The reason Americans have soaring gas prices(as opposed to just rising) gas prices, is largely because they haven't paid market rates for petrol in a long long time.
Petrol got expensive recently, it got expensive everywhere recently, some of this has to do with the fact that OPEC hates everyone, but most of it is that a lot of third world countries that didn't use oil previously are expanding and now using an awful lot of it.
The democrats have pretty much nothing to do with this, and like pretty much every other government in the world, they can't do squat about it.
They can cut the fuel excise, but that pays for an awful lot of the roads we drive on and they'd have to recover that tax somewhere, plus it'd only be a one off reduction and not something they could do again.
They can mandate more efficient standards for cars, but Americans don't want tiny European style cars, so the only way that'll pass is if the whole country bleeds from the wallet for a few years first.
The current batch of democrats have an awful lot to be held accountable for (mostly having to do with allowing the current administration to stamp all over civil rights for the last 8 years, and of course having given us really shitty candidates for two elections), but the fact that gas costs more isn't their fault.
I'd also argue that as much as I want us out of Iraq, that cutting off funding and leaving the troops out there badly supplied and equipped until a man who has defined his entire political character by not changing his mind even when he's wrong is forced to negotiate would have been irresponsible, but that's up for debate.
And I disagree with that bullshit as much as you do.That sort of behavior does no one any favors, including the footballers(99% of them won't be good enough to make it to the pro level, and they won't be prepared to take advantage of their any scholarship's they might have). Allowing a student who was unable to attend something due to a school activity to make it up is one thing, letting someone pass for nothing is another. I just believe there's a difference between letting someone work their way up to a C(if they work hard), and letting them pass because if they didn't they couldn't play footy.
I suppose we can agree to disagree, and like most agreements to disagree we're disagreeing about totally different things.
I fully believe in most of what you're saying, I just don't believe that this particular instance is an instance of what you believe.
I think that it sounds bad because it's like "oh, we're going to give our kids 50 free points", and that sounds like something terrible, but in reality all it does is reduce the depth of an F, which I'm all for.
I don't believe in all this everyone's good at everything nonsense any more than you do, and if they started passing kids who didn't deserve it, I'd be as pissed as you are.
I just think that reducing the depth of an F(after all when a zero is an F as is a 59 so in the end it's still an F) so that kids who are motivated can pull themselves out of failure, which would otherwise be impossible isn't a bad thing.
I'm not looking to give people something they didn't deserve, I just believe that giving kids the opportunity to work their way out of the hole(which is what this does, and not at the expense of already overworked teachers like make up work would) through discipline and hard work, isn't a bad thing.
I mean do we really want to teach our 13 year olds that once you fail you're done and you may as well stop trying or do we want to teach them that with hard work you can improve your situation.
Seems to me like the first will result in a lot more idiocracy than the second.
I know where you're coming from, this just isn't the example of it that you think it is.
If you went to a school which used GPA you were doing this anyway, an F has the same value if you get a 0 or you get a 59%.
There's no reason why academically F should be 60 points deep whereas any other grade on the scale only has to increase 10 points(20 for an average) to move upon notch.
The only students whose efforts get cheapened by this, are the kids who earned 50% on their own, because they could very well have done nothing and ended up in exactly the same situation.
The kid who gets this 50%, has a maximum potential grade of 75%, which if you're lucky is a C or C+. To get that grade this kid would have had to earn 100% for the entire second semester, and has earned that C+.
Your extra efforts have allowed you to get B's or A's, which this kid cannot possibly do.
The regular C students have been able to earn this grade with substantially less work, so they haven't been cheated.
You're not looking at giving a kid a C, or even a passing grade, you're giving a kid the possibility of earning a passing grade, without which the kid may as well not turn up, and is likely to get into a situation where they're going to cause you a lot more problems in the future.
As for make up work, your only options in that department are to either cap the potential grade the kid can earn at 50%, or else you're giving people free redo's and the potential to get better grades than the kids who did their work, which does cheapen other kids academic achievement.
Add to that the fact that if the kid lives a reasonable distance from the school it's not particularly workable and that makeup work means the teachers have to do even more unpaid out of school hours work, and you're looking at a rather useless situation.
This plan does not pass kids.
It does not allow kids who did poorly the first semester to get B's or A's or to get grades with less effort than kids who worked hard all year.
It merely makes the range of failure 10 points like every other grade as opposed to 60 points like it was, preventing kids from getting so far in the hole they can't get out again.
The only people who get screwed are the people sitting on a fully earned 50%, and realistically even they're better off if at least some of failing classmates focus on school instead of distracting them.
Well personally I'd rather the kid spend the second half the semester working their ass off and not distracting the other kids as opposed to quite sensibly sitting their for 5 months with nothing productive to do and causing everyone a head-ache.
This isn't about passing kids who don't deserve it, a 50% isn't passing. The whole point of something like this is to reduce the depth of an F so that it's actually possible to dig out of it.
