I'm not going to say it was perfect, but it was a fairly minimalist site, completely free, that had people answering questions, in a not unreasonable percentage of the cases actually good answers. I'm not actually sure what happened in the meantime, only that I forgot about it entirely, probably around 1999 or so, stumbled upon it a few years later (2003? 2004?), and sometime in between it had morphed into total crap.
Academia as a whole is fairly left-leaning, but economics departments are probably the most conservative field of academia. Where do you think the underpinnings of the libertarian philosophy were carried out? In university economics departments, in the U.S. centered around the University of Chicago's.
Of course, it depends on what kind of conservatism you're looking for. If you're looking for free-market, minimal-regulation, efficient-capitalism, free-trade sorts of conservatism, it's not only still present but probably the dominant position in American economics departments, the so-called "neoliberal consensus" (the "liberal" in "neoliberal" is not very closely related to modern American political liberalism). Only a minority of American economists take any sort of strong opposition to that in favor of social democracy or socialism or anything of that sort.
If you're looking for something more narrowly political, like people who think George Bush's (or Ronald Reagan's) economic policies are good, well yes, you'll look more in vain, but not really because of anything to do with liberals vs. conservatives; more because supply-side economics has never been widely respected among even the conservative wing of economists.
The 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 budgets had total spending for the year lower than total income for the year, not based on any sort of future payoff. Those were the first surplus budgets since 1969's small surplus. The deficit returned as soon as Clinton left office, as all of Bush's budgets have been in deficit.
Biology should probably point out that there is no human entity, just human Cubics - as in 4 different people in a 4 corner stage metamorphic rotation - never more than 1 corner at same time.
Also, mathematics could probably be reformed to acknowledge the controversy over what -1 x -1 equals. Although +1 is the "standard" answer given by secularists, I happen to be of the opinion that it's WRONG, it is academic stupidity and is evil. Even if it's going to be taught, the alternate theory, that the natural antipodes of +1 x +1 = +1 and -1 x -1 = -1 exist as plus and minus values of opposite creation - depicted by opposite sexes and opposite hemispheres - ought to be taught alongside it.
There was a shitstorm over the whole controversy, but the specific issue of making "apt-get install firefox" install iceweasel instead hasn't really been much of an issue. Once Debian decided to pull firefox from their repository and replace it with iceweasel, turning the 'firefox' package into a transition package with no files that exists solely to depend on the 'iceweasel' package was the obvious thing to do.
Smaller techie-type places are more likely to look neutrally or even favorably on something like phreaking on your resume, especially if it happened a while ago. It'll blackball you at a big corporation, though.
As an added bonus, you'll be supporting independent developers who come up with innovative gameplay ideas. I'm liking some stuff from Chronic Logic lately, most of which even comes for Linux (in addition to Windows and OS X).
I could've had a lower user number, but I didn't actually realize Slashdot had introduced user accounts until a day or two later when I noticed you couldn't just type in any name as the "by" field anymore.
The idealistic model is of course, just that: free citizens participating in consensual economic transactions, with prices set based on the supply/demand curve, supply adjusting to demand and demand changing due to price, etc.
But that all assumes functioning markets, usually idealized as perfectly competitive, with perfect information, instantly propagating price signals, etc. Some deviation from that is always true, but it really starts making the whole setup hard to maintain---and the pro-free-market philosophy hard to state with a straight face---if it deviates grossly from the ideal.
That's why we have laws to try to keep markets functioning properly. For example, to try to keep the "perfectly competitive" assumption from going too far off the deep end, we have laws against using monopoly positions in one market in a way that would manipulate another market, and laws against small numbers of companies with very large combined market share in some market colluding to set prices, reduce competition, etc. To keep the "perfect information" assumption vaguely valid, we have laws against fraud, false advertising, etc.
These are actually all good for capitalism, in the sense of a sustainable system with functioning markets that efficiently allocate resources.
I know plenty of people with 19" monitors at 1280x1024 resolution, which works reasonably well maximized. That's what I personally use, although I do have two such monitors side-by-side, and the browser obviously only maximized on one of them.
The DC totals include spending on things like the White House, since it happens to be located in DC (you might recall that it's the federal capital).
Comparing Alaska to the other 49 states, which also don't have a federal capital located in them, would be more meaningful, and on that measure Alaska is pretty pork-infested.
I was giving a laundry list of reasons she isn't a libertarian. "Social conservative" was one of them and "expanded the size of government" was a separate one, not necessarily related to the first one except in the sense that both are anti-libertarian positions.
