The problem is not slave or prison labor: the engineers and software developers in China and India are not prisoners or slaves. They're simply very intelligent people from a country with a lower standard of living. With a global market, prices tend to equalize, so their standard of living is on their way up, as their labor is currently available for much less than the global average, while the standard of living in the US and Europe will eventually decline, as the value of its labor is far above the global average.
In short, the issue is that the US and Europe are richer than the rest of the world, despite the fact that they are not necessarily better than the rest of the world. As this evens out, the rest of the world will get some of the jobs.
These people make $3/day and can do a good job. Why should I pay some American $150/day to do it? Even if I was feeling charitable, I wouldn't do that: I'd hire the foreigner for $10/day or something (hell, even $50/day!), because he needs the money more than Americans do.
An increasing proportion of women, especially at some schools with strong affirmative action programs, are either incompetent, or willfully game the system. Several of my friends count in the "gaming the system" group. They're intelligent, but they don't learn anything or do any work: they know that as long as they do a bare minimum, the professor will give them an A or B, because giving a lower grade would cause the professor problems as people ask why this white male professor was giving the only woman in his class a bad grade. In fact, it is pretty much impossible for them not to graduate, because the school cannot afford to have its already poor "percentage of women in the EE department" numbers look even worse. So they graduate people who purposely do no work.
Doesn't end after college either. These same women, who graduated with a decent GPA despite knowing nothing, get hired to do nothing at companies, which don't fire them because they serve a useful purpose for the company's diversity statistics. I know people who admit doing this, and have absolutely no trouble doing so.
This isn't anything particularly unique about women. If you tell a group of people that they can do a half-assed job and still succeed, many people will. Hell, I would.
The US press tilts in various directions, depending on which outlet you look at, but generally they're less tabloidish and less prone to gross misrepresentations than many European outlets. The BBC is a good news source in Europe, and so are some of the German papers, but there's a whole host of papers in the UK, France, Spain, and especially Greece and Italy, that are absolute trash. A Greek paper a few years ago even reported that Bush's daughters were caught with "drugs", when what they were caught with was underage drinking, something that's actually legal in Greece.
The act of criminalizing any idea ought to, all other things being equal, make that idea more appealing to thoughtful people. Criminalizing ideas is wrong, and one ought to make a stand for criminalized ideas whenever possible.
Of course, most reasonable people do not support Nazi ideas even where they're criminalized. But in general, criminalizing ideas makes them more attractive to those of us who side with unpopular sentiment against oppressive government.
just to clarify, that's not the one released today
on
Enlightenment Lives
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is still just an incremental, long-overdue maintenance release to 0.16. At some point in the past they chucked 0.16 and started from scratch, writing a bunch of libraries in a modular fashion to "do things right", but the project grew quite ambitious and has taken rather longer than probably anyone would've assumed, so eventually someone went back and did some maintenance releases on 0.16, which is what is being released here. I have no idea when 0.17 will come out, although a few of the libraries are finally starting to coalesce, after they were chucked and rewritten from scratch two or three times each.
They might be slow, but they sure as hell do a thorough job.
0.17, despite the paltry version number increase over 0.16, is not two years in the making so far because they're updating the eye candy on the window manager. It's an entire set of libraries covering basically anything you need to write and run apps, from which a complete desktop environment will also be built.
I've seen 250 ml (~8 oz) glass bottles and aluminum cans; 330 ml (~12 oz) aluminum cans; 500 ml (~17 oz) plastic bottles; and ~575 ml (20 oz) plastic bottles. I have not, however, seen a 500 ml aluminum can, in either Europe or the United States.
Now perhaps this company is making one, but to compare it to a 500-ml aluminum beverage can as if 500-ml aluminum beverage cans actually exist is odd.