You're not going to get yourself an A you didn't deserve out of this, you might get a B if you work your ass off, and realistically you're probably going to get a C or a D. If you slack off the second semester you're going to get an F just like you did the first semester(simple math says that in about the best case scenario you'd have to get yourself something on the order of a 70% the second semester to even pass, which isn't an insubstantial improvement even if had a genuine 50%.
The problem with your attitude is that these people don't go away. They don't miraculously disappear from your life when they flunk out of school. You can let them rot and say "I earned my grades, you didn't so go screw yourself", but they don't go away. They grow up, and they take shitty jobs, or they become criminals and steal the shit you earned. Then they vote in elections, and they generally don't have particularly high opinions of education, or of folks like you.
Far better to try and help them when they're just kids who maybe don't know any better as opposed to when it's too late.
We're talking about high school here, you don't get a lot of class choices in high school and you've got to pass a certain section of them.
Generally speaking for skills which build on other skills they'd have to go back and learn that material anyway in order to pass the second half, they'd just have motivation to do so.
UAC is no different than any of the number of dialogs which KDE, Gnome, etc, use to notify the user that they're requesting elevated rights.
They're even so incredibly intrusive that people actually have to pay attention to them, and the question is always very simple, application X is requesting administrative rights, should it have them.
That's actually a fairly good use of pop-ups.
The problem with UAC is two fold.
Too much software developed for Windows relies on having admin rights to the box that it doesn't need and shouldn't have.
UAC lacks a capability to say "I know this program is requesting admin rights, I know it will always request admin rights, until I tell you not to, let it request admin rights.
Fixing either of those two things, or ideally both, would make UAC quite a good use of pop-ups. Sending a message saying that there was a memory read failure at address X as in TFA on the other hand is a very bad use of pop-ups. I know what that means and I still don't care. I'm not debugging the app, so aside from running a memory test(for which I still don't need to know what the memory address is) I'm not going to do much with the information.
Yes, I'm probably going to notice that the alert isn't really an alert, and maybe some work has to be done to make it harder to fake alerts, but the bigger issue is showing users things that don't matter to them, because they'll click through those things, and get in the habit of clicking through everything else as well.
Well yes, but this thread of discussion involves a "significant" scale.
A bunch of wealthy educated greek men who have more in common than not is not a significant scale.
Realistically, Athenian democracy wasn't a whole heck of a lot different than what we have now, they just had a slightly larger congress, and no one voted for them.
The idea, and whether it works or not is debatable, is to not discourage kids from trying.
In the old system, if you tank badly enough in the beginning you have to do extraordinarily well to get a passing grade.
With rare exceptions, most kids who are going to get less than a 50% on something are never going to get the grades in the second semester that will give them a passing grade.
They might be capable of improvement, and hard work may help them, but excluding certain exceptional cases(i.e. good student with something major going on in their life) which should be handled in other ways, they're not likely to get 100%.
If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
This system, and again, implementation may not give this result, is designed so that if a kid screws up the first half of the year, that they still have the opportunity to at least pass if they work hard and apply themselves.
50% isn't a passing grade, so it's not like they're going to skim through, all it does is reduce the depth of a failing grade so that kids can pull themselves out of it.
A good analogy would be being under 6 feet of water as opposed to 600. If you don't do something about it, you're still going to drown, but it's possible to swim to the surface.
If implemented correctly, it could ensure that certain members of your "Idiocracy" actually learn something, and maybe improve their knowledge, this is a good thing.
Of course that does't mean that this system might not be flawed(haven't read the details) or that it's implementation may not cause it to run counter to the intention, but the intention is good and has nothing to do with lowering standards or any sort of "idiocracy".
When people have no hope of improving their lives, they don't try to improve them. You can't, and probably shouldn't, improve someones life for them, but you can give them a hand up so that when they do try to improve themselves(and I mean genuinely try) that they are rewarded for it.
Well in Microsoft's defense, the Vista brand has been so thoroughly(and quite often unfairly) trashed that they probably have no real choice but to rename it.
Everyone loves to hate Vista, they hate it even when they've never even used it, or because they don't want to change.
I get it, I used to be one those people who the second they installed XP would turn off all the prettiness and change the menus back to the old style.
Eventually my PC got powerful enough to not bother about the prettiness, and a couple of years ago, I finally had to actually use the new start menu on a 2k3 machine and I discovered that it's actually pretty darned good, so I now use it on my XP machines(and my Vista machine).
I still turn off the new style control panel of course, but that's not so much an issue that the new style is bad, but that categorizing the contents isn't really necessary when you already know what you're looking for.
As I've said before, Vista is exactly like XP was when it came out.
Some hardware you love does't work, and some hardware manufacturers won't update the drivers because they want you to buy a new one.
It's more resource intensive because it does a lot of new things.
Some of the interfaces you were really accustomed to, no longer work exactly the way they used to.
It's not a huge upgrade on the previous version if the previous version is meeting your needs.