The kinds of manufacturing that are getting the squeeze due to shipping costs ship very bulky, heavy products. For example, the U.S. steel industry is getting a bit more competitive again, because steel beams are giant and heavy. A shipping crate full of laptops packs a lot more value into a lot less space/weight, so the shipping costs aren't nearly as big a proportion of the total costs.
Assuming Google remains a United States company, has U.S. bank accounts, does business in the U.S., has its employees and managers on U.S. soil instead of moving them all to the boat too, and so on, it'll be pretty easily subject to U.S. laws.
When states rights come up against traditional conservative issues, which way people split differs.
A large proportion of conservatives, for example, support the anti-states-rights position that the 14th amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights against the states as regards the second amendment, thereby prohibiting state or local regulation of gun ownership (the original, states-rights position was that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government).
A more interesting split was seen on medical marijuana. A number of southern Attorneys General wrote amicus briefs in favor of California's position, deciding that the issue of states rights was more important than conservative opposition to marijuana. On the other hand, Antonin Scalia, usually a libertarian-leaning conservative, voted for the federal-power position in endorsing an expansive interpretation of the interstate-commerce clause, apparently deciding it was more important to keep pot illegal.
Did you miss the part where she massively expanded the size of government while mayor, supported banning books she disagreed with, used eminent domain in an unprecedented manner to seize private property, ran for governor on a platform of lobbying for large amounts of federal funding for earmarked infrastructure projects, raised taxes while governor, and has generally been the opposite of a libertarian in any way you care to think of?
Palin is a social conservative, raised taxes numerous times, expanded the size of government in both her role as mayor and governor, and made questionable use of eminent domain to seize private property in a manner that had previously been unprecedented in Alaska.
Basically, her position is the exact opposite of the libertarian one on most issues you care to look at.
Well I obviously didn't read the link and I know nothing about this game, but from the title I assume it's an innovative new game with a genre-creating videogame take on BDSM snuff porn.
A lot of people start out somewhat but not completely skeptical, think "hmm I'll try a few and see", and think they see signs of it working so get sold.
Of course, this should be harder with something like penis enlargement where in theory you could actually measure it. It's a lot easier explanation for why things like homeopathic sleep aids work, because falling asleep is a very placebo-susceptible sort of thing.
And of course, it's not just snake-oil salesmen: a large portion of modern "lifestyle" pharmaceuticals work more through the placebo effect than they do through pharmaceutical means, even the ones that do have demonstrable more-than-placebo effect.
Even if you word the question in a way to try to give them an "out" by opting for some sort of theistically-guided evolution (the official modern position of the Catholic and Orthodox churches and many mainline Protestant ones), and try to tie down creationism specifically to young-earth creationism (humans were created within the past 10,000 years), a plurality of Americans, nearly a majority, opt for creationism.
The wording Gallup has been using for years when asking the question is this:
"Which one of the following statements come closest to your views about the origin and development of human beings? Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process (or) Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process (or) God created humans pretty much in the present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?"
The results in 2007 were: 30% for God-guided evolution, 13% for without-God evolution, and 48% for "created in present form within the last 10,000 years".
On the plus side, and contrary to what you might expect, fewer creationists than fans of evolution consider it an issue determining their vote. In 2007, 15% of people said they'd be more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in evolution, whereas 29% said they'd be less likely (53% said it wouldn't make a difference to their vote). So adopting a creationist position is a net loss for politicians on a national scale.
There were people on the street corner selling at least clothes (food was often more regulated) decades before the Berlin wall fell, for the most part perfectly legally (though the exact position of private enterprise, and the rationalizations for why it "wasn't capitalism" varied according to the ideological whims of the day).
The state aimed for control over large-scale aspects of the economy, but wisely didn't go for all-out confrontation with the petty-bourgeois class, with the partial exception of Stalin's disastrous rule. Their status ranged from officially permitted, to technically illegal but nobody cared.
The best-known era of legal (promoted, even) private enterprise was during Lenin's New Economic Program, but with ebbs and flows it was quite significant throughout, and extensively so from the 1970s. The right to privately sell small-scale goods and services was even enshrined in the 1977 version of the Soviet constitution, and it was never seriously challenged after Stalin's death.
It isn't a particularly controversial statement among doctors that "elderly patients who have had multiple melanomas are at significant risk of dying due to cancer". The exact numbers depend on how exactly you define the patient groups, what sorts of time horizon you're looking for, which risk factors you control for, etc., but nobody disputes that the risk of death is fairly significant.
Slashdot Mirror
A site about "she boys" eh?
