Notice one key factor here: These people all use AOL. That's naturally going to self-select your data towards certain segments of the population which might exhibit different inclinations than rest of the group.
In all seriousness, most of the really happy old people I know are still learning things, still finding interesting uses of their time, and getting out into the world for as long as they physically can. For example, one guy I knew was playing and teaching violin up until the month before he died, despite arthritis. Another who falls pretty thoroughly into the "little old lady" category is still giving talks, doing research, and travelling the world well into her 80's. Another interesting thing I noticed several years back is that something like half of the people hiking the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to Maine) are retirees in their late 60's or early 70's.
The thing is that the "war on drugs" has become such a profit driven thing by our government that they cannot legalize it anymore because it would kill their bottom line.
If anything, legalizing drugs would help the government's bottom line due to:
First off, my remarks weren't intended as a troll, they were intended in a similar vein to the comments that followed, essentially saying there were more important issues for Congress to worry about.
Secondly, when I said that Congress had issues to deal with in Gaza and Lebanon, I wasn't suggesting that they should take any particular side. Since, however, the US government is indirectly involved in this conflict (Secretary Rice's diplomatic efforts, vetoes in the UN Security Council, and selling weapons to Israel to name a few ways), Congress does have every right to consider US actions in response to what is going on, and pass laws or resolutions directing the executive branch to undertake certain actions as a matter of US policy.
Certainly far easier to go after porn sites and sex offendors that dealing with, say, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Lebanon. Oh, and dealing with N Korea and Iran.
The speed of code written in computer language is based on the number of CPU cycles required to carry it out. That means that the speed of any higher-level language is related to the efficiency of code executed by the interpreter or produced by the compiler. Most compilers and interpreters these days are pretty darn good at optimizing, making the drawback of using a higher-level language less and less important.
If you don't believe me, I suggest you look at some of the assembly code output of gcc. I'm no assembly guru, but I don't think I would have done as well writing assembly by hand.
Actually, murder is statistically a relatively low risk, compared to the top causes according to the CDC (2002 data, but still relatively accurate): Heart Disease - 696,947 Cancer - 557,271 Stroke - 162,672 Chronic lower respiratory diseases (I'm guessing asthma and emphysema show up here) - 124,816 Accidents (This would include traffic accidents) - 106,742 Diabetes - 73,249 Influenza/Pneumonia - 65,681 Alzheimer's - 58,866 Kidney Disease - 40,974 Septicemia - 33,865
The reason there's so much fuss about terrorism is that the blame can be placed on someone from a different country, different culture, and different religion, thousands of miles away (completely ignoring home-grown terrorists like McVeigh). Murder is usually another case where most folks think they can place the blame elsewhere, on the "big black guy" rather than the much more likely "cheating spouse wanting the life insurance money". It's a lot easier to accept that a risk exists from some unknown bad guy than from someone close to you, or even more likely yourself (due to smoking, drunk driving, unprotected promiscuous sex) because to admit the latter is to admit that you made mistakes in your life.
Actually, your month naming example is interesting to me because I was raised as a Quaker, and they use numbered months (First Month=January, Second Month=February, etc) and numbered weekdays (First Day=Sunday, Second Day=Monday...). They originally did so because they objected to the pagan sources of the names (Sun, Moon, Tyr, Wodin, Thor, Freya, Saturn), but it also simplified things a lot.
I always thought that made a whole lot of sense for us geeky types, and thinking that way makes writing crontabs easier.
When you give you president dictatorial powers and have no oversight and no way of getting rid of a president during his term, you have put yourself at risk. Add to that the ever increasing polarization of the politics in this country and you'll understand that there are no difference between a one-party state and a two-party state.
I have to disagree with that argument: In recent memory, government worked fairly well (not great, but relatively sane) when 2 parties held control of a branch of government (Reagan vs Democratic Congress, Clinton vs Republican Congress), and sucked when a single party controlled all branches of government (George W Bush, Carter). The reason for this phenomenon seems pretty obvious to me: When one party controls all branches of government, the Constitutional checks and balances are ineffective because everyone with the power to stop a branch of government is part of the same organization. In other words, there's really one-party rule going on, even if it's officially a two-party system.
That can lead to a lot of the polarization you're worried about. If one side can't be heard except by screaming as loudly as possible in public, that's exactly what they're going to do, and the other side will start screaming to drown out the screaming of the group not in power. Hence a shrill political debate, and increased polarization as politicians take more extreme positions in order to get noticed.
XSS is not the problem. JavaScript is (just for the record, at NeoSmart we feel JavaScript is more of a headache than it is a life-saver..), and XSS is but a result of the (many) inherent security holes in JavaScript and not in the package itself!
That quote really says it all. The basic argument seems to be very simple: Javascript Sucks, Ergo XSS Vulnerabilities are inevitable. That's about as accurate as saying that if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit.