Vista will probably be skipped by most people and most companies, not because it's a bad OS(pretty much everything that's true of Vista was true of XP when it came out and how many people would refuse XP in favour of 2k without a specific reason), but because it's been trashed to kingdom come.
It deserved some of that trashing. Realistically UAC should have contained a control panel which allowed you to say at the application level that certain apps were going to ask for permissions that, yes they probably shouldn't need, but did, so stop asking.
Windows 7 will come around, it'll be most of what was in Vista(just as XP was most of what was in 2k) with some fixes and maybe they'll pressure some of the folks like HP to provide drivers for their older hardware, but stuff like the UI won't change much.
It's not about being stuck-up, or having unreasonable expectations, it's about trust.
Having an e-mail domain is a bit like having a shop front. It's not tremendously hard, nor is it proof against fraud, but it gives people the feeling of permanency that enhances trust and the client's willingness to give you money.
That said, if you work for a company, any e-mail address not associated with that company will look equally unprofessional (if your e-mail service is so bad that you won't use it, then your company is unreliable on a fairly simple task), so the OP is probably not going to improve his situation.
My situation is of course a little bit different, as I work in Australia, and in a slightly smaller market.
I work a 38 hour salaried week with overtime when it's needed but not usually more than 45 hours a week and only when I have a big task to finish. In order to be fired, they have to either eliminate my position(which they're not going to do), or provide me with 3 written warnings concerning why I am being fired, and then I qualify for unemployment if it happens.
On the down side, cost of living here is fairly high, and the rental/housing market is pretty tight, so I can't realistically afford to not work for more than a couple of months unless I'm making substantially more money.
In this country you also are in the situation where if you contract for just one company for more than 6 months you are legally considered an employee of that company, and have to pay all relevant taxes and fees.
I specialize in Integration and Web Interfaces. I could probably get another IT job tomorrow if I had to, but I couldn't guarantee myself contract work for 12 months of the year(things where I live scale down quite a bit around Christmas time, and at EoFY(June), so you can't always guarantee work.
YMMV, I'm just saying that the whole "just become your own boss and you'll be a billionaire" line is BS, and live a stress free live.
Granted, being your own boss is pretty much the only way to become a billionaire, but contracting is often times not a whole lot better than working full time, and you shouldn't expect it to miraculously fix your problems.
That's not to say that quitting a shitty job isn't a good thing to do, just that all of a sudden becoming your own boss doesn't make everything better, because you're not your own boss because no one who relies on someone else as a source of money really is (and that includes the CEO's of pretty much every company you can think of).
It's not really an issue of intelligence, it's an issue of ideology.
I think DRM is stupid, pointless, and generally only going to lose you customers, but I don't passionately hate it, because, to be honest life's too short.
It makes the studio execs feel better, it doesn't really inconvenience me, so why should I care, why should anyone care?
DRM is stupid, but it doesn't really cause any problems most of the time, and when companies cross the line and actually inconvenience people they get their asses handed to them.
You obviously think that DRM is philosophically wrong, as do a lot of people on Slashdot. Oddly enough at the same time, a lot of people on slashdot seem to think that working 60+ hours a week is perfectly normal, and that there's nothing wrong with it.
From my perspective I'll have my 38 hour week and you can rail against DRM, which doesn't actually affect you.
Incorporation is great under certain circumstances, it can also be a hell of a lot of stress.
There's good times and there's bad times, and contractors don't generally get much work in the bad times.
Your skill set has to be sufficiently in demand to either guarantee you pretty close to full time work, or for you to get paid sufficiently above permanent rates to make up for the time you're not working. This demand is often substantially higher than the demand necessary to get a regular job.
You have to have either a really flexible financial situation, or a partner with an income you can live on.
Most companies are perfectly willing to throw extra work at a contractor because, well they're paying for it, so you often end up more stressed.
Add to that the fact that in a lot of countries if you work as a contractor for one company for too long you're considered legally a full time employee and have to pay all the relevant payroll taxes anyway.
For my two cents, if you're young, and single, or financially stable on your wife/husband's income. If your skill set is really hot at the moment, or if your specialty is in a field where generally you're only needed for a small portion of the project life cycle, then go ahead and contract.
If these things aren't true, it can be a hell of a lot worse than doing a regular old job, even if the pay during the good times is better. Being your own boss isn't sleeping in till noon and taking days off when you want, it's working for someone else who quite justifiable does't give a rats about you, and without the security of a regular position.
I think the solution to this is a good search tool, and proper weighting of articles.
I think most of the point is that the current methodologies for deletion are flawed and so we can't delete using them.
Notable is a rather farcical concept in this space. Either no one cares about it in which case it takes up no real resources so why delete it, or lots of people care about it in which case it's notable by definition, even if the editors don't think so.
Lack of veracity, while technically a good tool for culling content is sort of difficult to determine.
Just because something has a lot of links you can follow doesn't make it true, and the lack of links doesn't necessarily make something false. It does make a difference to whether something can be verified, but the mere presence or lack of those links shows that to the reader.
