the result. You also have to analyze the experiment and show what could've gone wrong throughout. If this is going to present a number (like the percentage chance that an AI can be mistaken for a human) then they have to show the error of that number. They are also going to suggest other experiments to do as part of the results.
I remember that the high-energy particle accelerators would generate terrabytes of data. While they could easily analyze those results and get something meaningful, they prefer to do everything at once and publish the results along with all the other information I listed above. That means that getting results for an experiment may take decades, even though the experiment itself only ran for a few days.
The Bible doesn't talk about other planets, except that there are stars and that they are created and move according to God's will. It is silent on whether or not there is more than just the race of humanity. All we know about is ourselves and our own history.
The one theory that was unacceptable hundreds of years ago but is more and more plausible today goes something like this.
(1) God is an infinite God.
(2) This earth is a finite earth - IE, definite beginning and end, limited scope.
(3) An infinite God cannot be satisfied with a finite creation. After all, to an infinite being, everything finite is nothing. Creating a single earth would be about as meaningful as doing nothing. We cannot imagine an intelligent God that does things without meaning or purpose (because lacking meaning and purpose is also a lack of intelligence).
(4) However, if God creates an infinite number of worlds, then it will be significant and meaningful and purposeful to an infinite God.
(5) Therefore, God is engaged in a process of creating worlds without end, and we are merely one of the worlds he has created and are not unique. This is the only logically consistant reasoning.
There are scriptures that seem to support this concept. For instance, we know that God is eternal and unchanging. How can this be if His sole earthly creation is definitely not eternal and unchanging? It makes more sense that He continually creates these worlds.
If you believe this idea, then it will be quite easy to accept that there was either at one point life on Mars, or there will be at one point life on Mars, or that there is life on Mars even as we speak. In fact, all planets at one point in their history may have been earths like our very own. (The concept of solar construction -- which is supported by direct observation! -- seems to support this. All planets grow and accumulate matter over time.) We know from observations here on earth that God's creations are not purposeless. Why have planets that are barren and pointless when they can just as easily be used for other things?
It also explains why there is an infinite expanse in the heavens with an infinite number of stars and apparently an infinite number of planets orbiting those stars. An infinite God would need that many planets to keep himself from going insane with boredom.
What I believe is more interesting is how evolutionists will explain how evolution occured on two planets within the same solar system. I can understand evolutionists imagining that somewhere in the expanse of the cosmos there are other planets with evolved life, but to find such a case in the same solar system? Should we actually find this life, and determine that it is similar to life on earth, the evolutionists will be left trying to explain how life from earth travelled to Mars without spacecraft to carry it there. (There are plausible explanations for this.)
Creationists can easily explain it as being created on Mars by the same God that created it here.
Everything around you is evidence of the creation.
QED.
PS. You yourself are also evidence of the creation.
Let's apply a little logic to your first statement. You claim that "centrigul force is not a force" and also that "centrifugal force exists". These are simple assertions, but they cannot work together.
How can a force that is not a force exist? It is a paradox. The only reasonable conclusion of a force that is not a force is that such a thing cannot exist. Claiming that such a thing does exist is like claiming that a man that is not a man exists, or that matter that is not matter exists. That is contradictory.
So, there is no such thing as "centrifugal force". Instead, we call the sensation of acceleration a "pseudo-force" which is not a real force, but a perceived force.
Gravity is not a force. It is a "pseudo-force" or a perceived force. We can write down equations and diagrams that include centrifugal and gravitational pseudo-forces, but we understand that we are using a short-hand that is not a true representation of reality. We understand that the accelerations are not caused by these forces but by other phenomena. In the case of centrifugal force, it is momentum. In the case of gravity, it is the curvature of space-time caused by objects with mass.
Oh, and your observation that things that spin have masses that fly outwards is incorrect. They do not fly outwards, but proceed according to Newton's law of motion, in a straight line at the same velocity until a force acts on them and they accelerate.
And remember, you cannot perceive forces directly. We only deduce forces based on the motions of the objects.
You have apparently misjudged the entire Christian world, and perhaps the other religions, if you think that reason and religion are mutually exclusive.
Don't Christians believe in a just and wise God? Doesn't this imply that laws and order govern Him? Otherwise, how can one be just if there are no laws to be justified by? And isn't the Christian God a God of order and uniformity and compliance? Doesn't this imply that there are some rules and guidelines that determine what is order and uniform and how to comply?
In my religion, I believe in a God who has dictated that a man who must be commanded in all things is slothful and not a good servant. Instead, we should be anxiously engaged in a good cause. This implies that I should be going above and beyond my current duties and discovering with my own wee little mind what is good and what I should spend my spare time doing.
My religion also dictates that I study the laws of God, or the laws that govern how He operates. Understanding these laws will allow me to behave more righteously and justly, and will help me draw closer to Him.