As someone who's had to wrangle plenty of Javascript, I agree that it sucks, but I disagree with any argument that security vulnerabilities are inevitable. These days, they seem to be more a product of adding features without thinking about the security implications (Hey, let's allow email viewed in Outlook to run scripts!) than poor implementations of those ideas. Although implementation problems play a part: You're busy coding the nifty new feature, you get to a point where it works, and you happily go and check it into CVS oblivious to the buffer overflow you've introduced.
Fundamentally, there's no such thing as a computer error, only a series of human errors buried deeply enough that they appear to be a computer error (with one exception, that of the expected hardware failure).
Iseemt0behavingtremend0usdifficultywithmylifestyle !
Don't you know how much damage that can cause? Talk like that can ensure that alien species destroy each other, send fleets to the Earth, and get themselves devoured by a small dog!
And don't underestimate Al Gore's contribution. And I don't mean that as a joke: He did a lot as senator to make sure DARPA had the funds it needed, and led the legislative effort to turn the Internet into a public network rather than an exclusive network for mostly military purposes.
So which wedge are we talking about here: pitch, sand, lob? Inquiring minds want to know.
Oh, and overall, golf is a very very expensive game, both because of the cost of maintaining the course and the amount of stuff designed for rich people who think their problem is with their equipment and not their skill at the game. This fits neatly in the second category.
Actually, you answered your own concern in your reply. Males in general are more likely to take risks while driving (and in other areas of life), and thus males are more likely to be in accidents than females, regardless of age. Since there is no realistic policy that prevents men from existing, we have to put up with that ill.
How about minimum driving ages being changed? It shouldn' surprise anyone that kids under the age of 18 account for a HUGELY disporportionate piece of the accident pie. How about something like a learners permit (requiring a licensed driver in the car until 17 instead of 16. How about a restricted license (to work and back, etc...) until 18. Give these kids a chance to learn how to drive before we shove them off on their own. Seriously, now we give them a permit at 15.5 yrs and by 16 we shove em out of the driving nest to fly on their own. Them we get outraged at the damage they cause.
The fundamental problems associated with young drivers are not that they're young, but that they are inexperienced. This has been pointed out time and time again by groups like AAA and most drivers' ed courses. That means that an appropriate graduated liscensing scheme doesn't apply because the driver is 16 or 17, it applies because the driver is a new driver, whatever their age. (This can be determined by whether the person who wants a liscense has one from any state.)
In fact, it's fair to say that younger drivers have a significant advantage over older drivers: They're younger, which means that on average they are stronger, quicker, and have a shorter reaction time.
Should a state be allowed to say that killing poor people for sport is ok?
Such a law would be considered unconstitutional without federal law establishing a supremacy, due to the Fourteenth Amendment (echoing the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause):
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Obviously the law allowing killing of poor people for sport deprives them of life without trial, and deprives them of equal protection. A similar argument holds for the case of rape as an attack on life or liberty, and theft as an attack of property. Slavery is similarly covered under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Therefor, all those laws you mentioned would be considered unconstitutional without federal legislation.
As far as child pornography goes, as the case history shows it is extremely difficult to answer the question of what pornography is exactly, and on top of that you have different definitions of who is a child depending on circumstances, so without a clear definition of "child pornography" I can't say one way or the other who should regulate it.
At any rate, this argument is pretty clearly a straw man, and furthermore I highly doubt an officeholder could get reelected by getting up there and saying "Why yes, I think murder is a good idea. So is child pornography and rape."
Is there some way that consumers can organize and make their own demands of the terms that determine who they do business with? Kinda like a union for consumers?
In theory at least, that's the purpose of the Consumers Union.
One, that does to Crawford, Texas what Katrina did to New Orleans, Missisippi, and elsewhere (assuming George W. Bush is still in charge at that point).
Minor quibble here: Dennis Kucinich is not a senator, he is a congressman. (From my district, in fact.) But I couldn't agree more that we need at least a viable third party.
Woz made hundreds of millions of dollars. Without Jobs, he wouldn't have even left HP.
On the flip side, however, Jobs and Woz wouldn't have been worth anything if Woz hadn't come up with the Apple 1. That's what made the company work so well: you had marketing expertise (Jobs), technical expertise (Woz), and respect between the two of them.
Like any other company, you need the operations side to have something to sell, and the marketing side to sell it.
Another interesting approach a couple of friends of mine used:
They got married. Apparantly a number of colleges and universities assume that if you're legally married, you no longer have access to your parents' income, and therefor qualify for all sorts of benefits you wouldn't otherwise have.
(I should point out that they were just friends, and the marriage was never consummated, and due to the lack of consummation they had it annulled shortly after graduation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Notice one key factor here: These people all use AOL. That's naturally going to self-select your data towards certain segments of the population which might exhibit different inclinations than rest of the group.