If you really want to keep things like blogs, or even lists(to some degree) off wikipedia, then you'd be much better off defining exactly what an article is, and saying that you can only have articles within the system. That at least would be a fair and implementable deletion policy.
I think that generally speaking my argument against deletionism isn't so much that nothing should ever be deleted, but merely nearly all current methodologies for determining that something should be deleted are sufficiently flawed that the costs of implementing them(loss of good information) outweighs the costs of leaving them in the system(minor system overhead and having articles which can be marked as inadequately sourced and which may or may not be factual).
There is an aspect of humanity to Wikipedia's problems.
It's also true that that sort of thing is present in all editorial processes.
My biggest complaint with Wikipedia(aside from the fact that there seems to be no official method of discouraging the worst of this behavior) is really that there seems to be a core group of Wikipedians who have a vision for what they think Wikipedia ought to be, and that this vision is completely at odds with what people actually use Wikipedia for.
Wikipedia is never going to be an on-line version of Britannica. This is mostly because the world doesn't need an on-line version of Britannica, and that if it did, Britannica would be perfectly capable of doing it themselves.
What the world needs is a place where you can look up all the stuff that doesn't get into encyclopaedia's. A lot of this stuff is trivial and non-notable, and of course there's some issues with reliability and truth, but that's what the citation system is for.
Wikipedia can be that place where you can find out all the alternate points of view, look at what they use as citations(if anything) and judge them. It can do this because realistically it doesn't cost them anything to host information no one looks at and any information people are interested in is fundamentally notable by the very definition of the word.
Wikipedia can, and should, host pages on pretty much everything that can't be proven false. Anything that also can't be proven true, should be marked as such, but there is no harm, and possible a lot of good in it being there.
Certainly some things ought to be deleted, or at least sidelined, but that should mostly be about crap writing as opposed to something not being important. If someone sends something in which is totally unreadable, and no one is sufficiently interested in updating it, by all means delete it, but if someone puts together a well written, well thought out article about something that you think doesn't matter, let it lie.
The problem with things being "dark" is that you get Doom 3 where everything is really pretty and uses lots of video resources, but you can't see any of it because it's dark, or you get Quake which was the brownest game ever.
Making truly gritty environments is rather difficult and uses a lot of system resources to do properly. A truly gritty environment for a game like this wouldn't just be gray walls and shadows. A truly gritty environment would be whatever wonderful shiny, colorful environment the place was originally, covered in dust, ash, and general damage.
That's the ideal Diablo environment, the beautiful temple of light corrupted and destroyed, not some dingy dark cave.
Unfortunately doing that is somewhat technically difficult, and personally I'm sick to death of dark dingy dungeon crawlers.
I didn't say that there weren't elites in Europe. I didn't even strictly say that the Europeans were really socialist.
Every place has powerful elites which trap most of the money.
My point was that providing the little people with certain protections does't make you socialist and the fact that if your government buys out private companies and provides welfare to the rich doesn't make you a free market champion.
By not understanding the difference between wanting universal health care and being Joseph Stalin, the citizenry of the United States has created the last 8 years.
The current financial melt down is basically a direct result of the fact that American's believe that any sort of market regulation or social services whatsoever would make them communists.
Every single attempt to provide a fairer society in the United States is written off as being "Socialist" by people who don't even understand what being "Socialist" is.
Objecting to policy because you object to it is one thing, but tarring everything with the "Socialist" brush just shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whether the government sells off the current bailouts or not is really rather immaterial. The point is that our "free market" didn't work. It's not the free market if in order to save the country from Anarchy the tax payers have to bail out the arrogant greedy bastards every so often. That's not the free market, it's more socialist than anything any US presidential candidate has ever suggested. Just because the rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed doesn't mean it's not socialism it just means it's bad socialism.
I'm fairly certain that support for it does exist, at least for the purposes of getting a proper warrant.
It's questionable if you can prove the police had ties to the person in question, and of course if you want to use the evidence in question in a trial(as opposed to an excuse to search the premisises) I believe you would need the person who aquired it to testify as to its veracity.
That person would then be in for a world of hurt as they could be and would be charged with any crimes they commited in obtaining the information.
I think the principle is the same as a whistle blower, if someone from a company brings the police information it isn't illegal search and seizur.
It may be workplace theft, malfeasance, any number of other things, but only for the person who obtained it.
The US political system does not allow you to vote for a third party.
If you vote for a third party, you may as well vote for whichever of the two candidates you hate the most because that's what you're doing.
Voting for a third party does not, never has, and never will, send a message. The two major parties are well aware of what the outliers in their party want. They don't care. Democratic candidates are not going to move further left, the Republicans are not going to move any further right, no matter if you vote for a Pat Buchanan or a Ralph Nader.
They're not going to do this because catering to the lunatic fringe loses you the middle which is where elections are determined. No one gives a rats if you vote for a lunatic fringe party because catering more towards your ideology would lose them the election faster than losing your vote.
