The current distribution of national debt is a bit worrying for the US, because a lot of it is held by east asian countries. With China quickly becoming a regional powerhouse and investment opportunity, demand for US debt is decreasing, and even demand for the US dollar is decreasing, which is part of why it's at an all-time low. At the moment these trends are actually being artificially slowed, because a weak dollar hurts other countries' exports to the US, so they've been buying up dollars to prop up the currency. On the whole, not a good situation.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for Badnarik anyway, but really, the man is a little bit nuts. If the libertarians could get someone who'd talk more about fiscal responsibility and less about abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank, they might get more support.
As a US citizen, I find the fact that Europe no longer listens to its more intelligent part of the population the most worrying thing. The problem is not lack of people with a clue but dominance of clueless people.
(Have you ever tried conversing with an average European about world affairs? Their limited knowledge is ludicrously biased.)
You do realize that from within the United States you may load such websites as news.bbc.co.uk, don't you? I think Wikinews will be interesting, but it's hardly the first online source of non-US news.
Here in Texas, if you get an A or B in driver's ed, you are exempt from the driving test. Driver's ed does require about 8 hours of driving, so there's presumably some check that you're not a complete moron, but it's not a very high bar.
Not only is a 1-C change noticeable, but a 0.5-C change is as well, which is why the F scale is more natural. This is why A/C units let you set by the 0.5 C increment. I'm not sure if 10 to 11 in particular is noticeable, but 27, 27.5, 28, and 28.5 are distinctly different temperatures to set your A/C at.
Fahrenheit degrees are fairly near a reasonably perceptible change in temperature. Celsius ones are too big, so you either have to use half degrees (which most HVAC systems do) or round to a larger granularity.
Merely discovering things that exist in nature in any other field is not patentable.
If I am inspired by some strange cave formation and design a new method of supporting buildings around it, perhaps I can patent it the particular method of supporting buildings. But I can't just patent the cave formation after discovering it and sue anyone who then applies any principles contained therein to anything.
Re:not surprising...
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 3, Funny
just some of the best vodka you have ever tasted
Indeed! I would describe it as having a delightful initial nose of ethanol, a pleasant burning as it goes down, and finishing smoothly with a subtle aftertaste of ethanol punctuated by a complex ethanol-infused bouquet.
Taxing people based on how much they drive is a good idea (because as it stands, the costs of driving are highly externalized -- e.g. the people getting the benefit from driving more are not necessarily the ones paying for it)
The people who drive more pay more. Gas taxes are a fixed price per gallon, so if you buy more gallons, you pay more tax. This is essentially a "mileage tax", modified with a discount for people who have efficient cars and an extra surcharge for people with inefficient SUVs.
I don't see why tracking actual mileage would be better. Gas usage is both a good and anonymous stand-in for mileage, as it is directly related, and has the additional benefit of encouraging resource conservation.
While I don't disagree with all the points in this article, and thing the "trending towards mediocrity" issue is one that needs to be addressed (if you read the mailing list archives, it in fact has come up numerous times), Britannica is hardly a repository of flawless truth either.
Through the magic of things like amazon.com, you may purchase quite a lot of CDs, including from obscure bands. There are literally thousands of music groups in the United States; there's no reason to purchase exclusively from the top 40, or even the top 200.
The USSR did not even make a pretense of following Marx's philosophy. They claimed to be somehow following its spirit, but Lenin explicitly took issue with many of Marx's points, and substituted his own philosophy for it, which came to be known as "Marxism-Leninism", but which only owes to Marx its intellectual heritage. Ideas like a Central Committee (Politburo) controlling the revolution are fully Lenin's, and completely alien to Marx's philosophy.
It follow definition 2. It's written in the form of these traditional Japanese lyrics verses, but is neither in the traditional language (Japanese) nor about the traditional subject matter (nature or the seasons).
Certainly their methods are different, and nobody said Ashcroft was the more authoritarian of the two. But they're on the same broad side of the political spectrum in terms of their views on the role of the state in private life.
Slashdot Mirror
In a system where shifts of 2-5% have enormous rippling effects, that's pretty big.
The current distribution of national debt is a bit worrying for the US, because a lot of it is held by east asian countries. With China quickly becoming a regional powerhouse and investment opportunity, demand for US debt is decreasing, and even demand for the US dollar is decreasing, which is part of why it's at an all-time low. At the moment these trends are actually being artificially slowed, because a weak dollar hurts other countries' exports to the US, so they've been buying up dollars to prop up the currency. On the whole, not a good situation.
