All local records do is make it harder for people without money to get them. People with money have always been able to hire private investigators to track down the records they want. This makes it easier for people without money to do so, or for people who are vaguely interested in something but don't care enough to hire a private investigator (or do it themselves) to do so.
If you really want to stop abuse, you'll have to make them completely private, not just "private but inconvenient to get to".
I clicked through, but it looked like one of those "serious" cartoons in the newspaper that I don't read either. If it's got good drawing and more than a few words of text per panel, I don't have the concentration.
Europe is the continent that invented caffeinated wine... in the 19th century. Apparently that crap is actually popular there too (at least in parts of the UK).
You've been fucking up fine drinks for centuries, so now is no time to start complaining. =]
Try finding travel information without stumbling on cesspools of inter-linked hotel-reservation or otherwise advertising-related sites. You can put whatever -bookings -reservations crap you want in the search, but you're still not going to get useful results.
Clearly the interpretation step is what causes this optical illusion, along with all other optical illustions. What I'd like to know is what in particular about this image makes it look moving when it's not.
Japan has a very nice and very expensive system of multilane freeways throughout the country, completely with hundreds of tunnels to keep grades reasonable and turns wide. They pay for the construction partly with extremely high tolls (on the order of $0.30-$0.50/mile, so a journey between, say, Tokyo and Hamamatsu costs over $50). And what do they do with this very nice system you have to pay a lot of money for the privilege of driving on? They have the speed limit uniformly at 80 kph. That's 48 mph.
Now the Japanese tend to be law-abiding folks, but you don't ever see anyone going 48 mph on those highways.
It's now considered "standard" to classify anything that could possibly be traced to a physiological cause as a "mental illness", and to prescribe medication to resolve the condition. Unable to concentrate for ridiculously long periods of time? You have ADHD, and here's some medication. Feel like you're in a rut and life sucks? You have clinical depression, and here's some medication. Have sexual interests that differ from the general population, like an interest in bondage or S&M? You suffer from a paraphilia, and here's some medication. Etc.
Not that there aren't legitimate mental disorders, but they're much less frequent than they're made out to be. If you meet someone who is actually schizophrenic, that is someone who is actually suffering from an illness. A lot of what's classified as "mental illnesses" though, are really "problems in living"---you're not living your life in the way you want to, and so you blame it on a medical condition instead of fixing your goddamn life.
(Studies also show that fixing your life is a much better long-term "cure" for depression than medical treatment is.)
I've never seen anything like that before. Most optical illusions involve misjudging sizes or perspective due to relative proximity to confusing cues, or flipping back and forth between two difference scenes with ambiguous figure/ground. But I've never seen one that makes static things look like they're moving. Anyone have any info on the science behind these? What makes that happen?
The USSR was willing to say they'd never use a nuclear weapon first if the US would say so, and the US would not agree to that. The reason is that the USSR had a massive advantage in ground troops: if there were ever a ground invasion of western europe, NATO would need to use nuclear weapons to stand a chance.
Hardware has continually gotten cheaper for many years now, and Apple's market share has actually grown over the last few. People actually do want to buy those $3000 cinema displays, or a $3000 dual-G5 box. Now I personally don't, but even I ended up buying a $1300 (with student discount) 12" powerbook, because even for the money it's one of the best laptops around. Frankly I've yet to find a PC laptop that wasn't at least one of: 1) heavy; 2) unreliable; 3) ugly. The few PC laptops that can hold a candle to powerbooks in reliability (some of the IBM Thinkpad stuff, for example) aren't any cheaper anyway.
My ideal game would have an interesting, richly-simulated world, so that basically you can do almost anything. On that point I agree with you---it's really irritating when you can basically follow one track, and if you do manage to get off it, the game sucks because the designers never implemented anything they didn't expect you to do.
I do think story has a place in games though. It would be nice if you could do anything, but things sort of developed: the game reacted to what you did. This is how traditional "live-action" RPGs work, with a gamemaster making up the plot as things progress to react to what the players do. Of course, a computer is not sentient, but there's people working on the issue of how to make games reactive so that there is plot but plot that doesn't shoehorn the user into following a strictly scripted storyline.
Of course, I may be biased, as one of the projects I'm working on is a baby step in that direction. =]
I haven't noticed that. Is that a recent feature (I haven't upgraded in 2-3 months)? Or is it an option somewhere? I've seen the little icon in the chat window that says "your buddy is typing", but no highlighting of the buddy names in the buddy list window.
