I did say ``almost identical''. I don't think we disagree. The mutual affection and respect comes from the ``identical'' part, the friction comes from the ``almost'' part.
10,000 people fell for it. Isn't that rather depressing?
Well, there are 300,000,000 people in the U.S., using big, round numbers. 10,000/300,000,000 = 0.000033333, so a trivial proportion fell for it. If you could only fall for it if you were sufficiently stupid, that would show that they need to be about 3.98 standard deviations below the average (from R):
> pnorm(-3.98788)
[1] 3.333318e-05
>
That's obviously over simplified, but you get the idea: in a Normally distributed population as big as ours, there are going to be a lot of idiots, even if the average is pretty high.
If cruel and unusual is verboten, then cruel is ok, usual is ok, cruel and usual is ok and, of course, unusual is ok. It's the combo of cruel and unusual that we can't do.
That's not an unreasonable interpretation, actually. In the founding fathers' time many cruel punishments were usual, and it's quite plausible to think that they meant only this: ``If the punishment is not the usual one for the crime, it must not combine cruelty (or perhaps an unusual degree of cruelty) with novelty.'' If they had meant to prohibit cruel punishment, they would surely have said so!
Some of the founding fathers had interesting ideas on punishment. For example, Jefferson believed that anyone sentenced to more than five years in prison should be executed, since he'd never be able to participate in society again after five years of being brutalized. He didn't seem to think of making prison less brutal.
I wonder if we could get the ACLU to look the other way, just this once, so we could give them an appropriate sentence? Or maybe we could do something that's merely cruel: after all, the constitution prohibits ``cruel and unusual'' punishment, not ``cruel or unusual''. Cruel and usual is obviously ok.
What a pity Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. I'm pretty sure that an appropriate sentence should involve him, and a bottle of chianti.
They must speak a different language over there
on
Beagle 3 Plans Revealed
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· Score: 3, Funny
They must speak a different language over there: it will have ``deadbeat airbags'', and though they call it a beagle, it doesn't have short legs or long ears. Well, the last one was really a dog, so maybe that fits.
I make more than enough to pay my debts, as long as I'm getting it in U.S. dollars. I get excellent insurance on top of that. I don't have to worry about long waits or being ``denied a yearly preventative MRI''. I've read the health stats, and what I've seen backs up the anecdotes: the Canadian system is ok if you're young and healthy (but then you're fine with no insurance!), it often works if you have a life-threatening acute illness. If you are somewhere in between, you often have serious problems, more in some provinces than others.
In the U.S., if you have traditional insurance rather than an HMO, everything is good. Health Canada would be a step down for me. Since my family and I are in excellent health, I'd be willing to take that step if there were other factors, like a stronger Canadian dollar, to balance it out. I really do like the idea of moving South.
In retirement, I'll have a secure pension which includes traditional insurance, and no debts, so I'll be moving South then if not before. I can just commute into Seattle to visit doctors as necessary.
I think that the main difference between them and us is that they talk just a little funny.
The reason that Americans like Canadians and vise versa is that we're almost identical. The reason there's some friction is that we're almost identical.
It should bother you that anybody is leaving for political reasons.
It would bother me if they wanted to leave and couldn't. It would bother me if everybody stayed away for political reasons. Nobody and no country can please everyone. Folks are coming and going for political reasons. That's fine.
However, this will only affect users who have Windows Scripting Host enabled and certain ActiveX controls, according to MessageLabs."
Well, I was going to switch over from Linux to Windows, because I heard Bill Gates said that ``security is our top priority'', but now I think he must have been misquoted. Maybe I'll stick with Linux just a little longer, until Windows gets those last few little bugs ironed out.
I don't think there's any reason to think that there was widespread shenanigans, but this'll help make sure, either way.
I think that any place that used any sort of electronic voting should be made aware that they're going to be under a microscpoe because of it. Complying with lots of FOI requests needs to be an expensive part of the TCO for Diebold machines, and their ilk.
I'm volunteering to help any of them pack their bags. Heck I'll even hold the door open so it don't hit em on the butt on the way out.
Me too, but I'm just as eager to see them come back someday. Sadder-but-wiser ex-expats and immigrants from dictatorships typically make great citizens: they know what's good about the U.S., and that most other places are lacking too much of it.
If you are going to be an expat you need to be ready to deal with the immigration system which is the biggest hassle.
I was interested enough in Canada to look into getting a green card there. With my age and education, they'd give me a green card without a job lined up (I think. Won't be sure unless I apply, of course.). Two things are stopping me: the exchange rate (I have U.S. dollar-denominated debts) and the medical care.
Too bad: I'd love to move to the Vancouver area. The weather gets better as you go farther south, and they have a big Chinese community there.
Acutally, I'm a Canadian that has been planning on moving to California... and help swing the next election back for Hillary.
Well, unless you have been a landed immigrant here for over a year already, you aren't going to be voting in the next election: citizenship takes at least (usually more than) 5 years from the time you get your greencard.
