See, I don't buy that statement that you were republican right up until that. You sound more like an anti-globalization green to me. Sure you might claim that the Max Cleland incident was what "turned you away" from republicans", but the reality is that your mind was changed long before that. Frankly, after watching what happened to Cleland, I can't say it was much different from how most political campaigns are. Both sides play this game. If one party has someone that served in the military, then anyone disagreeing with them on diplomatic or military policy is "questioning their patriotism" and is a horrible american for daring to disagree with someone who served their country so well. Standard straw dog arguement. The other party always says that the service (or lack thereof) is irrelevant to whether their policies would be good for america. The so called "Max Cleland incident" is just another exercise in wining and hand wringing by some partisans looking for traction with the voting public.
True, but the MSDN camp are the ones that want to push all sorts of new buggy and untested features into new versions of windows. Stuff them full of "cool new technology"TM and shove them out the door. The "Raymond Chen" camp is all about backwards compatability and stability (they know where MS's bread is buttered) and are interested in not rocking the boat and giving customers an incentive to switch.
"Eventually debian will just be like slackware...it still exists...but why?"
Because I use slackware..... you insensitive clod!
In all seriousness slackware 10 just came out and I would venture to say that it is one of the most up-to-date distros out right now. Why the anti-slackware sentiment? I mean it's still profitable enough for Patrick to keep doing it, has been since the beginning.
Actually if you want to really get nitpicky, Roe V Wade didn't really settle the question that definitely. The ruling didn't establish an absolute right to an abortion, in fact their decision codified some sort of compromise on medical privacy versus rights of a fetus. According to the ruling states could still ban third trimester abortions and place some restrictions on 2nd trimester ones. Only in the first trimester did the court say that abortions were to remain unrestricted by the state.
You can get yourself removed as a dependant from your parents at the age of 18. Then you don't have to include their income on your financial aid. Of course if you do this you aren't included as a dependant for their tax purposes or included on their insurance etc. But you will qualify for much more assistance if you suddenly don't have your parents income.
Or Features, Quality, and Resources. Of course these all are constrained in certain ways. (You don't have unlimiited time or programmers (or money), you need a certain number of features for the program to even be useful, and a certain level of quality too. To me it is better to shoot for a few key features right off the bat and release as soon as possible with high quality, and then add the functionality in upgrades. The key is to build it right (but not with lots of features) the first time.
(Basically release early and often + don't bite off more than you can chew.)
You know though, sometimes it wouldn't hurt the programmers to understand the business perspective a little better, or that of the end user. Since these are the people that are going to USE the software, and thus are the ones that are "paying your bills" so to speak. (And yes, sometimes the developer(s) is(are) the user(s). But I'm speaking more generally here.
My understanding is that CDMA (the technology, not the interface) can scale up and down better such that you can really pack the towers in where the population is dense (by reducing their range, allowing you to reuse the same freqs. over a city) and in sparsely populated areas you can scale it way up (one tower covering a large area).
Wish my cable company would wise up and do this. Right now they just block everything going out to port 25 (meaning that you have to relay everything through their server). This breaks SPF if i want to send from email accounts other than my cable one. (unless i get them to setup an alternate port). That and the lack of static ips leads me to go for DSL.
You know, that is my one real complaint about this. Specifically, I understand why driving is a priviledge (acutally and technically, anyone can drive on private property, just not on public streets), and I understand why anyone can't just hop in a airplane and takeoff. Taken individually, each of these can be easily justified legally to be necessary and held not to be an infringement of our rights. However, the practical EFFECT is exactly that which you state.
Imagine that, law professors disagreeing with a SCOTUS ruling. Boy, how unusual. Cause lawprofessors are so much more objective than the rest of us when it comes to politics. The line about "673 law professors" goes straight from assuption to conclusion. It doesn't tell us anything about that facts of the case, just that it was highly contentious.