I'll admit there isn't much reason or logic behind being told the fundamentals. But when you start putting the pieces together, it all makes a whole lot of sense. The evidences that we piece together go beyond the natural world and extend into the supernatural. For instance, Christians believe that revelation - or in scientific parlance, facts - can come from a variety of sources. It is our job to correlate these facts into sound theories of doctrine.
Remember that the entire field of science was formalized by faithful Christians applying their principles of religion and understanding of Diety. The shoulders of the giants you are standing on include saints. Don't understimate their contribution - and their continuing contribution - to the field of science.
People who claim that religion and reason are mutually exclusive are themselves ignorant about what religion is. They haven't taken the time to dive beyond the surface and immerse themselves in teh culture, writings, and behavior of true religionists. Instead, they rely on popular culture and second-hand lies based on misrepresentations to determine their attitudes - which is exactly contrary to the scientific method.
Bingo. You got it right.
They have no correlation. Creationists can be evolutionists. There're not mutually exclusive.
Using evolution to try to refute religion is equally absurd as using religion to try and refute evolution. The problem isn't creationism or evolution"ism", it's evolutionists and creationists who argue one with another.
The purpose of religion is to extend one's ability beyond the natural or "worldly" state. It has to do with reliance on principles that cannot be proven by normal scientific methods. Ask anyone who spends a great deal of time praying or pondering theology, and they will say they're doing it for the joy and hope and betterment it brings themselves.
The purpose of science, on the other hand, is to try and make sense out of the nonsense around us. It's all a game trying to piece together the world. The problem about this game is that there is no pre-defined endpoint. Rather, it is a process, wherein old theories are overturned by the new. Anyone in a science field who becomes attached to any theory beyond its practicality has fallen victim to turning science into something more than it is.
You're missing the point. This law is forbidding the FEC from getting involved with the matter. In other words, it is government saying, "We won't approach this; we don't have a right to."
I mean, you have heard of Albert Einstein and the general theory of relativity? Gravity doesn't exist. It's not a force. It's a pseudo- or false force.
Timespace is curved, and it's that curvature that gives the acceleration. There is no such thing as gravity, just as there is no such thing as centrifugal force.
So there is a consensus on gravity - and that is that it isn't a valid theory.
I'd like to point out that there is no real discussion between evolution vs. creationism, except in the minds of people who misunderstand science. Evolution is a really great theory, just like the General Theory of Relativity is a really great theory. You do know that physicists do not accept it as gospel truth and in fact are looking for a better theory to replace it, right? Aren't biologists looking for a better theory than evolution to replace it one day, or have they accepted it as a religion and begun treating it like a faith?
Creationism is a completely different concept. It doesn't try to explain the origin of the diverse creatures. Believers of creationism instead look towards all things in the world around them and accept it as testament of the glory and intelligence of God. They also accept themselves as created in the image of God as children of God. Many scientists are creationists. That isn't contradictory. They treat science the same way as people did from previous generations: By understanding the natural world around us, we will understand the nature of God, and thus ourselves, better. In fact, for many of these scientist, it was a sort of divine inspiration to discover new intelligence or knowledge. Each point of science, each bit of evidence, each theory that seemed to work, was treated as a gift from God.
Do you see how evolution doesn't even really enter the argument for creationists?
Instead of trying to fight IP theft, make the sharing of your software permissible and even encourage it. License your software under an open source license.
In the end, you'll realize that the cost of understanding the complete codebase is high enough that it doesn't make sense to try and "steal" the code once you open source it.
(the public accounting version of an Executive Board) of their Accounting firms and decided to use every loophole and deregulation trick that the glorious Republican Party gave us in order stuff their pockets with money and buy $16,000 umbrella stands.
Sadly, though, those Arthur Anderson A-2s are the ones who hit the streets searching for new jobs while a handful of George "Kenny Boy" W. Bush's buddies got off scott-free.
Highly unethical, but then again, we can thank Republican-backed deregulation and rapacious partners for that greed-inspired business practice.
You obviously have a bias against the Republican party. Too bad it is all inaccurate and incorrect.
When did the scandals hit? Who was president? Who ran congress? The heyday of the scandals and the dot-com bubble were during the Clinton administration. President Bush comes in, appoints John Ashcroft, and now these people are hunted down and brought to justice. Now you're hearing about the scandals committed during the 90's. You're forgetting that part of the story.
And you're also forgetting the follow-up. Who reformed the way accounting is done, held the CEOs and CFOs responsible for shoddy accounting, and is still hunting down and prosecuting the criminals on high? One hint: It ain't the democrats, because they are nowhere to be found in Washington DC ever since Bush swept the elections of '04.