I was thinking more of the theoretical "live in a swing state and deciding between Bush/Kerry" situation. As I live in Texas, which Kerry will not win even if Bush murders a baby on live TV, I'll be voting Badnarik.
Since us libertarians are fiscally conservative, and the two parties are increasingly looking like they're both not fiscally conservative, there's no real reason to vote for either of them. I might end up voting Kerry because at least he's pro-freedom on social issues, but it will be a somewhat grudging vote.
This might be the case if they have specific policies that could conceivably fit in with a larger party, but it doesn't work if they are completely different. For example, which party do you suggest Badnarik be swallowed by? He might fit in with the socially-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, as he supports drug legalization, getting the government out of marriage, and opposes foreign wars. Or he might fit in with the fiscally-conservative wing of the Republican Party, as he opposes social and entitlement programs, supports lower taxes, and so on. But his social liberalism is anathema to the Republicans' social conservatism, and his fiscal conservatism is anathema to the Democrats' fiscal socialism. So there's no conceivable way he could join either party.
It's still bad, in that when things are essentially a tie, we'd like to break them fairly and impartially. However in terms of "will of the people", it's the same either way: to a very good approximation, you can say "half the people will not have their preferred candidate in power". In a country of 300m people, whether 500 people prefer one over the other hardly matters: if it's that split, you have no clear "will of the people" either way, but basically two wills of the people pushing in opposite direction with approximately equal strength.
That's sort of like Canadians and USians emigrating to each others' countries. Accepting immigrants from vastly different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds is something Europe seems a lot worse at than the US. Generally nobody in Europe seems to like Turks, Arabs, Albanians, and etc.
If Japan's immigration policy were like the US, but more lax, then those Koreans would have citizenship. You seem to have missed the part where the US gives automatic citizenship to anyone born in the US, regardless of "ethnic" origin.
If you mean that the immigrants are in their countries, perhaps (it depends on the country). If you mean that the immigrants have citizenship and can vote, the US wins by a huge margin.
Slashdot Mirror
If we didn't do it on the federal level, doing it on a city-by-city level is not the only other alternative: states could do it.
All local records do is make it harder for people without money to get them. People with money have always been able to hire private investigators to track down the records they want. This makes it easier for people without money to do so, or for people who are vaguely interested in something but don't care enough to hire a private investigator (or do it themselves) to do so.
If you really want to stop abuse, you'll have to make them completely private, not just "private but inconvenient to get to".
I clicked through, but it looked like one of those "serious" cartoons in the newspaper that I don't read either. If it's got good drawing and more than a few words of text per panel, I don't have the concentration.
This is where we pretend we care about the nobel prize in physics for a day.
Now back to Linux.
Europe is the continent that invented caffeinated wine... in the 19th century. Apparently that crap is actually popular there too (at least in parts of the UK).
You've been fucking up fine drinks for centuries, so now is no time to start complaining. =]
Try finding travel information without stumbling on cesspools of inter-linked hotel-reservation or otherwise advertising-related sites. You can put whatever -bookings -reservations crap you want in the search, but you're still not going to get useful results.
Clearly the interpretation step is what causes this optical illusion, along with all other optical illustions. What I'd like to know is what in particular about this image makes it look moving when it's not.
Japan has a very nice and very expensive system of multilane freeways throughout the country, completely with hundreds of tunnels to keep grades reasonable and turns wide. They pay for the construction partly with extremely high tolls (on the order of $0.30-$0.50/mile, so a journey between, say, Tokyo and Hamamatsu costs over $50). And what do they do with this very nice system you have to pay a lot of money for the privilege of driving on? They have the speed limit uniformly at 80 kph. That's 48 mph.
Now the Japanese tend to be law-abiding folks, but you don't ever see anyone going 48 mph on those highways.
It's now considered "standard" to classify anything that could possibly be traced to a physiological cause as a "mental illness", and to prescribe medication to resolve the condition. Unable to concentrate for ridiculously long periods of time? You have ADHD, and here's some medication. Feel like you're in a rut and life sucks? You have clinical depression, and here's some medication. Have sexual interests that differ from the general population, like an interest in bondage or S&M? You suffer from a paraphilia, and here's some medication. Etc.
Not that there aren't legitimate mental disorders, but they're much less frequent than they're made out to be. If you meet someone who is actually schizophrenic, that is someone who is actually suffering from an illness. A lot of what's classified as "mental illnesses" though, are really "problems in living"---you're not living your life in the way you want to, and so you blame it on a medical condition instead of fixing your goddamn life.