In all seriousness, most of the really happy old people I know are still learning things, still finding interesting uses of their time, and getting out into the world for as long as they physically can. For example, one guy I knew was playing and teaching violin up until the month before he died, despite arthritis. Another who falls pretty thoroughly into the "little old lady" category is still giving talks, doing research, and travelling the world well into her 80's. Another interesting thing I noticed several years back is that something like half of the people hiking the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to Maine) are retirees in their late 60's or early 70's.
If anything, legalizing drugs would help the government's bottom line due to:
First off, my remarks weren't intended as a troll, they were intended in a similar vein to the comments that followed, essentially saying there were more important issues for Congress to worry about.
Secondly, when I said that Congress had issues to deal with in Gaza and Lebanon, I wasn't suggesting that they should take any particular side. Since, however, the US government is indirectly involved in this conflict (Secretary Rice's diplomatic efforts, vetoes in the UN Security Council, and selling weapons to Israel to name a few ways), Congress does have every right to consider US actions in response to what is going on, and pass laws or resolutions directing the executive branch to undertake certain actions as a matter of US policy.
Certainly far easier to go after porn sites and sex offendors that dealing with, say, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Lebanon. Oh, and dealing with N Korea and Iran.
The speed of code written in computer language is based on the number of CPU cycles required to carry it out. That means that the speed of any higher-level language is related to the efficiency of code executed by the interpreter or produced by the compiler. Most compilers and interpreters these days are pretty darn good at optimizing, making the drawback of using a higher-level language less and less important.
If you don't believe me, I suggest you look at some of the assembly code output of gcc. I'm no assembly guru, but I don't think I would have done as well writing assembly by hand.
This is a great explanation of why the Bush administration is against all forms of cloning.
Actually, murder is statistically a relatively low risk, compared to the top causes according to the CDC (2002 data, but still relatively accurate):
Heart Disease - 696,947
Cancer - 557,271
Stroke - 162,672
Chronic lower respiratory diseases (I'm guessing asthma and emphysema show up here) - 124,816
Accidents (This would include traffic accidents) - 106,742
Diabetes - 73,249
Influenza/Pneumonia - 65,681
Alzheimer's - 58,866
Kidney Disease - 40,974
Septicemia - 33,865
The reason there's so much fuss about terrorism is that the blame can be placed on someone from a different country, different culture, and different religion, thousands of miles away (completely ignoring home-grown terrorists like McVeigh). Murder is usually another case where most folks think they can place the blame elsewhere, on the "big black guy" rather than the much more likely "cheating spouse wanting the life insurance money". It's a lot easier to accept that a risk exists from some unknown bad guy than from someone close to you, or even more likely yourself (due to smoking, drunk driving, unprotected promiscuous sex) because to admit the latter is to admit that you made mistakes in your life.
Actually, your month naming example is interesting to me because I was raised as a Quaker, and they use numbered months (First Month=January, Second Month=February, etc) and numbered weekdays (First Day=Sunday, Second Day=Monday...). They originally did so because they objected to the pagan sources of the names (Sun, Moon, Tyr, Wodin, Thor, Freya, Saturn), but it also simplified things a lot.
I always thought that made a whole lot of sense for us geeky types, and thinking that way makes writing crontabs easier.
When you give you president dictatorial powers and have no oversight and no way of getting rid of a president during his term, you have put yourself at risk. Add to that the ever increasing polarization of the politics in this country and you'll understand that there are no difference between a one-party state and a two-party state.
I have to disagree with that argument: In recent memory, government worked fairly well (not great, but relatively sane) when 2 parties held control of a branch of government (Reagan vs Democratic Congress, Clinton vs Republican Congress), and sucked when a single party controlled all branches of government (George W Bush, Carter). The reason for this phenomenon seems pretty obvious to me: When one party controls all branches of government, the Constitutional checks and balances are ineffective because everyone with the power to stop a branch of government is part of the same organization. In other words, there's really one-party rule going on, even if it's officially a two-party system.
That can lead to a lot of the polarization you're worried about. If one side can't be heard except by screaming as loudly as possible in public, that's exactly what they're going to do, and the other side will start screaming to drown out the screaming of the group not in power. Hence a shrill political debate, and increased polarization as politicians take more extreme positions in order to get noticed.
I'm glad someone got it. I was thinking more along the lines of Ballmer saying "Oh Belgium" myself.
XSS is not the problem. JavaScript is (just for the record, at NeoSmart we feel JavaScript is more of a headache than it is a life-saver..), and XSS is but a result of the (many) inherent security holes in JavaScript and not in the package itself!
That quote really says it all. The basic argument seems to be very simple: Javascript Sucks, Ergo XSS Vulnerabilities are inevitable. That's about as accurate as saying that if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit.
