Three other reasons the VP matters: 1. VP's can end up being the heir apparant after somebody's second term is up e.g. Richard Nixon and Al Gore. (Also off your "died in office" list: Harry Truman) 2. Vice presidents can and do get involved in the administration of the country, at the direction of the president, and almost always have the presidents' ear if they want it. e.g. Al Gore had a lot to do with Clinton's computing technology initiatives, and Dick Cheney had a lot to do with George W Bush's foreign policy. 3. For non-incumbents, the VP pick is the first major decision that the candidate makes. Seeing who they pick goes a long way towards seeing how they'd actually govern, rather than how they say they'd govern.
Monthly release cycle isn't really bad, if your goal is stability. This gives your testing/QA team (you have one, right?) plenty of time to find problems, and developers time to fix any bugs the QA team found.
Shorter release cycles might be better if your goal is responsiveness, but in my experience faster than weekly is asking for trouble.
Also, make sure you have a process for handling those things that do legitimately need to move faster than the release cycle (e.g. "We just discovered a massive bug that's risking exposing customer credit card numbers!"). The process for doing this needs to have people (such as your QA and admin teams) empowered to say "no-go" for fixes like this, to prevent someone from just willy-nilly pushing stuff by declaring it to be in this "faster release cycle" process.
They're a fundamental part of low-level programming, which is exactly what an operating system is.
For higher-level programming, you're right that you're probably better off with languages that don't need you to explicitly manage them, like Java and Python. But at some point, you have to get to something that deals with the hardware, and you really can't do that without using pointers.
1989 was the point where the USSR stopped trying to control the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany. It was definitely the beginning of the end for the Soviets.
Protests without guns that successfully toppled oppressive regimes include, but are not limited to: * Phillipines, 1986 * A whole bunch of countries after the collapse of the USSR: Poland, 1988-9 Hungary, 1988-9 East Germany, 1989 Czechoslovakia, 1989 Bulgaria, 1989 * Serbia, 2000 * Georgia, 2003 * Ukraine, 2004 * Lebanon, 2005 * The "Arab Spring": Tunisia, 2011 Egypt, 2011
The point: You can resist a bad government with nothing but your bodies, your voices, and some semblence of organization, and have a decent chance of success. It's not a 100% chance of success, but neither is violent resistance.
But it's easy to disprove time travel: 1. Anyone capable of time travel at any point in the future would immediately take the opportunity to kill Hitler while he was a no-name artist. 2. Nobody killed Hitler before WWII started. 3. Ergo, there exists no future where time travel exists. Q.E.D.
The comparison between now and 2000 is simply irrelevant to this discussion, since the policies you're complaining about didn't go into effect until fall of 2008 at the earliest (unless you believe that no central bank should exist or do anything if it does exist).
They also have nothing at all to do with socialism, again, unless you think that any attempt at monetary policy is socialism.
What I'm really reading into this is that you're probably somebody with a lot of assets and want to maximize the return for those assets, so like most creditors you want money to hold its value as much as possible. You don't seem to really care about unemployment or the overall health of the economy, which is exactly what central banks like the Fed are supposed to be doing. Their policies aren't necessarily in your short-term interest, but that doesn't make them incorrect.
And it's highly unlikely that Ben Bernanke, appointed to the Fed and made chairman by George W Bush, is a raging socialist who wants to keep Obama in office. The Fed is designed so that a sitting president cannot threaten them in any tangible way, precisely so that they won't be pressured to make a decision that would affect their reelection chances.
Your alarm triggered the shower's heating unit, so the water comes out at a pleasant 108 degrees, exactly your preference.
Or it would have, except that as a prank your roommate grabbed your CID and changed the preferences so that the water now comes out at 35 F (2 C).
As the door closes behind you, you absently wave your phone by the doorbell panel. The embedded RFID chip triggers the locks and security system, and sends a command to start your car.
Meanwhile, a bad guy read your RFID chip yesterday when you passed him going to the restaurant and made a copy. He uses it to unlock your house, sits down at the PC to install a tool that will send your CID and any other identifying information about you to him, figures out where your car is likely to be, closes the door, re-locking the security system and starting your car. A confederate hops in the now-started car, drives a while, replaces the ID transponder currently in the car with one he can control, and leaves.
You quickly swab your nose and throat, and place the samples on the attachment's sensor, then step into the kitchen to make some tea while you wait. In 20 minutes, the results come back, showing a very strong likelihood that you have the seasonal flu. Your results are automatically sent to the CDC, where their algorithms verify your CID and confirm you had contact with several other people now exhibiting symptoms. An antiviral drug is prescribed for you immediately.
In addition, your insurance company knows that you are now sick, and raises your rates accordingly. Also, you notice that when you visit ad-supported web sites, they're all pushing products to help you combat your illness.
There are well placed equities, it's just they are mostly not in USA.