As a side note, before you start throwing around the word "Socialism", learn what it means. By any global standard, Obama is not even remotely socialist. He believes in things like universal health care, but that's not socialism, it's just universal health care. If you don't agree with universal health care say you disagree with it, but don't try to claim that it's socialist and bury it under the "I hate the commies" pile.
You might also want to consider that the current Republican Administration currently owns controlling shares in the largest insurance company in the country, as well as two major investment bankers.
The "free market" ideals of the current government have forced them to take a more "socialist" control of the economy than any previous government in US history, just to fix up their mistakes.
Bandwidth is not free, and processing is not cheap, but storage(when you're talking about text) is virtually unlimited.
64,000 pages, even if they were full of largish images would take up at worst a few hundred megs of disk space(and that'd basically involve every page being full of images), which these days basically costs nothing.
There would also be some additional processing requirements for the search, though even that would be rather minimal.
Any additional substantial bandwidth or processing costs would only exist if there is a large demand for the content within those pages, and if a large number of people are interested in the topic then it is obviously notable.
By this logic, it costs wikipedia virtually nothing to host non notable material and anything it costs them anything measurable to host is popular and therefor notable.
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Petrol got expensive recently, it got expensive everywhere recently, some of this has to do with the fact that OPEC hates everyone, but most of it is that a lot of third world countries that didn't use oil previously are expanding and now using an awful lot of it.
The democrats have pretty much nothing to do with this, and like pretty much every other government in the world, they can't do squat about it.
They can cut the fuel excise, but that pays for an awful lot of the roads we drive on and they'd have to recover that tax somewhere, plus it'd only be a one off reduction and not something they could do again.
They can mandate more efficient standards for cars, but Americans don't want tiny European style cars, so the only way that'll pass is if the whole country bleeds from the wallet for a few years first.
The current batch of democrats have an awful lot to be held accountable for (mostly having to do with allowing the current administration to stamp all over civil rights for the last 8 years, and of course having given us really shitty candidates for two elections), but the fact that gas costs more isn't their fault.
I'd also argue that as much as I want us out of Iraq, that cutting off funding and leaving the troops out there badly supplied and equipped until a man who has defined his entire political character by not changing his mind even when he's wrong is forced to negotiate would have been irresponsible, but that's up for debate.
And I disagree with that bullshit as much as you do.That sort of behavior does no one any favors, including the footballers(99% of them won't be good enough to make it to the pro level, and they won't be prepared to take advantage of their any scholarship's they might have). Allowing a student who was unable to attend something due to a school activity to make it up is one thing, letting someone pass for nothing is another.
I just believe there's a difference between letting someone work their way up to a C(if they work hard), and letting them pass because if they didn't they couldn't play footy.
I fully believe in most of what you're saying, I just don't believe that this particular instance is an instance of what you believe.
I think that it sounds bad because it's like "oh, we're going to give our kids 50 free points", and that sounds like something terrible, but in reality all it does is reduce the depth of an F, which I'm all for.
I don't believe in all this everyone's good at everything nonsense any more than you do, and if they started passing kids who didn't deserve it, I'd be as pissed as you are.
I just think that reducing the depth of an F(after all when a zero is an F as is a 59 so in the end it's still an F) so that kids who are motivated can pull themselves out of failure, which would otherwise be impossible isn't a bad thing.
I'm not looking to give people something they didn't deserve, I just believe that giving kids the opportunity to work their way out of the hole(which is what this does, and not at the expense of already overworked teachers like make up work would) through discipline and hard work, isn't a bad thing.
I mean do we really want to teach our 13 year olds that once you fail you're done and you may as well stop trying or do we want to teach them that with hard work you can improve your situation.
Seems to me like the first will result in a lot more idiocracy than the second.
If you went to a school which used GPA you were doing this anyway, an F has the same value if you get a 0 or you get a 59%.
There's no reason why academically F should be 60 points deep whereas any other grade on the scale only has to increase 10 points(20 for an average) to move upon notch.
The kid who gets this 50%, has a maximum potential grade of 75%, which if you're lucky is a C or C+. To get that grade this kid would have had to earn 100% for the entire second semester, and has earned that C+.
Your extra efforts have allowed you to get B's or A's, which this kid cannot possibly do.
The regular C students have been able to earn this grade with substantially less work, so they haven't been cheated.
You're not looking at giving a kid a C, or even a passing grade, you're giving a kid the possibility of earning a passing grade, without which the kid may as well not turn up, and is likely to get into a situation where they're going to cause you a lot more problems in the future.
As for make up work, your only options in that department are to either cap the potential grade the kid can earn at 50%, or else you're giving people free redo's and the potential to get better grades than the kids who did their work, which does cheapen other kids academic achievement.
Add to that the fact that if the kid lives a reasonable distance from the school it's not particularly workable and that makeup work means the teachers have to do even more unpaid out of school hours work, and you're looking at a rather useless situation.
This plan does not pass kids.