Well, I really meant ``people who've left the U.S. in the last decade or so for political reasons''.
So far (with six replies), two starlets left, two didn't; two geeks have left, one has moved in and two are still thinking about it. Doesn't sound like an exodus to me.
By the way, I'm disappointed in Streisand and Baldwin. So much for keeping your word. Hrmph.
So: if you're a Slashdot reader who moved abroad because of the political situation, please post here, and tell us why, and how it's working out.
We hear a lot of threats to move from silly starlets and disgruntled geeks, but I've never heard of anyone who actually did it.
By the way, if anyone actually did move overseas, we miss you, and you can come back whenever you're ready. We won't wait up, but we'll leave the light on for you.
That's mighty decent of him. After the whine-fest that followed 2000's election, I had been afraid that the Democrats might try to go that route again, but Kerry is showing more character than his enemies gave him credit for. Good.
I have to wonder, though, what went on between Kerry and Edwards. Maybe it went something like this:
Kerry: Well, the writing's on the wall... time to concede.
Edwards [shouting]: Are you crazy? There's a class-action lawsuit here! Dozens of them! We're all going to get rich! We CAN'T concede!
Kerry: John, we have to do the right thing, or we'll end up like Al Gore: the cartoonists will start drawing us with a tin-foil beanie. Besides, we can't drag the country through the mud for nothing.
Edwards: Nothing! [shouting] Do you call tens of thousands of billable hours nothing?
Kerry [motioning to the guards]: John, we're conceding, and you're going to pretend you like it. [muttering] I knew I shouldn't have teamed up with a tort lawyer. I told'em he wouldn't have the right stuff....
So, if Moore's Observation does fail, how bad is it?
We've said recently that as machines get faster, the software gets slower, so the work we have to do doesn't get sped up much (though the expectation for bells and whistles like fancy typesetting go up and up...), so would it really make such a big difference in our lives?
Here's one nifty thing that will break with Moore's Observation: the optimal slack time for large computations. If you're doing large computations, it would suck to see your slack time evaporate!
Just vote for any third party candidate.
That will both scare the Republican and Democratic wings of the big government party.
As long as you vote for either the Repub's or the Democ's, they're both happy, because they all get to keep playing the same old game, at your expense.
... if not democracy, then how exactly do you intend to allow for a reasonable peaceful society to exist?
Any system of government would work just dandy as long as it didn't have enough power to do much of anything. As long as the government has little power, it will be respectable. No one will bribe the dictator/king/elected representative, because he has no power to plunder.
Give any government power, and it becomes corrupt; the more power, the faster and further that goes. This is old news.
So, any system of government will work, as long as it is sufficiently limited.
No system will work if it is not sufficiently limited.
You get almost none of the ``pleasures'' of smoking, and get the stigma of being seen to smoke.
I bet this is much bigger in Europe and Asia than in the U.S., since smoking carries less stigma over there. That's probably why it's being introduced in Germany rather than here.
I want this for my plastics. I mean, my glasses with the plastic lenses which aren't quite as clear as they used to be. This would make life significantly better for all us glasses wearers!
I think that the differences between individuals swamp differences between numbers of languages. My kids learned later than my sister and I did. I'm not sure what affect my wife's genes had: her family doen't talk to kids much, and they don't remember when she started talking.
I've known many multi-lingual children, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't speed them up. Of course, many is a few dozen, and I don't have any hard data, anyway, but I do think that if it's going to have any affect, it'll be to slow things down.
I'm curious about how you taught your son. My wife speaks only Chinese to the kids, and I speak only English. They learn Mama's language and Baba's language, and when they're little, it really bothers them to speak Mama's language to me, or vise versa.
Slashdot Mirror
I did say ``almost identical''. I don't think we disagree. The mutual affection and respect comes from the ``identical'' part, the friction comes from the ``almost'' part.
Well, there are 300,000,000 people in the U.S., using big, round numbers. 10,000/300,000,000 = 0.000033333, so a trivial proportion fell for it. If you could only fall for it if you were sufficiently stupid, that would show that they need to be about 3.98 standard deviations below the average (from R):
> pnorm(-3.98788)
[1] 3.333318e-05
>
That's obviously over simplified, but you get the idea: in a Normally distributed population as big as ours, there are going to be a lot of idiots, even if the average is pretty high.
That's not an unreasonable interpretation, actually. In the founding fathers' time many cruel punishments were usual, and it's quite plausible to think that they meant only this: ``If the punishment is not the usual one for the crime, it must not combine cruelty (or perhaps an unusual degree of cruelty) with novelty.'' If they had meant to prohibit cruel punishment, they would surely have said so!
Some of the founding fathers had interesting ideas on punishment. For example, Jefferson believed that anyone sentenced to more than five years in prison should be executed, since he'd never be able to participate in society again after five years of being brutalized. He didn't seem to think of making prison less brutal.