Really? Compare, say, the S&P 500 (US, 25% return this year), the FTSE 100 (Europe, 10% return), ASEAN (Asia, 20% return), which strongly suggests that the USA is a pretty good place to put your money. Gold and silver, as previously discussed, are either flat or dropping, which also strongly suggests that the hyperinflation you're concerned about isn't happening.
I get it: Fiat money is just a piece of paper with no inherent value. The thing is, the social value of a dollar still exists, there's no evidence whatsoever that we're anywhere close to turning into Zimbabwe, and there's lots of evidence that the monetary policies of Bernanke are helping substantially in mitigating the effects of a recession (in fact, if it doesn't, there's no real point in having a Federal Reserve or even a currency). And what will happen (if the Fed is doing its job) is that when the economy recovers, the Fed sells back those assets they bought up back to the open market and may even raise interest rates to cool things down.
For comparison, would you rather be in: A. The United States (7.8% unemployment and dropping slowly), where the Fed cut interest rates and bought up assets like crazy, risking inflating the dollar. B. The UK (8.1% unemployment and basically flat) where the Bank of England cut interest rates from 4.5% to 0.5% in response to the recession, risking inflating the pound. C. Spain (25% unemployment and climbing rapidly), where the European Central Bank is maintaining the value of the Euro at all costs.
The market thinks otherwise. Just thought I'd point that out. Yes, they're conceivably wrong.
If you're going to suggest that the solution is to buy gold instead, you're probably wrong too: The price of gold today is lower in USD than it was in mid-November last year. If there were runaway inflation making all your dollars completely worthless, you'd expect gold to by skyrocketing, but it's not. Likewise, silver peaked on April 30, 2011 and has lost about 30% of its value since then.
So again, where's the runaway inflation caused by made-up dollars flooding the market making US Treasuries worthless?
It still makes no sense to me that Cheney was somehow able to avoid any responsibility for these events.
It makes perfect sense to me: Obama is trying to protect himself from being prosecuted for his crimes by not prosecuting Cheney (and Bush) for their crimes.
The only evidence of WMD programs came from Dick Cheney's special intel unit that didn't have ANY new data.
That's not entirely true: There were somewhat new completely unsupported assertions from a guy named Ahmed Chalabi who probably thought that he was convincing the US to remove Saddam Hussein and put Chalabi in charge.
Also worthy of mention: Colin Powell, when given the intelligence he was initially supposed to present at the UN, reportedly responded with something like "This is bullshit" (and Powell gives the impression of being someone who doesn't normally use that kind of language). The silly stuff about mobile chemical weapons labs and the like was the closest thing that the Bush administration had to hard evidence, and it was all laughably wrong. So wrong that all permanent UNSC members knew it was bogus. An entirely reasonable view of that is that the UNSC was basically a stage prop for a propaganda aimed at the US public.
As far as the geopolitical implications go, the different reactions to Iraq and North Korea made things quite clear: If you don't have WMDs, but you annoy the current US administration, the US will claim you have them and take you out. If you do have WMDs, you can annoy the US all you like and they won't attack you. Among other effects, this means that Iran trying to get a nuke is hardly the act of a madman, but the act of a government trying to protect its territory and people.
If there's any papers in it, there's a good chance you'll find names and addresses.
Imagine a phone call that starts like this: "Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it."
This strategy is in addition to any cameras you might have set up.
Also, we don't need to factor in the war crime of aggression. The case that he's a war criminal is very easy to make: 1. Waterboarding was defined as a crime against humanity by the Allied tribunal in 1945. 2. Ordering a war crime is a war crime. 3. Dick Cheney announced on national television that he led a committee that ordered waterboarding.
Defending Dick Cheney is the moral equivalent of defending Slobodan Milosevic.
It's a model. A model is a hypothesis. The "results" are correlations and as we all know, correlation is not causation.
I agree: The only way to definitely prove that AGW causes the Earth to burn to a crisp is to actually burn the planet to a crisp via greenhouse gas emissions, with no other variables that could affect the result. With an identical control Earth except for the CO2 and methane emissions, so we know that we have isolated the right variable. And double-blinded, so the researchers' biases don't creep in. And then repeat the test under the same conditions, so we know it wasn't just a fluke.
Do you have some spare planets I can use for this test? In the meantime, I'm going to accept the correlation combined with the lab-tested mechanism for one variable of that correlation causing the other variable as the best we can muster.
Slashdot Mirror
Three other reasons the VP matters:
1. VP's can end up being the heir apparant after somebody's second term is up e.g. Richard Nixon and Al Gore. (Also off your "died in office" list: Harry Truman)
2. Vice presidents can and do get involved in the administration of the country, at the direction of the president, and almost always have the presidents' ear if they want it. e.g. Al Gore had a lot to do with Clinton's computing technology initiatives, and Dick Cheney had a lot to do with George W Bush's foreign policy.