You're new here, aren't you?
(Hopefully new enough that I can reuse this joke, too.)
Is we'd first need a sane libertarian party.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for Badnarik anyway, but really, the man is a little bit nuts. If the libertarians could get someone who'd talk more about fiscal responsibility and less about abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank, they might get more support.
Just about everyone under 30 in Greece understands English pretty well...
As a US citizen, I find the fact that Europe no longer listens to its more intelligent part of the population the most worrying thing. The problem is not lack of people with a clue but dominance of clueless people.
(Have you ever tried conversing with an average European about world affairs? Their limited knowledge is ludicrously biased.)
You do realize that from within the United States you may load such websites as news.bbc.co.uk, don't you? I think Wikinews will be interesting, but it's hardly the first online source of non-US news.
In the discussions setting it up, "not becoming Indymedia" was definitely an explicit goal of the initiative.
Here in Texas, if you get an A or B in driver's ed, you are exempt from the driving test. Driver's ed does require about 8 hours of driving, so there's presumably some check that you're not a complete moron, but it's not a very high bar.
Not only is a 1-C change noticeable, but a 0.5-C change is as well, which is why the F scale is more natural. This is why A/C units let you set by the 0.5 C increment. I'm not sure if 10 to 11 in particular is noticeable, but 27, 27.5, 28, and 28.5 are distinctly different temperatures to set your A/C at.
Fahrenheit degrees are fairly near a reasonably perceptible change in temperature. Celsius ones are too big, so you either have to use half degrees (which most HVAC systems do) or round to a larger granularity.
Merely discovering things that exist in nature in any other field is not patentable.
If I am inspired by some strange cave formation and design a new method of supporting buildings around it, perhaps I can patent it the particular method of supporting buildings. But I can't just patent the cave formation after discovering it and sue anyone who then applies any principles contained therein to anything.
Now that's a bazaar...
just some of the best vodka you have ever tasted
Indeed! I would describe it as having a delightful initial nose of ethanol, a pleasant burning as it goes down, and finishing smoothly with a subtle aftertaste of ethanol punctuated by a complex ethanol-infused bouquet.
Taxing people based on how much they drive is a good idea (because as it stands, the costs of driving are highly externalized -- e.g. the people getting the benefit from driving more are not necessarily the ones paying for it)
The people who drive more pay more. Gas taxes are a fixed price per gallon, so if you buy more gallons, you pay more tax. This is essentially a "mileage tax", modified with a discount for people who have efficient cars and an extra surcharge for people with inefficient SUVs.
I don't see why tracking actual mileage would be better. Gas usage is both a good and anonymous stand-in for mileage, as it is directly related, and has the additional benefit of encouraging resource conservation.
While I don't disagree with all the points in this article, and thing the "trending towards mediocrity" issue is one that needs to be addressed (if you read the mailing list archives, it in fact has come up numerous times), Britannica is hardly a repository of flawless truth either.
For some examples from the other side, see:
Errors in Britannica which have been corrected in Wikipedia
Through the magic of things like amazon.com, you may purchase quite a lot of CDs, including from obscure bands. There are literally thousands of music groups in the United States; there's no reason to purchase exclusively from the top 40, or even the top 200.
If you can raise a private army, you can enforce your intellectual property rights with shotguns too.
The USSR did not even make a pretense of following Marx's philosophy. They claimed to be somehow following its spirit, but Lenin explicitly took issue with many of Marx's points, and substituted his own philosophy for it, which came to be known as "Marxism-Leninism", but which only owes to Marx its intellectual heritage. Ideas like a Central Committee (Politburo) controlling the revolution are fully Lenin's, and completely alien to Marx's philosophy.
It follow definition 2. It's written in the form of these traditional Japanese lyrics verses, but is neither in the traditional language (Japanese) nor about the traditional subject matter (nature or the seasons).
What if he was using the Slashdot subscription money to fund his drug habit? Then you'd be okay.
(Also, is posting a comment like this insinuating that said claim might be true libel, despite the fact that it does not outright assert it?)
If you make chairs, and I make chairs, but you make 10x as many of them, your company is bigger. :D
it's: a contraction for "it is"
its: the possessive form of "it"
Shouldn't any decent optimizing compiler (gcc?) inline those commonly-called functions anyway?
Certainly their methods are different, and nobody said Ashcroft was the more authoritarian of the two. But they're on the same broad side of the political spectrum in terms of their views on the role of the state in private life.