There are very few movies which I consider as valuable as a quality CD. Maybe if movies were half the price of CDs I'd buy them, but in general a movie is good for 1.5-2 hours of enjoyment, or in exceptional cases maybe I can watch it 3-5 times and get up to 10 hours of enjoyment out of it. Compare to a CD, which can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of music being produced that is a ripoff at $12-$18 per CD, because there is. But for some good music, that often took a year or so of the artist's time to write and record, it's not a bad price at all. Especially with lesser-known artists, who might be extremely lucky if they sell 5,000 copies of their CD, the $12-$18 isn't really enough to even support them without a day job.
The category in question, of course, is "largest state in land area, counting only states that actually have at least one real city (towns under 300k residents need not apply)".
The issue is that the RIAA is the one fucking up normal citizens' lives for no reason other than to buy time for a failing business model. If you disagree with this, it is not a good idea to continue to hand them money with which to do this: instead, you ought to boycott them.
I've been doing this for some time now, and there's quite a bit of non-RIAA music well worth listening to. Metropolis Records is a good place to start for industrial/EBM fans.
Canadians have sort of the best of both worlds: they have socialized medicine at home, and are right next door to a capitalist medicine system if they want to use that. If socialized medicine was the only choice, and people couldn't go over the to US for treatment if they chose to, that might make at least some people less happy with the arrangement.
Is there some trick to getting KisMac to work on Powerbooks? It hangs after about 3-10 seconds for me, and I have to force quit it. Happens consistently, every time. (With an Airport Extreme card, which it claims to support.)
I've been to my share of rallies and speeches and political websites, but I've yet to find a large segment of the neo-left that places evidence and facts before ideology. It's all ideology and partisanship: if Bush does something, it's automatically decided it's wrong, and the justification comes afterwards. Nobody makes honest evaluations based on evidence and facts in that camp. Sure, Bush is usually wrong, but that doesn't mean that every single thing he does is automatically wrong, unless you're some sort of partisan warrior.
Possibly an exception to this is Noam Chomsky, who certainly isn't perfect, but at least has an unusual combination of views that aren't easy to pinhole into one particular ideology. Nader also on occasion seems thoughtful. But Kerry? Partisan idiot, possibly even more so than Bush (Kerry's almost on the level of Tom DeLay in partisan nastiness). Same goes with most neo-left groups, especially the sort that hold rallies.
The Republicans have consistently been the party of business since their inception. Originally it was northern business versus the southern agriculture that supported the Democrats, and now it's business wherever that business happens to be located. The Republicans have never been the party of unions and minimum wages: that's always been the Democrats. Surely you remember the corrupt union bosses forging votes to get Democrats into office?
The Democrats too, time and time again, give tax breaks / incentives / corporate welfare to the rich. Remember Senator Hollings, a Democrat, who sponsored a copyright extension to protect the monetary interests of the Disney corporation? He's just one of many.
Bush, by far - 57,218 to 26,911, outpaces Kerry in the $2,000+ donors category, and Kerry, again by a large margin - 35% of Kerry's donors compared to 28% of Bush's, outpaces Bush in the $200 or less category.
These statistics don't show anything at all about the relative donations by fat cats and average people. They show merely that the average Bush donor gives more. This could be because the average Bush donor is rich, as you seem to be implying, or it could be because the average Bush donor is more deeply committed to the campaign. To figure out which it is, you'd have to give breakdowns by "percentage of donors with annual incomes of $xx-$yy".
Remember, Utah donates more to charity than Connecticut, despite Connecticut being a lot richer.
Shouting down your opponent and trying to prevent him or her from having venues to speak is opposing free speech. It's not an issue involving the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but it is an issue involving the fundamental right to freedom of speech: freedom from restriction by oppressive governments, and freedom from restriction by oppressive mobs.
This comes up pretty often on college campuses, where idiot "liberal" student groups try to shout down people they disagree with, because they're too busy smoking pot on daddy's paycheck to come up with a response besides a temper-tantrum style yelling.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not slave or prison labor: the engineers and software developers in China and India are not prisoners or slaves. They're simply very intelligent people from a country with a lower standard of living. With a global market, prices tend to equalize, so their standard of living is on their way up, as their labor is currently available for much less than the global average, while the standard of living in the US and Europe will eventually decline, as the value of its labor is far above the global average.