It does not allow kids who did poorly the first semester to get B's or A's or to get grades with less effort than kids who worked hard all year.
It merely makes the range of failure 10 points like every other grade as opposed to 60 points like it was, preventing kids from getting so far in the hole they can't get out again.
The only people who get screwed are the people sitting on a fully earned 50%, and realistically even they're better off if at least some of failing classmates focus on school instead of distracting them.
This isn't about passing kids who don't deserve it, a 50% isn't passing. The whole point of something like this is to reduce the depth of an F so that it's actually possible to dig out of it.
You're not going to get yourself an A you didn't deserve out of this, you might get a B if you work your ass off, and realistically you're probably going to get a C or a D. If you slack off the second semester you're going to get an F just like you did the first semester(simple math says that in about the best case scenario you'd have to get yourself something on the order of a 70% the second semester to even pass, which isn't an insubstantial improvement even if had a genuine 50%.
The problem with your attitude is that these people don't go away. They don't miraculously disappear from your life when they flunk out of school. You can let them rot and say "I earned my grades, you didn't so go screw yourself", but they don't go away. They grow up, and they take shitty jobs, or they become criminals and steal the shit you earned. Then they vote in elections, and they generally don't have particularly high opinions of education, or of folks like you.
Far better to try and help them when they're just kids who maybe don't know any better as opposed to when it's too late.
Generally speaking for skills which build on other skills they'd have to go back and learn that material anyway in order to pass the second half, they'd just have motivation to do so.
They're even so incredibly intrusive that people actually have to pay attention to them, and the question is always very simple, application X is requesting administrative rights, should it have them.
That's actually a fairly good use of pop-ups.
The problem with UAC is two fold.
Fixing either of those two things, or ideally both, would make UAC quite a good use of pop-ups. Sending a message saying that there was a memory read failure at address X as in TFA on the other hand is a very bad use of pop-ups. I know what that means and I still don't care. I'm not debugging the app, so aside from running a memory test(for which I still don't need to know what the memory address is) I'm not going to do much with the information.
Yes, I'm probably going to notice that the alert isn't really an alert, and maybe some work has to be done to make it harder to fake alerts, but the bigger issue is showing users things that don't matter to them, because they'll click through those things, and get in the habit of clicking through everything else as well.
A bunch of wealthy educated greek men who have more in common than not is not a significant scale.
Realistically, Athenian democracy wasn't a whole heck of a lot different than what we have now, they just had a slightly larger congress, and no one voted for them.
In the old system, if you tank badly enough in the beginning you have to do extraordinarily well to get a passing grade.
With rare exceptions, most kids who are going to get less than a 50% on something are never going to get the grades in the second semester that will give them a passing grade.
They might be capable of improvement, and hard work may help them, but excluding certain exceptional cases(i.e. good student with something major going on in their life) which should be handled in other ways, they're not likely to get 100%.
If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
This system, and again, implementation may not give this result, is designed so that if a kid screws up the first half of the year, that they still have the opportunity to at least pass if they work hard and apply themselves.
50% isn't a passing grade, so it's not like they're going to skim through, all it does is reduce the depth of a failing grade so that kids can pull themselves out of it.
A good analogy would be being under 6 feet of water as opposed to 600. If you don't do something about it, you're still going to drown, but it's possible to swim to the surface.
If implemented correctly, it could ensure that certain members of your "Idiocracy" actually learn something, and maybe improve their knowledge, this is a good thing.
Of course that does't mean that this system might not be flawed(haven't read the details) or that it's implementation may not cause it to run counter to the intention, but the intention is good and has nothing to do with lowering standards or any sort of "idiocracy".
When people have no hope of improving their lives, they don't try to improve them. You can't, and probably shouldn't, improve someones life for them, but you can give them a hand up so that when they do try to improve themselves(and I mean genuinely try) that they are rewarded for it.
Everyone loves to hate Vista, they hate it even when they've never even used it, or because they don't want to change.
I get it, I used to be one those people who the second they installed XP would turn off all the prettiness and change the menus back to the old style.
Eventually my PC got powerful enough to not bother about the prettiness, and a couple of years ago, I finally had to actually use the new start menu on a 2k3 machine and I discovered that it's actually pretty darned good, so I now use it on my XP machines(and my Vista machine).
I still turn off the new style control panel of course, but that's not so much an issue that the new style is bad, but that categorizing the contents isn't really necessary when you already know what you're looking for.
As I've said before, Vista is exactly like XP was when it came out.
Vista will probably be skipped by most people and most companies, not because it's a bad OS(pretty much everything that's true of Vista was true of XP when it came out and how many people would refuse XP in favour of 2k without a specific reason), but because it's been trashed to kingdom come.
It deserved some of that trashing. Realistically UAC should have contained a control panel which allowed you to say at the application level that certain apps were going to ask for permissions that, yes they probably shouldn't need, but did, so stop asking.
Windows 7 will come around, it'll be most of what was in Vista(just as XP was most of what was in 2k) with some fixes and maybe they'll pressure some of the folks like HP to provide drivers for their older hardware, but stuff like the UI won't change much.