3. For non-incumbents, the VP pick is the first major decision that the candidate makes. Seeing who they pick goes a long way towards seeing how they'd actually govern, rather than how they say they'd govern.
"I'll get wood for two hobbits," indeed.
Kinky.
Monthly release cycle isn't really bad, if your goal is stability. This gives your testing/QA team (you have one, right?) plenty of time to find problems, and developers time to fix any bugs the QA team found.
Shorter release cycles might be better if your goal is responsiveness, but in my experience faster than weekly is asking for trouble.
Also, make sure you have a process for handling those things that do legitimately need to move faster than the release cycle (e.g. "We just discovered a massive bug that's risking exposing customer credit card numbers!"). The process for doing this needs to have people (such as your QA and admin teams) empowered to say "no-go" for fixes like this, to prevent someone from just willy-nilly pushing stuff by declaring it to be in this "faster release cycle" process.
In addition, many of the Sealandish nobility also claim citizenship of other nations.
They're a fundamental part of low-level programming, which is exactly what an operating system is.
For higher-level programming, you're right that you're probably better off with languages that don't need you to explicitly manage them, like Java and Python. But at some point, you have to get to something that deals with the hardware, and you really can't do that without using pointers.
Grima, is that you?
Paul Ryan isn't that old. John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Lieberman, on the other hand ...
1989 was the point where the USSR stopped trying to control the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany. It was definitely the beginning of the end for the Soviets.
Protests without guns that successfully toppled oppressive regimes include, but are not limited to:
* Phillipines, 1986
* A whole bunch of countries after the collapse of the USSR: Poland, 1988-9 Hungary, 1988-9 East Germany, 1989 Czechoslovakia, 1989 Bulgaria, 1989
* Serbia, 2000
* Georgia, 2003
* Ukraine, 2004
* Lebanon, 2005
* The "Arab Spring": Tunisia, 2011 Egypt, 2011
The point: You can resist a bad government with nothing but your bodies, your voices, and some semblence of organization, and have a decent chance of success. It's not a 100% chance of success, but neither is violent resistance.
No, not Speedos. Buy Lightspeed Briefs!
But it's easy to disprove time travel:
1. Anyone capable of time travel at any point in the future would immediately take the opportunity to kill Hitler while he was a no-name artist.
2. Nobody killed Hitler before WWII started.
3. Ergo, there exists no future where time travel exists. Q.E.D.
The comparison between now and 2000 is simply irrelevant to this discussion, since the policies you're complaining about didn't go into effect until fall of 2008 at the earliest (unless you believe that no central bank should exist or do anything if it does exist).
They also have nothing at all to do with socialism, again, unless you think that any attempt at monetary policy is socialism.
What I'm really reading into this is that you're probably somebody with a lot of assets and want to maximize the return for those assets, so like most creditors you want money to hold its value as much as possible. You don't seem to really care about unemployment or the overall health of the economy, which is exactly what central banks like the Fed are supposed to be doing. Their policies aren't necessarily in your short-term interest, but that doesn't make them incorrect.
And it's highly unlikely that Ben Bernanke, appointed to the Fed and made chairman by George W Bush, is a raging socialist who wants to keep Obama in office. The Fed is designed so that a sitting president cannot threaten them in any tangible way, precisely so that they won't be pressured to make a decision that would affect their reelection chances.
Relevant to this kind of thinking: "Even in the future, nothing works!" - Dark Helmet
Your alarm triggered the shower's heating unit, so the water comes out at a pleasant 108 degrees, exactly your preference.
Or it would have, except that as a prank your roommate grabbed your CID and changed the preferences so that the water now comes out at 35 F (2 C).
As the door closes behind you, you absently wave your phone by the doorbell panel. The embedded RFID chip triggers the locks and security system, and sends a command to start your car.
Meanwhile, a bad guy read your RFID chip yesterday when you passed him going to the restaurant and made a copy. He uses it to unlock your house, sits down at the PC to install a tool that will send your CID and any other identifying information about you to him, figures out where your car is likely to be, closes the door, re-locking the security system and starting your car. A confederate hops in the now-started car, drives a while, replaces the ID transponder currently in the car with one he can control, and leaves.
You quickly swab your nose and throat, and place the samples on the attachment's sensor, then step into the kitchen to make some tea while you wait. In 20 minutes, the results come back, showing a very strong likelihood that you have the seasonal flu. Your results are automatically sent to the CDC, where their algorithms verify your CID and confirm you had contact with several other people now exhibiting symptoms. An antiviral drug is prescribed for you immediately.
In addition, your insurance company knows that you are now sick, and raises your rates accordingly. Also, you notice that when you visit ad-supported web sites, they're all pushing products to help you combat your illness.