I'm not going to say it was perfect, but it was a fairly minimalist site, completely free, that had people answering questions, in a not unreasonable percentage of the cases actually good answers. I'm not actually sure what happened in the meantime, only that I forgot about it entirely, probably around 1999 or so, stumbled upon it a few years later (2003? 2004?), and sometime in between it had morphed into total crap.
Academia as a whole is fairly left-leaning, but economics departments are probably the most conservative field of academia. Where do you think the underpinnings of the libertarian philosophy were carried out? In university economics departments, in the U.S. centered around the University of Chicago's.
Of course, it depends on what kind of conservatism you're looking for. If you're looking for free-market, minimal-regulation, efficient-capitalism, free-trade sorts of conservatism, it's not only still present but probably the dominant position in American economics departments, the so-called "neoliberal consensus" (the "liberal" in "neoliberal" is not very closely related to modern American political liberalism). Only a minority of American economists take any sort of strong opposition to that in favor of social democracy or socialism or anything of that sort.
If you're looking for something more narrowly political, like people who think George Bush's (or Ronald Reagan's) economic policies are good, well yes, you'll look more in vain, but not really because of anything to do with liberals vs. conservatives; more because supply-side economics has never been widely respected among even the conservative wing of economists.
The 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 budgets had total spending for the year lower than total income for the year, not based on any sort of future payoff. Those were the first surplus budgets since 1969's small surplus. The deficit returned as soon as Clinton left office, as all of Bush's budgets have been in deficit.
See the CBO data, the past 15 years of which Wikipedia nicely graphs.
Biology should probably point out that there is no human entity, just human Cubics - as in 4 different people in a 4 corner stage metamorphic rotation - never more than 1 corner at same time.
Also, mathematics could probably be reformed to acknowledge the controversy over what -1 x -1 equals. Although +1 is the "standard" answer given by secularists, I happen to be of the opinion that it's WRONG, it is academic stupidity and is evil. Even if it's going to be taught, the alternate theory, that the natural antipodes of +1 x +1 = +1 and -1 x -1 = -1 exist as plus and minus values of opposite creation - depicted by opposite sexes and opposite hemispheres - ought to be taught alongside it.
There was a shitstorm over the whole controversy, but the specific issue of making "apt-get install firefox" install iceweasel instead hasn't really been much of an issue. Once Debian decided to pull firefox from their repository and replace it with iceweasel, turning the 'firefox' package into a transition package with no files that exists solely to depend on the 'iceweasel' package was the obvious thing to do.
Smaller techie-type places are more likely to look neutrally or even favorably on something like phreaking on your resume, especially if it happened a while ago. It'll blackball you at a big corporation, though.
As an added bonus, you'll be supporting independent developers who come up with innovative gameplay ideas. I'm liking some stuff from Chronic Logic lately, most of which even comes for Linux (in addition to Windows and OS X).
lunix has built-in anti-hacker tarball support
I could've had a lower user number, but I didn't actually realize Slashdot had introduced user accounts until a day or two later when I noticed you couldn't just type in any name as the "by" field anymore.
The idealistic model is of course, just that: free citizens participating in consensual economic transactions, with prices set based on the supply/demand curve, supply adjusting to demand and demand changing due to price, etc.
But that all assumes functioning markets, usually idealized as perfectly competitive, with perfect information, instantly propagating price signals, etc. Some deviation from that is always true, but it really starts making the whole setup hard to maintain---and the pro-free-market philosophy hard to state with a straight face---if it deviates grossly from the ideal.
That's why we have laws to try to keep markets functioning properly. For example, to try to keep the "perfectly competitive" assumption from going too far off the deep end, we have laws against using monopoly positions in one market in a way that would manipulate another market, and laws against small numbers of companies with very large combined market share in some market colluding to set prices, reduce competition, etc. To keep the "perfect information" assumption vaguely valid, we have laws against fraud, false advertising, etc.
These are actually all good for capitalism, in the sense of a sustainable system with functioning markets that efficiently allocate resources.
I know plenty of people with 19" monitors at 1280x1024 resolution, which works reasonably well maximized. That's what I personally use, although I do have two such monitors side-by-side, and the browser obviously only maximized on one of them.
The DC totals include spending on things like the White House, since it happens to be located in DC (you might recall that it's the federal capital).
Comparing Alaska to the other 49 states, which also don't have a federal capital located in them, would be more meaningful, and on that measure Alaska is pretty pork-infested.
I was giving a laundry list of reasons she isn't a libertarian. "Social conservative" was one of them and "expanded the size of government" was a separate one, not necessarily related to the first one except in the sense that both are anti-libertarian positions.