(Studies also show that fixing your life is a much better long-term "cure" for depression than medical treatment is.)
I was looking at the image on a cache, so didn't see the PDF link.
I've never seen anything like that before. Most optical illusions involve misjudging sizes or perspective due to relative proximity to confusing cues, or flipping back and forth between two difference scenes with ambiguous figure/ground. But I've never seen one that makes static things look like they're moving. Anyone have any info on the science behind these? What makes that happen?
The USSR was willing to say they'd never use a nuclear weapon first if the US would say so, and the US would not agree to that. The reason is that the USSR had a massive advantage in ground troops: if there were ever a ground invasion of western europe, NATO would need to use nuclear weapons to stand a chance.
Hardware has continually gotten cheaper for many years now, and Apple's market share has actually grown over the last few. People actually do want to buy those $3000 cinema displays, or a $3000 dual-G5 box. Now I personally don't, but even I ended up buying a $1300 (with student discount) 12" powerbook, because even for the money it's one of the best laptops around. Frankly I've yet to find a PC laptop that wasn't at least one of: 1) heavy; 2) unreliable; 3) ugly. The few PC laptops that can hold a candle to powerbooks in reliability (some of the IBM Thinkpad stuff, for example) aren't any cheaper anyway.
Gah, should've used preview, of course. How about this link: fixed link.
My ideal game would have an interesting, richly-simulated world, so that basically you can do almost anything. On that point I agree with you---it's really irritating when you can basically follow one track, and if you do manage to get off it, the game sucks because the designers never implemented anything they didn't expect you to do.
I do think story has a place in games though. It would be nice if you could do anything, but things sort of developed: the game reacted to what you did. This is how traditional "live-action" RPGs work, with a gamemaster making up the plot as things progress to react to what the players do. Of course, a computer is not sentient, but there's people working on the issue of how to make games reactive so that there is plot but plot that doesn't shoehorn the user into following a strictly scripted storyline.
Of course, I may be biased, as one of the projects I'm working on is a baby step in that direction. =]
It's completely algorithmically driven, not human-made calls. They could be doing some sort of straight averaging without weeding out outliers.
I haven't noticed that. Is that a recent feature (I haven't upgraded in 2-3 months)? Or is it an option somewhere? I've seen the little icon in the chat window that says "your buddy is typing", but no highlighting of the buddy names in the buddy list window.
I was thinking more of the theoretical "live in a swing state and deciding between Bush/Kerry" situation. As I live in Texas, which Kerry will not win even if Bush murders a baby on live TV, I'll be voting Badnarik.
Since us libertarians are fiscally conservative, and the two parties are increasingly looking like they're both not fiscally conservative, there's no real reason to vote for either of them. I might end up voting Kerry because at least he's pro-freedom on social issues, but it will be a somewhat grudging vote.
This might be the case if they have specific policies that could conceivably fit in with a larger party, but it doesn't work if they are completely different. For example, which party do you suggest Badnarik be swallowed by? He might fit in with the socially-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, as he supports drug legalization, getting the government out of marriage, and opposes foreign wars. Or he might fit in with the fiscally-conservative wing of the Republican Party, as he opposes social and entitlement programs, supports lower taxes, and so on. But his social liberalism is anathema to the Republicans' social conservatism, and his fiscal conservatism is anathema to the Democrats' fiscal socialism. So there's no conceivable way he could join either party.
It's still bad, in that when things are essentially a tie, we'd like to break them fairly and impartially. However in terms of "will of the people", it's the same either way: to a very good approximation, you can say "half the people will not have their preferred candidate in power". In a country of 300m people, whether 500 people prefer one over the other hardly matters: if it's that split, you have no clear "will of the people" either way, but basically two wills of the people pushing in opposite direction with approximately equal strength.
That's sort of like Canadians and USians emigrating to each others' countries. Accepting immigrants from vastly different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds is something Europe seems a lot worse at than the US. Generally nobody in Europe seems to like Turks, Arabs, Albanians, and etc.
Text-messaging was instrumental to organizing public demonstrations in the Phillippines that forced President Joseph Estrada from office
Well, of course they're a security threat! We don't want groups of unimportant people forcing politicians from office, now do we?
If Japan's immigration policy were like the US, but more lax, then those Koreans would have citizenship. You seem to have missed the part where the US gives automatic citizenship to anyone born in the US, regardless of "ethnic" origin.
If you mean that the immigrants are in their countries, perhaps (it depends on the country). If you mean that the immigrants have citizenship and can vote, the US wins by a huge margin.