Actually, about the last 2: - The funny thing about the health care bill is that right after it passed, it only had 40% of the American people not wanting it. - You haven't been modded down.
However, also to add to your list: - The Pope is Catholic! - Bears shit in the woods!
It's the same reason that marijuana is illegal. The cotton lobby made it illegal because they feared hemp. Then it became a moral issue (that oddly, no one had about tobacco and we had just swung the other way on with alcohol) and we exported our morals to the rest of the world.
A big part of why marijuana is illegal while tobacco is fine is that marijuana was smoked originally by Hispanic people while tobacco was smoked by white people. And then when the hippies got into it, the "marijuana is evil" campaign really took off. So while the cotton lobby might have had something to do with it, racism had an awful lot to do with it.
Just try to find something as simple as a loaf of bread, or salad dressing without HFCS in it.
Well, for salad dressing, there's an easy solution: olive oil + your favorite vinegar. Add spices as desire. Takes about 2 minutes at most.
For bread, it's out there, if you go for the stuff marketed to health nuts. Or if that doesn't work, find yourself a good local bakery, preferably one run by aging hippies.
Trouble is that will never get through the US Senate, for 2 reasons: 1. Any senator from any primarily agricultural state (Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, etc) who voted for it would be voted out immediately, because a large percentage of their constituents depend on that subsidy to make ends meet. 2. Those same senators would be giving up big bucks in campaign contributions from Archer Daniels Midland.
The brilliance (if you're an evil bastard working at ADM) of the way the corn subsidy works is that it's really a subsidy to ADM (by keeping the price of corn artificially low, which dramatically cuts their costs), but looks like a subsidy to family farmers (because they get the checks). Think of it this way: if the big corn distributors could farm their own corn more cheaply than they could buy it from the independent farmers, they would do so.
Why give her the shirt and cutoffs? A lot of ads these days would just go with showing her nude with some strategically placed corn stalks to ward off the censors.
But see, a "package manager" is the result of careful research and experience by a bunch of long-haired university-bound communist hippies, so it could never have any usefulness in the real world. Plus it's not a register-able trademark, so customers might realize that there are other better package managers out there. And once they get hooked on apt-get, they'll turn immediately into a clone of RMS and start helping the FSF.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the lack of mention has a lot to do with demographics. Most gamer publications (and a majority of video games) are aimed at men in the pre-teen to late 20's age group. One of the unique aspects of Myst (and its various sequels and imitators) is that it attracted a lot of middle-aged women.
Games like King's Quest and its descendants were absolutely astounding for their time, and took adventure gaming away from nerds typing "xyzzy" or "plugh" to a much wider audience. They were also critical in getting women interested in video games. In some ways, it created the audience for Myst and its relatives as well.
The Brits have been generally less keen on the whole EU thing than the continent has. They haven't moved to the Euro, for instance. Among other things, if they're more closely tied to the EU, then the UK has to play second-fiddle to Germany and France. So I wouldn't be surprised if part of this is a subtle anti-EU move.
Actually, as Eddie Izzard point out, their real problem was a lack of flags.
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag ?" "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!"
Because then I can't come up with the "I'm Just Fixin a Bug Rag" (with apologies to Country Joe MacDonald):
Come on, all you real smart men, Mozilla Foundation needs your help again. Got themselves in a terrible mess Releasing code that fails the tests. So put down your game, log into a Sun, we're gonna have a whole lotta fun.
(Chorus) And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we writin' for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, just sending out some spam. And it's 5, 6, 7, resigned to our fate. Ain't no time to test our code, Whoopie, we're all botnet nodes.
There's quite a bit of evidence that teenagers' bodies naturally want to sleep in and stay up later than adults. If your typical teenage boy goes to sleep at around 9:30 PM, they will still tend to sleep as late as if they went to sleep at 11:30 PM. And I've worked with kids and seen this in action.
Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.
Maybe outside the realm of "most individuals", but $10,000 needed to pay for a coder to do what you ask is considerably less than $250 million or so needed to buy enough of Microsoft to make them pay the slightest bit of attention to your demands. And that kind of value is not an investment that is so huge that most small or mid-sized businesses don't have that option.
And of course, the other alternative is to code it yourself.