I don't agree with the contention that the name itself is incriminating. It's doesn't provide evidence that you have committed a crime, it can only confirm if you ARE the individual who committed the crime. Does that make any sense? The name itself isn't incriminating.
Not eating breakfast in the morning causes your metabolism to be lower during the morning. Rememeber, you probably haven't eaten for 8+ hours since you have been sleeping. Of course sleeping is like a mini-fast and you naturally have a lower metabolism when you are sleeping. Thus eating a very small breakfast (like a small glass of juice and a piece of toast or something helps to boost energy and metabolism in the morning. Also, skipping meals tends to make you eat much more than "normal" at your next meal since your body thinks it's starving. You just have to be careful not to snack your self to death either!
1 & 2) "Half the world's budget" is not relevant, but since the US is approximately one fourth of the world's economy we are only about double the "average". (And if defense is a luxury only the wealthiest countries can afford to spend much on, then the US spending looks highly appropriate) Plus one could say that the US subsidizes the defense of many places (Western Europe, and South Korea come to mind). Hell, it's quite a bargin if you look at it that way.
I'm looking at long term trends in defense spending as a percentage of real GDP. Even 600 Billion in FY 2004 would not be unrealistic by historical comparison. (The CBO and OMB have actual figures if you want to look but I don't have the space here for that kind of data.) Where the budget has expanded over time has been primarily social programs. You can argue their value, but you can't blame our present problems on "spiraling defense spending" which seems to fluxuate between 3-6% of GDP during "peace time" Social program spending OTOH continues to take a larger and larger share of our total income over time (not just increases in spending, but increasing in the percent of income budgeted to that task.
3) My talk about optimality in regards to taxes was just a reference to the fact that taxes alter wealth and tax rates alter behavior by changing our incentives to do certain things. Thus taxes cause varying degrees of inefficiency, economically speaking. (I'm not denying that taxes are necessariy to fund certain kinds of things, "public investments" if you will. The question is are the investments profitable (including the opportunity/economic costs)). Wealth transfer is primarily done for political reasons, not because it is a good idea economically. To quote Bill Lucas from the U of C, "The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."
I wasn't sure if your response was tongue in cheek, so I'm going to respond
Bottom line, everyone gets one vote, no matter how much money. No one is saying that those with money should get more votes, not anyone i know anyway. What I am suggesting is that restricting speech under the guise that speech isn't "fair", is unconstitutional. Speech has never been fair, wasn't in 1776 and it certainly isn't today. In fact, i'd say it's much more fair today then it was back then. People had far fewer news sources then and weren't as well educated in general. Usually people like Pulitzer could run an entire city. "That's the power of the press", and they meant that literally. Despite all of the "media concentration" etc, there is an abundance of ways for us to reach out and touch others that weren't available 2 centuries or even 2 decades ago. The first ammendment doesn't guarantee everyone an equal sized bullhorn and soapbox, that idea was rejected by the writers of the constitution. It meerly guarantees that the government is never to supress the expression of opinions, even if they have "too much influence" in the view of some.
I guess I don't think organizations (whether unions or large public companies) SHOULD be donating to candidates or political parties. The members and shareholders are a diverse group with differing opinions and they would probably best serve their constituants by leaving the politics to the individuals. But I don't know that it should be illegal.
Obviously the problem we have is that giving money directly (or indirectly) to public officials constitues the existance, potential, or appearance of corruption. But as long as we are electing individuals to office they are going to require monies to run their campaign, unless they can pay for it all themselves (which is again even more an undemocratic result than what exists now by virtue of money, as only the wealthy could afford to run for high office). Constantly guarding against REAL CORRUPTION (ie, explicitly changing a vote for money) is the price we pay for living in a representative republic, because the solution being proposed to "take the money out of politics" is worse than the problem, highly infeasible, and is a gross violation of the first ammendment. My point is that EVERYONE IS A SPECIAL INTEREST.
Sure I don't like it when I don't get my way politically, but there's my incentive to organize like-minded people, get us all to vote, be active with the candidates and maybe change some minds.