There are well placed equities, it's just they are mostly not in USA.
Really? Compare, say, the S&P 500 (US, 25% return this year), the FTSE 100 (Europe, 10% return), ASEAN (Asia, 20% return), which strongly suggests that the USA is a pretty good place to put your money. Gold and silver, as previously discussed, are either flat or dropping, which also strongly suggests that the hyperinflation you're concerned about isn't happening.
I get it: Fiat money is just a piece of paper with no inherent value. The thing is, the social value of a dollar still exists, there's no evidence whatsoever that we're anywhere close to turning into Zimbabwe, and there's lots of evidence that the monetary policies of Bernanke are helping substantially in mitigating the effects of a recession (in fact, if it doesn't, there's no real point in having a Federal Reserve or even a currency). And what will happen (if the Fed is doing its job) is that when the economy recovers, the Fed sells back those assets they bought up back to the open market and may even raise interest rates to cool things down.
For comparison, would you rather be in:
A. The United States (7.8% unemployment and dropping slowly), where the Fed cut interest rates and bought up assets like crazy, risking inflating the dollar.
B. The UK (8.1% unemployment and basically flat) where the Bank of England cut interest rates from 4.5% to 0.5% in response to the recession, risking inflating the pound.
C. Spain (25% unemployment and climbing rapidly), where the European Central Bank is maintaining the value of the Euro at all costs.
Of-course AFAIC US bonds are junk.
The market thinks otherwise. Just thought I'd point that out. Yes, they're conceivably wrong.
If you're going to suggest that the solution is to buy gold instead, you're probably wrong too: The price of gold today is lower in USD than it was in mid-November last year. If there were runaway inflation making all your dollars completely worthless, you'd expect gold to by skyrocketing, but it's not. Likewise, silver peaked on April 30, 2011 and has lost about 30% of its value since then.
So again, where's the runaway inflation caused by made-up dollars flooding the market making US Treasuries worthless?
If SkyNET developed a conscience
... it would probably shut down Wall St entirely, because you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
It still makes no sense to me that Cheney was somehow able to avoid any responsibility for these events.
It makes perfect sense to me: Obama is trying to protect himself from being prosecuted for his crimes by not prosecuting Cheney (and Bush) for their crimes.
Wouldn't you be more likely to find that on Venus?
I was hoping someone would catch that reference to a typical American case of blind justice.
The only evidence of WMD programs came from Dick Cheney's special intel unit that didn't have ANY new data.
That's not entirely true: There were somewhat new completely unsupported assertions from a guy named Ahmed Chalabi who probably thought that he was convincing the US to remove Saddam Hussein and put Chalabi in charge.
Also worthy of mention: Colin Powell, when given the intelligence he was initially supposed to present at the UN, reportedly responded with something like "This is bullshit" (and Powell gives the impression of being someone who doesn't normally use that kind of language). The silly stuff about mobile chemical weapons labs and the like was the closest thing that the Bush administration had to hard evidence, and it was all laughably wrong. So wrong that all permanent UNSC members knew it was bogus. An entirely reasonable view of that is that the UNSC was basically a stage prop for a propaganda aimed at the US public.
As far as the geopolitical implications go, the different reactions to Iraq and North Korea made things quite clear: If you don't have WMDs, but you annoy the current US administration, the US will claim you have them and take you out. If you do have WMDs, you can annoy the US all you like and they won't attack you. Among other effects, this means that Iran trying to get a nuke is hardly the act of a madman, but the act of a government trying to protect its territory and people.
If there's any papers in it, there's a good chance you'll find names and addresses.
Imagine a phone call that starts like this:
"Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it."
This strategy is in addition to any cameras you might have set up.
Dick Cheney is a war criminal.
Also, we don't need to factor in the war crime of aggression. The case that he's a war criminal is very easy to make:
1. Waterboarding was defined as a crime against humanity by the Allied tribunal in 1945.
2. Ordering a war crime is a war crime.
3. Dick Cheney announced on national television that he led a committee that ordered waterboarding.
Defending Dick Cheney is the moral equivalent of defending Slobodan Milosevic.
At one time, I thought that there should be a fork of Mesa: Maybe "Black Mesa". (That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance)
It's a model. A model is a hypothesis. The "results" are correlations and as we all know, correlation is not causation.
I agree: The only way to definitely prove that AGW causes the Earth to burn to a crisp is to actually burn the planet to a crisp via greenhouse gas emissions, with no other variables that could affect the result. With an identical control Earth except for the CO2 and methane emissions, so we know that we have isolated the right variable. And double-blinded, so the researchers' biases don't creep in. And then repeat the test under the same conditions, so we know it wasn't just a fluke.
Do you have some spare planets I can use for this test? In the meantime, I'm going to accept the correlation combined with the lab-tested mechanism for one variable of that correlation causing the other variable as the best we can muster.