Having an e-mail domain is a bit like having a shop front. It's not tremendously hard, nor is it proof against fraud, but it gives people the feeling of permanency that enhances trust and the client's willingness to give you money.
That said, if you work for a company, any e-mail address not associated with that company will look equally unprofessional (if your e-mail service is so bad that you won't use it, then your company is unreliable on a fairly simple task), so the OP is probably not going to improve his situation.
I work a 38 hour salaried week with overtime when it's needed but not usually more than 45 hours a week and only when I have a big task to finish. In order to be fired, they have to either eliminate my position(which they're not going to do), or provide me with 3 written warnings concerning why I am being fired, and then I qualify for unemployment if it happens.
On the down side, cost of living here is fairly high, and the rental/housing market is pretty tight, so I can't realistically afford to not work for more than a couple of months unless I'm making substantially more money.
In this country you also are in the situation where if you contract for just one company for more than 6 months you are legally considered an employee of that company, and have to pay all relevant taxes and fees.
I specialize in Integration and Web Interfaces. I could probably get another IT job tomorrow if I had to, but I couldn't guarantee myself contract work for 12 months of the year(things where I live scale down quite a bit around Christmas time, and at EoFY(June), so you can't always guarantee work.
YMMV, I'm just saying that the whole "just become your own boss and you'll be a billionaire" line is BS, and live a stress free live.
Granted, being your own boss is pretty much the only way to become a billionaire, but contracting is often times not a whole lot better than working full time, and you shouldn't expect it to miraculously fix your problems.
That's not to say that quitting a shitty job isn't a good thing to do, just that all of a sudden becoming your own boss doesn't make everything better, because you're not your own boss because no one who relies on someone else as a source of money really is (and that includes the CEO's of pretty much every company you can think of).
Most people don't have that problem because their hardware does what they want it to do(play movies).
I think DRM is stupid, pointless, and generally only going to lose you customers, but I don't passionately hate it, because, to be honest life's too short.
It makes the studio execs feel better, it doesn't really inconvenience me, so why should I care, why should anyone care?
DRM is stupid, but it doesn't really cause any problems most of the time, and when companies cross the line and actually inconvenience people they get their asses handed to them.
You obviously think that DRM is philosophically wrong, as do a lot of people on Slashdot. Oddly enough at the same time, a lot of people on slashdot seem to think that working 60+ hours a week is perfectly normal, and that there's nothing wrong with it.
From my perspective I'll have my 38 hour week and you can rail against DRM, which doesn't actually affect you.
There's good times and there's bad times, and contractors don't generally get much work in the bad times.
Your skill set has to be sufficiently in demand to either guarantee you pretty close to full time work, or for you to get paid sufficiently above permanent rates to make up for the time you're not working. This demand is often substantially higher than the demand necessary to get a regular job.
You have to have either a really flexible financial situation, or a partner with an income you can live on.
Most companies are perfectly willing to throw extra work at a contractor because, well they're paying for it, so you often end up more stressed.
Add to that the fact that in a lot of countries if you work as a contractor for one company for too long you're considered legally a full time employee and have to pay all the relevant payroll taxes anyway.
For my two cents, if you're young, and single, or financially stable on your wife/husband's income. If your skill set is really hot at the moment, or if your specialty is in a field where generally you're only needed for a small portion of the project life cycle, then go ahead and contract.
If these things aren't true, it can be a hell of a lot worse than doing a regular old job, even if the pay during the good times is better. Being your own boss isn't sleeping in till noon and taking days off when you want, it's working for someone else who quite justifiable does't give a rats about you, and without the security of a regular position.
I think most of the point is that the current methodologies for deletion are flawed and so we can't delete using them.
Notable is a rather farcical concept in this space. Either no one cares about it in which case it takes up no real resources so why delete it, or lots of people care about it in which case it's notable by definition, even if the editors don't think so.
Lack of veracity, while technically a good tool for culling content is sort of difficult to determine.
Just because something has a lot of links you can follow doesn't make it true, and the lack of links doesn't necessarily make something false. It does make a difference to whether something can be verified, but the mere presence or lack of those links shows that to the reader.
If you really want to keep things like blogs, or even lists(to some degree) off wikipedia, then you'd be much better off defining exactly what an article is, and saying that you can only have articles within the system. That at least would be a fair and implementable deletion policy.
I think that generally speaking my argument against deletionism isn't so much that nothing should ever be deleted, but merely nearly all current methodologies for determining that something should be deleted are sufficiently flawed that the costs of implementing them(loss of good information) outweighs the costs of leaving them in the system(minor system overhead and having articles which can be marked as inadequately sourced and which may or may not be factual).
It's also true that that sort of thing is present in all editorial processes.
My biggest complaint with Wikipedia(aside from the fact that there seems to be no official method of discouraging the worst of this behavior) is really that there seems to be a core group of Wikipedians who have a vision for what they think Wikipedia ought to be, and that this vision is completely at odds with what people actually use Wikipedia for.