What about issues that don't arise in the campaign??
If we can vote on everything then why have representatives?
What if circumstances change or they change their minds.
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" J.M. Keynes
This is EXACTLY what the first ammendment was written to prevent. It's one thing to ban contibutions to individual candidates (which one can argue isn't speech, but merely a form of graft/payoff) but limiting the spending of political groups and individuals ADVOCATING policy or candidates is a CLEAR VOILATION OF THE FIRST AMMENDMENT. Frankly, McCain-Feingold is a bigger violation of civil-liberties than the DMCA, PATRIOT ACT, and all the rest of these bills we all worry about here on slashdot. Only on slashdot do people defend pedophlia and porn under the guise of free speech, but rail in favor of "taking the money out of politics" (ie, government censorship of political speech.
1. What does a appropriations bill have to do with the trade deficit??
2. These "tax breaks" were designed to be paid for by closing loopholes in the existing tax code and using that to lower the rate on foreign earnings made by US companies, among other things. (Under the current system, the incentive is to keep these earnings overseas in the foreign subsidiaries to avoid having to pay US taxes, which happens when they remit the earnings back to the parent company). I'm not generally for subsidizing companies, but "corporate taxes" are just stupid, as they are either paid for by the the shareholders or customers. It's much easier to collect from the individuals (since they have to pay income tax anyways) rather than have to tax both of them. Why incur the additional overhead?
And airbus doesn't get these "military subsidies" because the EU doesn't make miliary aircraft?? Yeah right. I'd also like to point out that Boeing has to bid for it's military contracts, against Lockheed-Martin, etc, so this "military subsidy of civilian industry" can't work the way you say it does.
Sorry for not letting this thread die. Say what you want about Limbaugh, he is diameterically opposed to government censorship of Howard Stern, and IIRC he even did an op-ed about it for the LA TImes. The only thing Limbaugh did say was that it isn't censorship if a PRIVATE organization does it. There are some things that it is ok for the private sector to do that are not ok for the government (since the government has a monopoly on the ability to make laws that apply to everyone.)
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See, I don't buy that statement that you were republican right up until that. You sound more like an anti-globalization green to me. Sure you might claim that the Max Cleland incident was what "turned you away" from republicans", but the reality is that your mind was changed long before that. Frankly, after watching what happened to Cleland, I can't say it was much different from how most political campaigns are. Both sides play this game. If one party has someone that served in the military, then anyone disagreeing with them on diplomatic or military policy is "questioning their patriotism" and is a horrible american for daring to disagree with someone who served their country so well. Standard straw dog arguement. The other party always says that the service (or lack thereof) is irrelevant to whether their policies would be good for america. The so called "Max Cleland incident" is just another exercise in wining and hand wringing by some partisans looking for traction with the voting public.
True, but the MSDN camp are the ones that want to push all sorts of new buggy and untested features into new versions of windows. Stuff them full of "cool new technology"TM and shove them out the door. The "Raymond Chen" camp is all about backwards compatability and stability (they know where MS's bread is buttered) and are interested in not rocking the boat and giving customers an incentive to switch.
Hey...Leave me out of this!!!!
In all seriousness slackware 10 just came out and I would venture to say that it is one of the most up-to-date distros out right now. Why the anti-slackware sentiment? I mean it's still profitable enough for Patrick to keep doing it, has been since the beginning.
Actually if you want to really get nitpicky, Roe V Wade didn't really settle the question that definitely. The ruling didn't establish an absolute right to an abortion, in fact their decision codified some sort of compromise on medical privacy versus rights of a fetus. According to the ruling states could still ban third trimester abortions and place some restrictions on 2nd trimester ones. Only in the first trimester did the court say that abortions were to remain unrestricted by the state.
You can get yourself removed as a dependant from your parents at the age of 18. Then you don't have to include their income on your financial aid. Of course if you do this you aren't included as a dependant for their tax purposes or included on their insurance etc. But you will qualify for much more assistance if you suddenly don't have your parents income.