What a pity Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. I'm pretty sure that an appropriate sentence should involve him, and a bottle of chianti.
It's almost as if they don't speak english.
In the U.S., if you have traditional insurance rather than an HMO, everything is good. Health Canada would be a step down for me. Since my family and I are in excellent health, I'd be willing to take that step if there were other factors, like a stronger Canadian dollar, to balance it out. I really do like the idea of moving South.
In retirement, I'll have a secure pension which includes traditional insurance, and no debts, so I'll be moving South then if not before. I can just commute into Seattle to visit doctors as necessary.
The reason that Americans like Canadians and vise versa is that we're almost identical. The reason there's some friction is that we're almost identical.
It would bother me if they wanted to leave and couldn't. It would bother me if everybody stayed away for political reasons. Nobody and no country can please everyone. Folks are coming and going for political reasons. That's fine.
Well, I was going to switch over from Linux to Windows, because I heard Bill Gates said that ``security is our top priority'', but now I think he must have been misquoted. Maybe I'll stick with Linux just a little longer, until Windows gets those last few little bugs ironed out.
I think that any place that used any sort of electronic voting should be made aware that they're going to be under a microscpoe because of it. Complying with lots of FOI requests needs to be an expensive part of the TCO for Diebold machines, and their ilk.
Me too, but I'm just as eager to see them come back someday. Sadder-but-wiser ex-expats and immigrants from dictatorships typically make great citizens: they know what's good about the U.S., and that most other places are lacking too much of it.
I was interested enough in Canada to look into getting a green card there. With my age and education, they'd give me a green card without a job lined up (I think. Won't be sure unless I apply, of course.). Two things are stopping me: the exchange rate (I have U.S. dollar-denominated debts) and the medical care.
Too bad: I'd love to move to the Vancouver area. The weather gets better as you go farther south, and they have a big Chinese community there.
Well, unless you have been a landed immigrant here for over a year already, you aren't going to be voting in the next election: citizenship takes at least (usually more than) 5 years from the time you get your greencard.
So far (with six replies), two starlets left, two didn't; two geeks have left, one has moved in and two are still thinking about it. Doesn't sound like an exodus to me.
By the way, I'm disappointed in Streisand and Baldwin. So much for keeping your word. Hrmph.
We hear a lot of threats to move from silly starlets and disgruntled geeks, but I've never heard of anyone who actually did it.
By the way, if anyone actually did move overseas, we miss you, and you can come back whenever you're ready. We won't wait up, but we'll leave the light on for you.
I have to wonder, though, what went on between Kerry and Edwards. Maybe it went something like this:
Kerry: Well, the writing's on the wall ... time to concede.
Edwards [shouting]: Are you crazy? There's a class-action lawsuit here! Dozens of them! We're all going to get rich! We CAN'T concede!
Kerry: John, we have to do the right thing, or we'll end up like Al Gore: the cartoonists will start drawing us with a tin-foil beanie. Besides, we can't drag the country through the mud for nothing.
Edwards: Nothing! [shouting] Do you call tens of thousands of billable hours nothing?
Kerry [motioning to the guards]: John, we're conceding, and you're going to pretend you like it. [muttering] I knew I shouldn't have teamed up with a tort lawyer. I told'em he wouldn't have the right stuff....
We've said recently that as machines get faster, the software gets slower, so the work we have to do doesn't get sped up much (though the expectation for bells and whistles like fancy typesetting go up and up...), so would it really make such a big difference in our lives?
Here's one nifty thing that will break with Moore's Observation: the optimal slack time for large computations. If you're doing large computations, it would suck to see your slack time evaporate!
Anyone know of any Libre anti-spyware for Windows? I don't use MS products except at work, so don't have to worry about such things.
As long as you vote for either the Repub's or the Democ's, they're both happy, because they all get to keep playing the same old game, at your expense.
Any system of government would work just dandy as long as it didn't have enough power to do much of anything. As long as the government has little power, it will be respectable. No one will bribe the dictator/king/elected representative, because he has no power to plunder.
Give any government power, and it becomes corrupt; the more power, the faster and further that goes. This is old news.
So, any system of government will work, as long as it is sufficiently limited.
No system will work if it is not sufficiently limited.
I bet this is much bigger in Europe and Asia than in the U.S., since smoking carries less stigma over there. That's probably why it's being introduced in Germany rather than here.
Monte Python didn't make it sound good, but they made it sound as if it didn't have anything to do with email.
I just wonder if it's antireflective, too?
We just ordered a bunch of 4X DVD burners here at work. If we buy it, it's obsolete. I guess that's what you get for using computers.
I've known many multi-lingual children, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't speed them up. Of course, many is a few dozen, and I don't have any hard data, anyway, but I do think that if it's going to have any affect, it'll be to slow things down.
I'm curious about how you taught your son. My wife speaks only Chinese to the kids, and I speak only English. They learn Mama's language and Baba's language, and when they're little, it really bothers them to speak Mama's language to me, or vise versa.