what exactly is this ignorant aversion to socialism all about?
Paul Krugman puts forth a truly interesting answer in his book The Conscience of a Liberal: The aversion to socialism in the United States has a lot to do with socialist measures like single-payer health care helping black people (who tend to be poorer) at the expense of white people (who on average are wealthier) - in other words, it's a consequence of the long history of slavery and racism in the US.
Maybe if someone does their shopping only at some corner convenience store instead of going a few extra miles to a real grocery store, but that's true of anywhere.
If you're poor enough that the difference between $1.50 Cambell's soup and $1 frozen pizza is critical, then you're not going to have the time or the $3 for bus fare to get to the real grocery store a few miles away. There really are areas where you can't easily get to a grocery store: they are called "food deserts" by those who work on issues surrounding food supplies in poor urban areas.
To a very high degree of correlation, the 'poor' aren't living in poverty because of a lack of money. They lack money because they have make poor lifestyle decisions that RESULT in a lack of money. Things like failure to get an education (or worse reject the value of knowledge entirely), become a single parent, waste money on substance abuse or Xbox... but I repeat myself.
This is completely wrong. Assume a mythical capitalist society in which there are no drugs, no Xboxes, and no single parents. No one has done anything particularly stupid in their lives. Question: In this mythical society, who's job is it to clean bathrooms, and what do they get paid? Somebody has to do it. Somebody is at the bottom of the totem pole, and the bottom is not going to be a pleasant place to be. In a capitalist society (e.g. many Latin American nations) without a welfare system or minimum wage, working full time (defined as 60 hours a week) will not be enough to survive on in any developed nation.
See, what your argument essentially boils down to is "The poor are poor because they're bad people. That means that I don't need to feel guilty because I'm unwilling to pay $100 to prevent someone a mile down the road from me dying." I highly suspect you don't actually know any really poor people. You don't know a guy who is flat broke because he was a good barber but now has shaky hands due to nerve damage he sustained in Vietnam. You don't know a woman who worked in a shop making donuts every day of her life and can only pay the bills because she eats only donuts she can take home from work. You don't know a father with an engineering degree who can't support his family because he ended up in this country in order to escape massacres in Bosnia and doesn't speak English well enough to convince employers of his skill. (For those who are wondering: Yes, these people actually exist. I'm personally acquainted with each of them.)
For some real insight into what the life of a poor person in the US is really like, I recommend either Barbara Erhenreich's Nickled and Dimed, or Morgan Spurlock's pilot episode of his show 30 Days.
In Texas, legislators are paid around $30k per year, but can't hold a regular job during lege years.
That's nothing. The New Hampshire House is paid $200 per 2-year legislative term, which leads to a lot of homemakers and retirees in the House. On the flip side, though, each representative has only about 3000 constituents, so it's not hard to contact and influence your state representative (in some cases easier than contacting and influencing municipal officials who can have as many as about 12000 constituents).
The real mindset of incoming college freshmen: Our parents are totally gone! Let's party, get drunk, and find someone to sleep with!
And that has been the mindset of at least a significant percentage of incoming freshmen for decades. Stuff like "OMG, technology changes" doesn't have anywhere near the same effect. Why are these guys concentrating on what divides current college kids from previous generations as opposed to what unites them?
You don't completely stop people, but you do create yet another hoop to jump through which the less intelligent criminals won't be able to manage.
It's not 100% foolproof. Then again, if the "PGW worker" really wanted to get in he could probably have thrown a rock through the first floor window, charged in, beat and tied up the wife, and ransacked the place.
In theory, it is more likely that that is the case, but I have seen some open source code that made me die a little on the inside.
The big difference is that with the open source code that makes you die a little on the inside, you (a) know it exists, (b) can fix it, and (c) if you choose option (b), and a bad project maintainer refuses to accept your patch, you can fork it and release the better version yourself. And then someone else can spot another improvement, and make that, making your code better. With MS code that makes you die a little on the inside, you don't even know it's there, all you know is that the particular Win32 call doesn't behave as documented.
If I had to guess, you "like following various companies" because your understanding (which is promulgated by the business press in particular) is that technology comes from companies. But as free software is demonstrating, software comes from programmers, and that while companies can act as an incubator of programmers they aren't completely necessary to the process anymore. For instance, Bell didn't create Unix - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did. Bell's role (which wasn't unimportant at the time) was to give them hardware to play with, a place to play with it, and a salary while they were playing with it. Now, though, the necessary equipment is easily in reach of, say, a Finnish college student, the role of the company in the making of software is reduced.