In short, the issue is that the US and Europe are richer than the rest of the world, despite the fact that they are not necessarily better than the rest of the world. As this evens out, the rest of the world will get some of the jobs.
These people make $3/day and can do a good job. Why should I pay some American $150/day to do it? Even if I was feeling charitable, I wouldn't do that: I'd hire the foreigner for $10/day or something (hell, even $50/day!), because he needs the money more than Americans do.
An increasing proportion of women, especially at some schools with strong affirmative action programs, are either incompetent, or willfully game the system. Several of my friends count in the "gaming the system" group. They're intelligent, but they don't learn anything or do any work: they know that as long as they do a bare minimum, the professor will give them an A or B, because giving a lower grade would cause the professor problems as people ask why this white male professor was giving the only woman in his class a bad grade. In fact, it is pretty much impossible for them not to graduate, because the school cannot afford to have its already poor "percentage of women in the EE department" numbers look even worse. So they graduate people who purposely do no work.
Doesn't end after college either. These same women, who graduated with a decent GPA despite knowing nothing, get hired to do nothing at companies, which don't fire them because they serve a useful purpose for the company's diversity statistics. I know people who admit doing this, and have absolutely no trouble doing so.
This isn't anything particularly unique about women. If you tell a group of people that they can do a half-assed job and still succeed, many people will. Hell, I would.
The US press tilts in various directions, depending on which outlet you look at, but generally they're less tabloidish and less prone to gross misrepresentations than many European outlets. The BBC is a good news source in Europe, and so are some of the German papers, but there's a whole host of papers in the UK, France, Spain, and especially Greece and Italy, that are absolute trash. A Greek paper a few years ago even reported that Bush's daughters were caught with "drugs", when what they were caught with was underage drinking, something that's actually legal in Greece.
The act of criminalizing any idea ought to, all other things being equal, make that idea more appealing to thoughtful people. Criminalizing ideas is wrong, and one ought to make a stand for criminalized ideas whenever possible.
Of course, most reasonable people do not support Nazi ideas even where they're criminalized. But in general, criminalizing ideas makes them more attractive to those of us who side with unpopular sentiment against oppressive government.
This is still just an incremental, long-overdue maintenance release to 0.16. At some point in the past they chucked 0.16 and started from scratch, writing a bunch of libraries in a modular fashion to "do things right", but the project grew quite ambitious and has taken rather longer than probably anyone would've assumed, so eventually someone went back and did some maintenance releases on 0.16, which is what is being released here. I have no idea when 0.17 will come out, although a few of the libraries are finally starting to coalesce, after they were chucked and rewritten from scratch two or three times each.
They might be slow, but they sure as hell do a thorough job.
0.17, despite the paltry version number increase over 0.16, is not two years in the making so far because they're updating the eye candy on the window manager. It's an entire set of libraries covering basically anything you need to write and run apps, from which a complete desktop environment will also be built.
It was founded by a German immigrant to the United Kingdom, and is currently a UK company headquartered in London.
I guess the British are also functional illiterates, eh?
I was thinking of soft drink cans. As I now recall, I have in fact seen 500 ml aluminum cans in which beer is sold (as well as pint-sized cans).
I've seen 250 ml (~8 oz) glass bottles and aluminum cans; 330 ml (~12 oz) aluminum cans; 500 ml (~17 oz) plastic bottles; and ~575 ml (20 oz) plastic bottles. I have not, however, seen a 500 ml aluminum can, in either Europe or the United States.
Now perhaps this company is making one, but to compare it to a 500-ml aluminum beverage can as if 500-ml aluminum beverage cans actually exist is odd.
There are very few movies which I consider as valuable as a quality CD. Maybe if movies were half the price of CDs I'd buy them, but in general a movie is good for 1.5-2 hours of enjoyment, or in exceptional cases maybe I can watch it 3-5 times and get up to 10 hours of enjoyment out of it. Compare to a CD, which can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of music being produced that is a ripoff at $12-$18 per CD, because there is. But for some good music, that often took a year or so of the artist's time to write and record, it's not a bad price at all. Especially with lesser-known artists, who might be extremely lucky if they sell 5,000 copies of their CD, the $12-$18 isn't really enough to even support them without a day job.