Remember the house banking scandals before the republicans took the majority in the 80's temporarily? Democrats were bouncing checks left and right and making the public pay for it. Now that doesn't happen anymore because Republicans came in and cleaned house.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Republicans are business-friendly---as long as that business is legit. Democrats, on the other hand, thrive on scandal after scandal after scandal. (Enron and AA were major democrat businesses, and in no way associated with Bush or the republican party, thankfully.)
They'll probably implement the transparent background technology before PNG compatibility in IE.
Meanwhile, by the time they get it working, the OS community will have 16 different implementations of the TDT (Transparent DeskTop) standard, and SVG will have been extended to include it.
People NEVER verify the card holders name to the ID these days so having the actual card stolen from someone is just about as safe.
Maybe it's because our new city police chief (who has reduced car theft by almost 50% in one year), but every time I buy something in town, I always get carded. And every clerk so far has been careful. The only time they don't is when it is something small, usually less than $20.
Granted, we don't have an identify theft or credit card problem around here. Maybe it's because our chief is so awesome and she's got everyone being proactive, though.
Just tonight I ate a good dinner with five and they asked for my ID. They took about 10 seconds to check then recheck it too.
If you're wondering, Federal Way Washington, and yes, there are tech jobs here and in the surrounding areas.
Oh, and the car thefts? She has her boys follow the top car thieves around town, all day, and all night. No special tech, no special investigators. Just footwork. And the bastards are dumb enough to try it anyways, even though they know they are being watched.
Oh, and if you report drugs on the street, they'll post a car in the area at night time. First they track them, then they tag them, and then one night you'll see cop cars busting into houses all over town. Those nights are very quiet except for the police activity. Usually they do it on a Thursday. I guess that's when they find the most stash.
Why not ask for checks in the mail? It seems to work for the credit card companies. It doesn't sound like you want to hide your sneakernet address.
If the contributions were going to be typically large and more numerous (more than $20 and thousands a month), then it would make sense to talk to your bank to get one of those machines to make CC transactions. Then ask for their credit card information on a secure section of the site. Store the transactions in a database, and then type them all in at the end of the day. It's not too difficult to do many an hour if you have a fast connection to your bank. I know because I used to deliver pizzas and we'd have to type in tips at the end of the day.
If you're going to have more than that, then it makes sense to get involved with one of the online credit card companies. They have some pretty strict requirements but it isn't too difficult to get into business with them. And it would save you a lot of time over driving to the bank to deposit checks or typing in CC transactions.
As far as I can tell, they are only limiting the rights to books that have copyright issues. They are making these books more accessible than before, but without violating the wishes of the copyright holders.
I wouldn't blame Amazon for this because they are merely respecting what the authors intended and upholding the law.
If you want to fight Stallman's bleak vision of the future, the important thing to do is to ensure that there are no limitations on what code you can read, write, examine, and execute. Make sure that when information is published, it is always published with the same rights or more rights than the author allows, but never in the opposite direction.
If Amazon took books that don't have copyrights, or have copyrights that expired, and applied this kind of scheme, I would be upset. But they are not. They are in fact trying to give the readers more rights, because the readers didn't previously have the options Amazon is providing.
As a physicist, I can tell you there are two important qualities for the wires, both of which won't affect the sound quality. Those two factors is how well the wires connect to the posts, and how well the wires transmit the signal.
If there were some frequency dependencies, then you would see a degradation of sound. But there isn't. If there were some variability of resistance based on current, then there would be a degradation of sound. But there isn't.
The only benefit your get from monster cables is a perhaps slightly lower resistance. That is all. The higher resistance of standard wires can easily be overcome by "turning up the volume".
So, Monster Cables are not worth it, strictly speaking. The only reason people get Monster Cables is the same reason people get gold-plated pens. Other than a status symbol, it is meaningless.
And besides, people who sport jewelry or expensive toys tend to be poorer than those who are more modest. (Case in point: It seems these spinners people buy for their cars are bought by the lower class in my town. Where they get the money for this, yet can't pay for their children's college education, is a question I don't think they'd want to answer.)
My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do.
This is curious. Which database are you using?
PostgreSQL was designed for low-memory situations, and if you fill up all the available RAM and start using the OS swap, then you will get killed. If you limit it to a reasonable range, it won't use the OS swap but its own and it does quite well because it can predict what it needs to swap or not quite well compared to the OS trying to guess. PostgreSQL will really suck every ounce of performance from your box in more ways than one (memory, HD read and writes, etc...) It has some pretty neat algorithms for figuring out how to approach tasks in the best way possible.
I imagine Oracle has a pretty good database on low-memory systems, but I've never had the opportunity to play around with it. I do know that the rollback segments will kill you (which PostgreSQL doesn't have.)
If you're using SQL Server or MySQL, I would consider switching DBs. Those aren't known for great performance with large datasets, and you probable want the increased reliability that Oracle or PostgreSQL can offer.