It's more a move towards a Swiss-style system, where it's run by heavily regulated private insurers, but everyone is covered. It's definitely not ideal, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we're seeing now, which is thousands of people dying a day due to lack of health coverage, thousands of other people losing their life savings and credit rating to pay for health care, and some other odd unintended consequences like people calling in the fire department rather than EMTs to handle health problems.
And then there's the issue that women will now be required to purchase abortion coverage separately because the government is forbidden to pay for that procedure.
One of the significant aspects about the abortion coverage issue is that because it's an executive order rather than in the bill, Obama (or some future president) could reverse it any time they wanted to.
What?! That sounds totally reasonable and pretty sane. What am I missing?
Several million dollars to donate to various legislator's campaigns. With absolutely no expectation of any sort of quid pro quo, of course. The mere thought would be preposterous.
You wait because some marketing droid thought it was more important to have animated menus than a responsive computer.
For software coming from proprietary land (which is what a Windows guy like the author in the original article sees as all that really counts), the programmers have little-to-no control over the feature list. So even if the programmers use the smartest, fastest algorithm that would make Knuth weep for joy, it won't help, because there will be a new checklist feature waiting in the wings to get added in.
That's also a reason for software bloat: for an upgrade to sell to the market, it has to do more than the previous version, not just do the same job as the previous version but in a better way. In open source land, if a better algorithm is created, coded, and accepted, it's in and will tend to get distributed relatively quickly. But if you're a talking about a software business, then the work to make software technically better is simply a drain on programmer time that should be going to the next upgrade that can be sold for big bucks.
Every able-bodied male citizen of Switzerland is conscripted into the military at age 20 for a tour of mandatory duty (women may also volunteer), and soldiers are required to keep their weapons nearby even if they're at home. This is a country where most citizens have ready access to real militarily useful guns, and the training to use them. And they're worried about Doom?
Is there a Swiss equivalent of Jack Thompson or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, about the last 2:
- The funny thing about the health care bill is that right after it passed, it only had 40% of the American people not wanting it.
- You haven't been modded down.
However, also to add to your list:
- The Pope is Catholic!
- Bears shit in the woods!
It's the same reason that marijuana is illegal. The cotton lobby made it illegal because they feared hemp. Then it became a moral issue (that oddly, no one had about tobacco and we had just swung the other way on with alcohol) and we exported our morals to the rest of the world.
A big part of why marijuana is illegal while tobacco is fine is that marijuana was smoked originally by Hispanic people while tobacco was smoked by white people. And then when the hippies got into it, the "marijuana is evil" campaign really took off. So while the cotton lobby might have had something to do with it, racism had an awful lot to do with it.
Just try to find something as simple as a loaf of bread, or salad dressing without HFCS in it.
Well, for salad dressing, there's an easy solution: olive oil + your favorite vinegar. Add spices as desire. Takes about 2 minutes at most.
For bread, it's out there, if you go for the stuff marketed to health nuts. Or if that doesn't work, find yourself a good local bakery, preferably one run by aging hippies.
Trouble is that will never get through the US Senate, for 2 reasons:
1. Any senator from any primarily agricultural state (Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, etc) who voted for it would be voted out immediately, because a large percentage of their constituents depend on that subsidy to make ends meet.
2. Those same senators would be giving up big bucks in campaign contributions from Archer Daniels Midland.
The brilliance (if you're an evil bastard working at ADM) of the way the corn subsidy works is that it's really a subsidy to ADM (by keeping the price of corn artificially low, which dramatically cuts their costs), but looks like a subsidy to family farmers (because they get the checks). Think of it this way: if the big corn distributors could farm their own corn more cheaply than they could buy it from the independent farmers, they would do so.
Why give her the shirt and cutoffs? A lot of ads these days would just go with showing her nude with some strategically placed corn stalks to ward off the censors.
But see, a "package manager" is the result of careful research and experience by a bunch of long-haired university-bound communist hippies, so it could never have any usefulness in the real world. Plus it's not a register-able trademark, so customers might realize that there are other better package managers out there. And once they get hooked on apt-get, they'll turn immediately into a clone of RMS and start helping the FSF.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the lack of mention has a lot to do with demographics. Most gamer publications (and a majority of video games) are aimed at men in the pre-teen to late 20's age group. One of the unique aspects of Myst (and its various sequels and imitators) is that it attracted a lot of middle-aged women.