Or Features, Quality, and Resources. Of course these all are constrained in certain ways. (You don't have unlimiited time or programmers (or money), you need a certain number of features for the program to even be useful, and a certain level of quality too. To me it is better to shoot for a few key features right off the bat and release as soon as possible with high quality, and then add the functionality in upgrades. The key is to build it right (but not with lots of features) the first time. (Basically release early and often + don't bite off more than you can chew.)
You know though, sometimes it wouldn't hurt the programmers to understand the business perspective a little better, or that of the end user. Since these are the people that are going to USE the software, and thus are the ones that are "paying your bills" so to speak. (And yes, sometimes the developer(s) is(are) the user(s). But I'm speaking more generally here.
You know, if you cause hearing loss they could sue.... I would suggest something nondistructive. Afterall, it's not really them you are mad at.
You forget that sick days and vacation days are separate.
My understanding is that CDMA (the technology, not the interface) can scale up and down better such that you can really pack the towers in where the population is dense (by reducing their range, allowing you to reuse the same freqs. over a city) and in sparsely populated areas you can scale it way up (one tower covering a large area).
Wish my cable company would wise up and do this. Right now they just block everything going out to port 25 (meaning that you have to relay everything through their server). This breaks SPF if i want to send from email accounts other than my cable one. (unless i get them to setup an alternate port). That and the lack of static ips leads me to go for DSL.
You know, that is my one real complaint about this. Specifically, I understand why driving is a priviledge (acutally and technically, anyone can drive on private property, just not on public streets), and I understand why anyone can't just hop in a airplane and takeoff. Taken individually, each of these can be easily justified legally to be necessary and held not to be an infringement of our rights. However, the practical EFFECT is exactly that which you state.
Haven't some states ruled the "sobriety checkpoints" unconstitutional?
Imagine that, law professors disagreeing with a SCOTUS ruling. Boy, how unusual. Cause lawprofessors are so much more objective than the rest of us when it comes to politics. The line about "673 law professors" goes straight from assuption to conclusion. It doesn't tell us anything about that facts of the case, just that it was highly contentious.
I don't agree with the contention that the name itself is incriminating. It's doesn't provide evidence that you have committed a crime, it can only confirm if you ARE the individual who committed the crime. Does that make any sense? The name itself isn't incriminating.
Not eating breakfast in the morning causes your metabolism to be lower during the morning. Rememeber, you probably haven't eaten for 8+ hours since you have been sleeping. Of course sleeping is like a mini-fast and you naturally have a lower metabolism when you are sleeping. Thus eating a very small breakfast (like a small glass of juice and a piece of toast or something helps to boost energy and metabolism in the morning. Also, skipping meals tends to make you eat much more than "normal" at your next meal since your body thinks it's starving. You just have to be careful not to snack your self to death either!
I'm looking at long term trends in defense spending as a percentage of real GDP. Even 600 Billion in FY 2004 would not be unrealistic by historical comparison. (The CBO and OMB have actual figures if you want to look but I don't have the space here for that kind of data.) Where the budget has expanded over time has been primarily social programs. You can argue their value, but you can't blame our present problems on "spiraling defense spending" which seems to fluxuate between 3-6% of GDP during "peace time" Social program spending OTOH continues to take a larger and larger share of our total income over time (not just increases in spending, but increasing in the percent of income budgeted to that task.
3) My talk about optimality in regards to taxes was just a reference to the fact that taxes alter wealth and tax rates alter behavior by changing our incentives to do certain things. Thus taxes cause varying degrees of inefficiency, economically speaking. (I'm not denying that taxes are necessariy to fund certain kinds of things, "public investments" if you will. The question is are the investments profitable (including the opportunity/economic costs)). Wealth transfer is primarily done for political reasons, not because it is a good idea economically. To quote Bill Lucas from the U of C, "The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."