"The hard drive cannot be destroyed by any means we here possess. It must be cast into the fiery chasm from whence it came.... I now dub the The Fellowship of the Hard Drive."
Especially since the project's funding depends on successful tests like this. For some reason, companies like Boeing always want to get their contract renewed.
DRM is by design and by law not user modifiable. If it were, it wouldn't work at all because users would modify it to give themselves free access. OpenSSL, by contrast, can be modified by anyone to their hearts content: you can make it use "4" as a random number every single time it needs one if you wanted to (not that I'm recommending this, of course).
Your either inadvertent or intentional blurring of the meaning of the word "open" is exactly what MS did with its "Office Open XML" format, which is precisely what GP was pointing out.
In the words of one of the town hall protesters: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
Or another personal favorite, from Investor's Business Daily: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." (For the reality-impaired: Stephen Hawking is and has always been British)
manage (n): Draft incomprehensible memos, run boring and useless meetings, waste large amounts of time and money, and take credit for others' hard work.
Yes, I mark university assignments. No, I really don't care what answer they get.
In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer: "Because in the new approach, the important thing is to understand what you are doing, rather than to get the right answer."
Whether or not it's illegal, it's usually considered a matter of civil law rather than criminal law. It's not like, say, the FDIC, where a bank caught with their hand in the cookie jar will be seized, the deposits given back, and the officers responsible thrown in PMITA prison.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has more immigration, for one thing
No, it doesn't:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_net_mig_rat-immigration-net-migration-rate
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_for_pop-immigration-foreign-population
All over the place, according to the USDA:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/AP/AP036/
what exactly is this ignorant aversion to socialism all about?
Paul Krugman puts forth a truly interesting answer in his book The Conscience of a Liberal: The aversion to socialism in the United States has a lot to do with socialist measures like single-payer health care helping black people (who tend to be poorer) at the expense of white people (who on average are wealthier) - in other words, it's a consequence of the long history of slavery and racism in the US.
Maybe if someone does their shopping only at some corner convenience store instead of going a few extra miles to a real grocery store, but that's true of anywhere.
If you're poor enough that the difference between $1.50 Cambell's soup and $1 frozen pizza is critical, then you're not going to have the time or the $3 for bus fare to get to the real grocery store a few miles away. There really are areas where you can't easily get to a grocery store: they are called "food deserts" by those who work on issues surrounding food supplies in poor urban areas.
To a very high degree of correlation, the 'poor' aren't living in poverty because of a lack of money. They lack money because they have make poor lifestyle decisions that RESULT in a lack of money. Things like failure to get an education (or worse reject the value of knowledge entirely), become a single parent, waste money on substance abuse or Xbox... but I repeat myself.
This is completely wrong. Assume a mythical capitalist society in which there are no drugs, no Xboxes, and no single parents. No one has done anything particularly stupid in their lives. Question: In this mythical society, who's job is it to clean bathrooms, and what do they get paid? Somebody has to do it. Somebody is at the bottom of the totem pole, and the bottom is not going to be a pleasant place to be. In a capitalist society (e.g. many Latin American nations) without a welfare system or minimum wage, working full time (defined as 60 hours a week) will not be enough to survive on in any developed nation.
See, what your argument essentially boils down to is "The poor are poor because they're bad people. That means that I don't need to feel guilty because I'm unwilling to pay $100 to prevent someone a mile down the road from me dying." I highly suspect you don't actually know any really poor people. You don't know a guy who is flat broke because he was a good barber but now has shaky hands due to nerve damage he sustained in Vietnam. You don't know a woman who worked in a shop making donuts every day of her life and can only pay the bills because she eats only donuts she can take home from work. You don't know a father with an engineering degree who can't support his family because he ended up in this country in order to escape massacres in Bosnia and doesn't speak English well enough to convince employers of his skill. (For those who are wondering: Yes, these people actually exist. I'm personally acquainted with each of them.)
For some real insight into what the life of a poor person in the US is really like, I recommend either Barbara Erhenreich's Nickled and Dimed, or Morgan Spurlock's pilot episode of his show 30 Days.
Well, you were right!
Thankfully, the robots have a pre-set kill limit, so they can be defeated by sending wave after wave of men at them until their kill limit is reached.