Wikipedia is never going to be an on-line version of Britannica. This is mostly because the world doesn't need an on-line version of Britannica, and that if it did, Britannica would be perfectly capable of doing it themselves.
What the world needs is a place where you can look up all the stuff that doesn't get into encyclopaedia's. A lot of this stuff is trivial and non-notable, and of course there's some issues with reliability and truth, but that's what the citation system is for.
Wikipedia can be that place where you can find out all the alternate points of view, look at what they use as citations(if anything) and judge them. It can do this because realistically it doesn't cost them anything to host information no one looks at and any information people are interested in is fundamentally notable by the very definition of the word.
Wikipedia can, and should, host pages on pretty much everything that can't be proven false. Anything that also can't be proven true, should be marked as such, but there is no harm, and possible a lot of good in it being there.
Certainly some things ought to be deleted, or at least sidelined, but that should mostly be about crap writing as opposed to something not being important. If someone sends something in which is totally unreadable, and no one is sufficiently interested in updating it, by all means delete it, but if someone puts together a well written, well thought out article about something that you think doesn't matter, let it lie.
Making truly gritty environments is rather difficult and uses a lot of system resources to do properly. A truly gritty environment for a game like this wouldn't just be gray walls and shadows. A truly gritty environment would be whatever wonderful shiny, colorful environment the place was originally, covered in dust, ash, and general damage.
That's the ideal Diablo environment, the beautiful temple of light corrupted and destroyed, not some dingy dark cave.
Unfortunately doing that is somewhat technically difficult, and personally I'm sick to death of dark dingy dungeon crawlers.
Every place has powerful elites which trap most of the money.
My point was that providing the little people with certain protections does't make you socialist and the fact that if your government buys out private companies and provides welfare to the rich doesn't make you a free market champion.
By not understanding the difference between wanting universal health care and being Joseph Stalin, the citizenry of the United States has created the last 8 years.
The current financial melt down is basically a direct result of the fact that American's believe that any sort of market regulation or social services whatsoever would make them communists.
Every single attempt to provide a fairer society in the United States is written off as being "Socialist" by people who don't even understand what being "Socialist" is.
Objecting to policy because you object to it is one thing, but tarring everything with the "Socialist" brush just shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whether the government sells off the current bailouts or not is really rather immaterial. The point is that our "free market" didn't work. It's not the free market if in order to save the country from Anarchy the tax payers have to bail out the arrogant greedy bastards every so often. That's not the free market, it's more socialist than anything any US presidential candidate has ever suggested. Just because the rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed doesn't mean it's not socialism it just means it's bad socialism.
It's questionable if you can prove the police had ties to the person in question, and of course if you want to use the evidence in question in a trial(as opposed to an excuse to search the premisises) I believe you would need the person who aquired it to testify as to its veracity.
That person would then be in for a world of hurt as they could be and would be charged with any crimes they commited in obtaining the information.
I think the principle is the same as a whistle blower, if someone from a company brings the police information it isn't illegal search and seizur.
It may be workplace theft, malfeasance, any number of other things, but only for the person who obtained it.
If you vote for a third party, you may as well vote for whichever of the two candidates you hate the most because that's what you're doing.
Voting for a third party does not, never has, and never will, send a message. The two major parties are well aware of what the outliers in their party want. They don't care. Democratic candidates are not going to move further left, the Republicans are not going to move any further right, no matter if you vote for a Pat Buchanan or a Ralph Nader.
They're not going to do this because catering to the lunatic fringe loses you the middle which is where elections are determined. No one gives a rats if you vote for a lunatic fringe party because catering more towards your ideology would lose them the election faster than losing your vote.
As a side note, before you start throwing around the word "Socialism", learn what it means. By any global standard, Obama is not even remotely socialist. He believes in things like universal health care, but that's not socialism, it's just universal health care. If you don't agree with universal health care say you disagree with it, but don't try to claim that it's socialist and bury it under the "I hate the commies" pile.
You might also want to consider that the current Republican Administration currently owns controlling shares in the largest insurance company in the country, as well as two major investment bankers.
The "free market" ideals of the current government have forced them to take a more "socialist" control of the economy than any previous government in US history, just to fix up their mistakes.
Bandwidth is not free, and processing is not cheap, but storage(when you're talking about text) is virtually unlimited.
64,000 pages, even if they were full of largish images would take up at worst a few hundred megs of disk space(and that'd basically involve every page being full of images), which these days basically costs nothing.
There would also be some additional processing requirements for the search, though even that would be rather minimal.
Any additional substantial bandwidth or processing costs would only exist if there is a large demand for the content within those pages, and if a large number of people are interested in the topic then it is obviously notable.
By this logic, it costs wikipedia virtually nothing to host non notable material and anything it costs them anything measurable to host is popular and therefor notable.
Cursed wireless keyboard and low battery, it does that sometimes, misses letters :(