All your files are belong to us.
Games like King's Quest and its descendants were absolutely astounding for their time, and took adventure gaming away from nerds typing "xyzzy" or "plugh" to a much wider audience. They were also critical in getting women interested in video games. In some ways, it created the audience for Myst and its relatives as well.
The Brits have been generally less keen on the whole EU thing than the continent has. They haven't moved to the Euro, for instance. Among other things, if they're more closely tied to the EU, then the UK has to play second-fiddle to Germany and France. So I wouldn't be surprised if part of this is a subtle anti-EU move.
Actually, as Eddie Izzard point out, their real problem was a lack of flags.
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in.
"I claim India for Britain!"
They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!"
"Do you have a flag ?"
"No..."
"Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!"
He's building a bomb, I tell you! A bomb! Send in the troops right now to stop him.
Because then I can't come up with the "I'm Just Fixin a Bug Rag" (with apologies to Country Joe MacDonald):
Come on, all you real smart men,
Mozilla Foundation needs your help again.
Got themselves in a terrible mess
Releasing code that fails the tests.
So put down your game, log into a Sun,
we're gonna have a whole lotta fun.
(Chorus)
And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we writin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
just sending out some spam.
And it's 5, 6, 7, resigned to our fate.
Ain't no time to test our code,
Whoopie, we're all botnet nodes.
There's quite a bit of evidence that teenagers' bodies naturally want to sleep in and stay up later than adults. If your typical teenage boy goes to sleep at around 9:30 PM, they will still tend to sleep as late as if they went to sleep at 11:30 PM. And I've worked with kids and seen this in action.
In the study, sheer luck. In real life as well, sheer luck plays a fairly significant role.
Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.
Maybe outside the realm of "most individuals", but $10,000 needed to pay for a coder to do what you ask is considerably less than $250 million or so needed to buy enough of Microsoft to make them pay the slightest bit of attention to your demands. And that kind of value is not an investment that is so huge that most small or mid-sized businesses don't have that option.
And of course, the other alternative is to code it yourself.
It's more a move towards a Swiss-style system, where it's run by heavily regulated private insurers, but everyone is covered. It's definitely not ideal, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we're seeing now, which is thousands of people dying a day due to lack of health coverage, thousands of other people losing their life savings and credit rating to pay for health care, and some other odd unintended consequences like people calling in the fire department rather than EMTs to handle health problems.
Wouldn't the really really big payoff be when they get to the point of printing out a celebrity sexbot?
Be careful, or you might get a machine that always gives you a drink that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Share and enjoy!
See, it's comments like that that get you written out of history.
And then there's the issue that women will now be required to purchase abortion coverage separately because the government is forbidden to pay for that procedure.
One of the significant aspects about the abortion coverage issue is that because it's an executive order rather than in the bill, Obama (or some future president) could reverse it any time they wanted to.
What?! That sounds totally reasonable and pretty sane. What am I missing?
Several million dollars to donate to various legislator's campaigns. With absolutely no expectation of any sort of quid pro quo, of course. The mere thought would be preposterous.
You wait because some marketing droid thought it was more important to have animated menus than a responsive computer.
For software coming from proprietary land (which is what a Windows guy like the author in the original article sees as all that really counts), the programmers have little-to-no control over the feature list. So even if the programmers use the smartest, fastest algorithm that would make Knuth weep for joy, it won't help, because there will be a new checklist feature waiting in the wings to get added in.
That's also a reason for software bloat: for an upgrade to sell to the market, it has to do more than the previous version, not just do the same job as the previous version but in a better way. In open source land, if a better algorithm is created, coded, and accepted, it's in and will tend to get distributed relatively quickly. But if you're a talking about a software business, then the work to make software technically better is simply a drain on programmer time that should be going to the next upgrade that can be sold for big bucks.
Every able-bodied male citizen of Switzerland is conscripted into the military at age 20 for a tour of mandatory duty (women may also volunteer), and soldiers are required to keep their weapons nearby even if they're at home. This is a country where most citizens have ready access to real militarily useful guns, and the training to use them. And they're worried about Doom?
Is there a Swiss equivalent of Jack Thompson or something?
Ohm my, you'll get in trouble when you cover current events like that.