Bottom line, everyone gets one vote, no matter how much money. No one is saying that those with money should get more votes, not anyone i know anyway. What I am suggesting is that restricting speech under the guise that speech isn't "fair", is unconstitutional. Speech has never been fair, wasn't in 1776 and it certainly isn't today. In fact, i'd say it's much more fair today then it was back then. People had far fewer news sources then and weren't as well educated in general. Usually people like Pulitzer could run an entire city. "That's the power of the press", and they meant that literally. Despite all of the "media concentration" etc, there is an abundance of ways for us to reach out and touch others that weren't available 2 centuries or even 2 decades ago. The first ammendment doesn't guarantee everyone an equal sized bullhorn and soapbox, that idea was rejected by the writers of the constitution. It meerly guarantees that the government is never to supress the expression of opinions, even if they have "too much influence" in the view of some.
I guess I don't think organizations (whether unions or large public companies) SHOULD be donating to candidates or political parties. The members and shareholders are a diverse group with differing opinions and they would probably best serve their constituants by leaving the politics to the individuals. But I don't know that it should be illegal.
Obviously the problem we have is that giving money directly (or indirectly) to public officials constitues the existance, potential, or appearance of corruption. But as long as we are electing individuals to office they are going to require monies to run their campaign, unless they can pay for it all themselves (which is again even more an undemocratic result than what exists now by virtue of money, as only the wealthy could afford to run for high office). Constantly guarding against REAL CORRUPTION (ie, explicitly changing a vote for money) is the price we pay for living in a representative republic, because the solution being proposed to "take the money out of politics" is worse than the problem, highly infeasible, and is a gross violation of the first ammendment. My point is that EVERYONE IS A SPECIAL INTEREST.
Sure I don't like it when I don't get my way politically, but there's my incentive to organize like-minded people, get us all to vote, be active with the candidates and maybe change some minds.
What about issues that don't arise in the campaign?? If we can vote on everything then why have representatives? What if circumstances change or they change their minds. "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" J.M. Keynes
That only applies to scripts though if you look at that slackware inits for example they follow a "if rc.startupscript +x then execute, else ;
This is EXACTLY what the first ammendment was written to prevent. It's one thing to ban contibutions to individual candidates (which one can argue isn't speech, but merely a form of graft/payoff) but limiting the spending of political groups and individuals ADVOCATING policy or candidates is a CLEAR VOILATION OF THE FIRST AMMENDMENT. Frankly, McCain-Feingold is a bigger violation of civil-liberties than the DMCA, PATRIOT ACT, and all the rest of these bills we all worry about here on slashdot. Only on slashdot do people defend pedophlia and porn under the guise of free speech, but rail in favor of "taking the money out of politics" (ie, government censorship of political speech.
1. What does a appropriations bill have to do with the trade deficit??
2. These "tax breaks" were designed to be paid for by closing loopholes in the existing tax code and using that to lower the rate on foreign earnings made by US companies, among other things. (Under the current system, the incentive is to keep these earnings overseas in the foreign subsidiaries to avoid having to pay US taxes, which happens when they remit the earnings back to the parent company). I'm not generally for subsidizing companies, but "corporate taxes" are just stupid, as they are either paid for by the the shareholders or customers. It's much easier to collect from the individuals (since they have to pay income tax anyways) rather than have to tax both of them. Why incur the additional overhead?
And airbus doesn't get these "military subsidies" because the EU doesn't make miliary aircraft?? Yeah right. I'd also like to point out that Boeing has to bid for it's military contracts, against Lockheed-Martin, etc, so this "military subsidy of civilian industry" can't work the way you say it does.
Sorry for not letting this thread die. Say what you want about Limbaugh, he is diameterically opposed to government censorship of Howard Stern, and IIRC he even did an op-ed about it for the LA TImes. The only thing Limbaugh did say was that it isn't censorship if a PRIVATE organization does it. There are some things that it is ok for the private sector to do that are not ok for the government (since the government has a monopoly on the ability to make laws that apply to everyone.)