As someone who's had to wrangle plenty of Javascript, I agree that it sucks, but I disagree with any argument that security vulnerabilities are inevitable. These days, they seem to be more a product of adding features without thinking about the security implications (Hey, let's allow email viewed in Outlook to run scripts!) than poor implementations of those ideas. Although implementation problems play a part: You're busy coding the nifty new feature, you get to a point where it works, and you happily go and check it into CVS oblivious to the buffer overflow you've introduced.
Fundamentally, there's no such thing as a computer error, only a series of human errors buried deeply enough that they appear to be a computer error (with one exception, that of the expected hardware failure).
Iseemt0behavingtremend0usdifficultywithmylifestyle !
Don't you know how much damage that can cause? Talk like that can ensure that alien species destroy each other, send fleets to the Earth, and get themselves devoured by a small dog!
And don't underestimate Al Gore's contribution. And I don't mean that as a joke: He did a lot as senator to make sure DARPA had the funds it needed, and led the legislative effort to turn the Internet into a public network rather than an exclusive network for mostly military purposes.
driving a wedge
So which wedge are we talking about here: pitch, sand, lob? Inquiring minds want to know.
Oh, and overall, golf is a very very expensive game, both because of the cost of maintaining the course and the amount of stuff designed for rich people who think their problem is with their equipment and not their skill at the game. This fits neatly in the second category.
Actually, you answered your own concern in your reply. Males in general are more likely to take risks while driving (and in other areas of life), and thus males are more likely to be in accidents than females, regardless of age. Since there is no realistic policy that prevents men from existing, we have to put up with that ill.
From what it sounds like, here's what this article is really saying: Please please please please keep the MSFT stock up so I can sell it for a profit!
How about minimum driving ages being changed? It shouldn' surprise anyone that kids under the age of 18 account for a HUGELY disporportionate piece of the accident pie. How about something like a learners permit (requiring a licensed driver in the car until 17 instead of 16. How about a restricted license (to work and back, etc...) until 18. Give these kids a chance to learn how to drive before we shove them off on their own. Seriously, now we give them a permit at 15.5 yrs and by 16 we shove em out of the driving nest to fly on their own. Them we get outraged at the damage they cause.
The fundamental problems associated with young drivers are not that they're young, but that they are inexperienced. This has been pointed out time and time again by groups like AAA and most drivers' ed courses. That means that an appropriate graduated liscensing scheme doesn't apply because the driver is 16 or 17, it applies because the driver is a new driver, whatever their age. (This can be determined by whether the person who wants a liscense has one from any state.)
In fact, it's fair to say that younger drivers have a significant advantage over older drivers: They're younger, which means that on average they are stronger, quicker, and have a shorter reaction time.
Such a law would be considered unconstitutional without federal law establishing a supremacy, due to the Fourteenth Amendment (echoing the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause): Obviously the law allowing killing of poor people for sport deprives them of life without trial, and deprives them of equal protection. A similar argument holds for the case of rape as an attack on life or liberty, and theft as an attack of property. Slavery is similarly covered under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Therefor, all those laws you mentioned would be considered unconstitutional without federal legislation.
As far as child pornography goes, as the case history shows it is extremely difficult to answer the question of what pornography is exactly, and on top of that you have different definitions of who is a child depending on circumstances, so without a clear definition of "child pornography" I can't say one way or the other who should regulate it.
At any rate, this argument is pretty clearly a straw man, and furthermore I highly doubt an officeholder could get reelected by getting up there and saying "Why yes, I think murder is a good idea. So is child pornography and rape."
Is there some way that consumers can organize and make their own demands of the terms that determine who they do business with? Kinda like a union for consumers?
In theory at least, that's the purpose of the Consumers Union.
One, that does to Crawford, Texas what Katrina did to New Orleans, Missisippi, and elsewhere (assuming George W. Bush is still in charge at that point).
Minor quibble here: Dennis Kucinich is not a senator, he is a congressman. (From my district, in fact.) But I couldn't agree more that we need at least a viable third party.
So, can we have your liver then?
Woz made hundreds of millions of dollars. Without Jobs, he wouldn't have even left HP.
On the flip side, however, Jobs and Woz wouldn't have been worth anything if Woz hadn't come up with the Apple 1. That's what made the company work so well: you had marketing expertise (Jobs), technical expertise (Woz), and respect between the two of them.
Like any other company, you need the operations side to have something to sell, and the marketing side to sell it.
Another interesting approach a couple of friends of mine used:
They got married. Apparantly a number of colleges and universities assume that if you're legally married, you no longer have access to your parents' income, and therefor qualify for all sorts of benefits you wouldn't otherwise have.
(I should point out that they were just friends, and the marriage was never consummated, and due to the lack of consummation they had it annulled shortly after graduation.)