Pricewatch.com and pricegrabber.com are still beating froogle.google.com by a large margin.
The category in question, of course, is "largest state in land area, counting only states that actually have at least one real city (towns under 300k residents need not apply)".
Perhaps they ought to spend more time cleaning up drugs rather than logos?
The issue is that the RIAA is the one fucking up normal citizens' lives for no reason other than to buy time for a failing business model. If you disagree with this, it is not a good idea to continue to hand them money with which to do this: instead, you ought to boycott them.
I've been doing this for some time now, and there's quite a bit of non-RIAA music well worth listening to. Metropolis Records is a good place to start for industrial/EBM fans.
what version of kismac? 1.x or 2.x?
Canadians have sort of the best of both worlds: they have socialized medicine at home, and are right next door to a capitalist medicine system if they want to use that. If socialized medicine was the only choice, and people couldn't go over the to US for treatment if they chose to, that might make at least some people less happy with the arrangement.
Aluminum 12", recent version (i.e. last few months).
Is there some trick to getting KisMac to work on Powerbooks? It hangs after about 3-10 seconds for me, and I have to force quit it. Happens consistently, every time. (With an Airport Extreme card, which it claims to support.)
IBM tried their best to stop clones. Eventually they were reverse-engineered, but they certainly didn't go willingly into the "IBM-compatible" era.
I've been to my share of rallies and speeches and political websites, but I've yet to find a large segment of the neo-left that places evidence and facts before ideology. It's all ideology and partisanship: if Bush does something, it's automatically decided it's wrong, and the justification comes afterwards. Nobody makes honest evaluations based on evidence and facts in that camp. Sure, Bush is usually wrong, but that doesn't mean that every single thing he does is automatically wrong, unless you're some sort of partisan warrior.
Possibly an exception to this is Noam Chomsky, who certainly isn't perfect, but at least has an unusual combination of views that aren't easy to pinhole into one particular ideology. Nader also on occasion seems thoughtful. But Kerry? Partisan idiot, possibly even more so than Bush (Kerry's almost on the level of Tom DeLay in partisan nastiness). Same goes with most neo-left groups, especially the sort that hold rallies.
The Republicans have consistently been the party of business since their inception. Originally it was northern business versus the southern agriculture that supported the Democrats, and now it's business wherever that business happens to be located. The Republicans have never been the party of unions and minimum wages: that's always been the Democrats. Surely you remember the corrupt union bosses forging votes to get Democrats into office?
The Democrats too, time and time again, give tax breaks / incentives / corporate welfare to the rich. Remember Senator Hollings, a Democrat, who sponsored a copyright extension to protect the monetary interests of the Disney corporation? He's just one of many.
Bush, by far - 57,218 to 26,911, outpaces Kerry in the $2,000+ donors category, and Kerry, again by a large margin - 35% of Kerry's donors compared to 28% of Bush's, outpaces Bush in the $200 or less category.
These statistics don't show anything at all about the relative donations by fat cats and average people. They show merely that the average Bush donor gives more. This could be because the average Bush donor is rich, as you seem to be implying, or it could be because the average Bush donor is more deeply committed to the campaign. To figure out which it is, you'd have to give breakdowns by "percentage of donors with annual incomes of $xx-$yy".
Remember, Utah donates more to charity than Connecticut, despite Connecticut being a lot richer.
Shouting down your opponent and trying to prevent him or her from having venues to speak is opposing free speech. It's not an issue involving the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but it is an issue involving the fundamental right to freedom of speech: freedom from restriction by oppressive governments, and freedom from restriction by oppressive mobs.
This comes up pretty often on college campuses, where idiot "liberal" student groups try to shout down people they disagree with, because they're too busy smoking pot on daddy's paycheck to come up with a response besides a temper-tantrum style yelling.