The kinds of manufacturing that are getting the squeeze due to shipping costs ship very bulky, heavy products. For example, the U.S. steel industry is getting a bit more competitive again, because steel beams are giant and heavy. A shipping crate full of laptops packs a lot more value into a lot less space/weight, so the shipping costs aren't nearly as big a proportion of the total costs.
Assuming Google remains a United States company, has U.S. bank accounts, does business in the U.S., has its employees and managers on U.S. soil instead of moving them all to the boat too, and so on, it'll be pretty easily subject to U.S. laws.
When states rights come up against traditional conservative issues, which way people split differs.
A large proportion of conservatives, for example, support the anti-states-rights position that the 14th amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights against the states as regards the second amendment, thereby prohibiting state or local regulation of gun ownership (the original, states-rights position was that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government).
A more interesting split was seen on medical marijuana. A number of southern Attorneys General wrote amicus briefs in favor of California's position, deciding that the issue of states rights was more important than conservative opposition to marijuana. On the other hand, Antonin Scalia, usually a libertarian-leaning conservative, voted for the federal-power position in endorsing an expansive interpretation of the interstate-commerce clause, apparently deciding it was more important to keep pot illegal.
Did you miss the part where she massively expanded the size of government while mayor, supported banning books she disagreed with, used eminent domain in an unprecedented manner to seize private property, ran for governor on a platform of lobbying for large amounts of federal funding for earmarked infrastructure projects, raised taxes while governor, and has generally been the opposite of a libertarian in any way you care to think of?
Palin is a social conservative, raised taxes numerous times, expanded the size of government in both her role as mayor and governor, and made questionable use of eminent domain to seize private property in a manner that had previously been unprecedented in Alaska.
Basically, her position is the exact opposite of the libertarian one on most issues you care to look at.
Well I obviously didn't read the link and I know nothing about this game, but from the title I assume it's an innovative new game with a genre-creating videogame take on BDSM snuff porn.
A lot of people start out somewhat but not completely skeptical, think "hmm I'll try a few and see", and think they see signs of it working so get sold.
Of course, this should be harder with something like penis enlargement where in theory you could actually measure it. It's a lot easier explanation for why things like homeopathic sleep aids work, because falling asleep is a very placebo-susceptible sort of thing.
And of course, it's not just snake-oil salesmen: a large portion of modern "lifestyle" pharmaceuticals work more through the placebo effect than they do through pharmaceutical means, even the ones that do have demonstrable more-than-placebo effect.
Even if you word the question in a way to try to give them an "out" by opting for some sort of theistically-guided evolution (the official modern position of the Catholic and Orthodox churches and many mainline Protestant ones), and try to tie down creationism specifically to young-earth creationism (humans were created within the past 10,000 years), a plurality of Americans, nearly a majority, opt for creationism.
The wording Gallup has been using for years when asking the question is this:
"Which one of the following statements come closest to your views about the origin and development of human beings? Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process (or) Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process (or) God created humans pretty much in the present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?"
The results in 2007 were: 30% for God-guided evolution, 13% for without-God evolution, and 48% for "created in present form within the last 10,000 years".
On the plus side, and contrary to what you might expect, fewer creationists than fans of evolution consider it an issue determining their vote. In 2007, 15% of people said they'd be more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in evolution, whereas 29% said they'd be less likely (53% said it wouldn't make a difference to their vote). So adopting a creationist position is a net loss for politicians on a national scale.
There were people on the street corner selling at least clothes (food was often more regulated) decades before the Berlin wall fell, for the most part perfectly legally (though the exact position of private enterprise, and the rationalizations for why it "wasn't capitalism" varied according to the ideological whims of the day).
The state aimed for control over large-scale aspects of the economy, but wisely didn't go for all-out confrontation with the petty-bourgeois class, with the partial exception of Stalin's disastrous rule. Their status ranged from officially permitted, to technically illegal but nobody cared.
The best-known era of legal (promoted, even) private enterprise was during Lenin's New Economic Program, but with ebbs and flows it was quite significant throughout, and extensively so from the 1970s. The right to privately sell small-scale goods and services was even enshrined in the 1977 version of the Soviet constitution, and it was never seriously challenged after Stalin's death.
Their job is to follow procedure and not overstep the bounds of their warrant.
It isn't a particularly controversial statement among doctors that "elderly patients who have had multiple melanomas are at significant risk of dying due to cancer". The exact numbers depend on how exactly you define the patient groups, what sorts of time horizon you're looking for, which risk factors you control for, etc., but nobody disputes that the risk of death is fairly significant.