Unfortunately, an old-fashioned dictionary does you no good if the letter you get rong is the first one. (yes, that was intentional)
Luckily for him, he's not using it to develop Perl, because that keyboard would probably get confused looking at something like
s/(^AB@H)?^&(D@DZsaivb*)rfhoi;13[ab]+/(\1)dn21\2/g;
In Texas, legislators are paid around $30k per year, but can't hold a regular job during lege years.
That's nothing. The New Hampshire House is paid $200 per 2-year legislative term, which leads to a lot of homemakers and retirees in the House. On the flip side, though, each representative has only about 3000 constituents, so it's not hard to contact and influence your state representative (in some cases easier than contacting and influencing municipal officials who can have as many as about 12000 constituents).
The real mindset of incoming college freshmen: Our parents are totally gone! Let's party, get drunk, and find someone to sleep with!
And that has been the mindset of at least a significant percentage of incoming freshmen for decades. Stuff like "OMG, technology changes" doesn't have anywhere near the same effect. Why are these guys concentrating on what divides current college kids from previous generations as opposed to what unites them?
Are you a UI designer of some kind? If so, a lot of projects would love to have your help in UI design.
Or are you a technical writer who has a problem with poor documentation? If so, a lot of projects would love to have your help writing a manual.
You don't completely stop people, but you do create yet another hoop to jump through which the less intelligent criminals won't be able to manage.
It's not 100% foolproof. Then again, if the "PGW worker" really wanted to get in he could probably have thrown a rock through the first floor window, charged in, beat and tied up the wife, and ransacked the place.
In theory, it is more likely that that is the case, but I have seen some open source code that made me die a little on the inside.
The big difference is that with the open source code that makes you die a little on the inside, you (a) know it exists, (b) can fix it, and (c) if you choose option (b), and a bad project maintainer refuses to accept your patch, you can fork it and release the better version yourself. And then someone else can spot another improvement, and make that, making your code better. With MS code that makes you die a little on the inside, you don't even know it's there, all you know is that the particular Win32 call doesn't behave as documented.
If I had to guess, you "like following various companies" because your understanding (which is promulgated by the business press in particular) is that technology comes from companies. But as free software is demonstrating, software comes from programmers, and that while companies can act as an incubator of programmers they aren't completely necessary to the process anymore. For instance, Bell didn't create Unix - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did. Bell's role (which wasn't unimportant at the time) was to give them hardware to play with, a place to play with it, and a salary while they were playing with it. Now, though, the necessary equipment is easily in reach of, say, a Finnish college student, the role of the company in the making of software is reduced.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
What does Howard Dean have to do with this?
They're just a bunch of explorers looking for windows of opportunity.
Of course not. In Korea, only old people play Starcraft.
"The hard drive cannot be destroyed by any means we here possess. It must be cast into the fiery chasm from whence it came. ... I now dub the The Fellowship of the Hard Drive."
Especially since the project's funding depends on successful tests like this. For some reason, companies like Boeing always want to get their contract renewed.
That's grade A BS right there.
DRM is by design and by law not user modifiable. If it were, it wouldn't work at all because users would modify it to give themselves free access. OpenSSL, by contrast, can be modified by anyone to their hearts content: you can make it use "4" as a random number every single time it needs one if you wanted to (not that I'm recommending this, of course).
Your either inadvertent or intentional blurring of the meaning of the word "open" is exactly what MS did with its "Office Open XML" format, which is precisely what GP was pointing out.
In the words of one of the town hall protesters: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
Or another personal favorite, from Investor's Business Daily: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." (For the reality-impaired: Stephen Hawking is and has always been British)
manage (n): Draft incomprehensible memos, run boring and useless meetings, waste large amounts of time and money, and take credit for others' hard work.
Yeah, I can do that on less sleep.
No matter your political leanings, it is hard to argue that NASA does not provide a great return on investment.
No it doesn't (from Congress's point of view): Funding NASA doesn't result in graft^Hcampaign contributions.
Yes, I mark university assignments. No, I really don't care what answer they get.
In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer:
"Because in the new approach, the important thing is to understand what you are doing, rather than to get the right answer."
Whether or not it's illegal, it's usually considered a matter of civil law rather than criminal law. It's not like, say, the FDIC, where a bank caught with their hand in the cookie jar will be seized, the deposits given back, and the officers responsible thrown in PMITA prison.