I'm going with (2), myself, since it seems to me that running an actual simulation would take far more resources than the thing being simulated. and that even a posthuman society wouldn't run many (or perhaps any) detailed simulations of their past. I doubt that the observable Universe has the computrons to run quantum-level simulations of a planetary surface, and that's pretty much what we're talking about. Remember the Douglas Adams computer that started with "I think, therefore I am" when turned on for testing, and had deduced the existence of rice pudding and the graduated income tax before it could be turned off? We're talking about that level of computing power.
If we are a simulation, I suspect it would be that we're not historical simulations, but much simplified from the real universe, and I'm not qualified to speculate intelligently on why they'd be doing this. I doubt I'm capable of understanding creatures that could run our Universe as a simulation.
Clinton is one of the most honest candidates this campaign season (Sanders and Kasich are about as honest). Her security issues were basically about trusting the wrong people. I don't know why you'd think she would be in the pockets of foreign powers, and she's never been convicted of anything criminal despite decades of scrutiny and attempts. She's not under investigation for treason. She wasn't indicted because neither the FBI director nor the Attorney General wanted to treat her differently from people who did what she did.
Psychopathic power crazed loon? What's new? You pretty much have to be one to launch a credible bid for the Presidency, and saying a major party candidate is one is about like saying the water is sure wet today.
I really don't think Nader had much of an effect on the Democratic Party, other than by getting Bush elected. Nader got fewer than three million votes, and only the fact that the race came down to an extremely close election in one state allowed him to potentially make a difference. The voters that influenced the Democratic Party most in recent years are the ones who supported Sanders.
Replacing an organization by another is normally done by working outside the organization. Pushing the organization to be more what you want is best done by working inside the organization.
Working for lasting change involving third parties means not just favoring a third party to the point where it becomes one of the big two, but giving third parties a role in politics.
Instant runoff voting is good, since it means I can vote for the candidate I like while still favoring the candidate I think electable and acceptable over the candidate I really don't want. This makes third-party candidates more electable.
What would be even more significant is proportional representation, which (as far as I can tell) can be done without amending the Constitution. "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States...." doesn't mandate individual House districts. It would be possible for a state to have parties submit ordered slates of candidates and allot seats based on a party votes. I don't think this is going to happen, because state governments have historically stayed very close to the US Federal government model, but it appears legal,
Linux is not used in large enterprise business servers with as many as 16 or even 32 sockets.
That's not what came up when I did a Google search on "IBM Linux". IBM has been a fan for a long time, and IIRC made it work on their mainframe architecture.
I'd feel much the same way if he was leaking only RNC documents, except I wouldn't find it quite as annoying. He's a foreigner who is trying to influence a US election by underhanded means. That is bad. (BTW, I like the US military in general.)
I've been something of a compulsive truth-teller, so I have learned how to lie with the facts. In fact, no organization looks good according to their internal emails, so displaying the dirty underwear of one side and not hinting at the other's dirty laundry is deceitful. I see no reason why I shouldn't wonder whether Assange is just publishing what he gets or if he exerts some influence over what he gets or editorial control over what he releases. He's clearly either a liar or mentally disturbed (which I didn't know when he released the Manning leaks).
When did machines and software systems become available to retailers? What about certification? Knowing doom is coming doesn't help if nobody's going to sell doom-proof underwear for another few years.
Right now, I have plenty of envelopes that are sized right for letter and (sometimes) legal paper sizes. I don't think A3 or A4 would fit nearly as well. There would be hassle during the changeover, and I really don't see the upside.
- The US is on the metric system. All of the customary weights and measures are specified in metric: The inch is defined as 25.4 mm. It isn't an IS unit, but it is metric. It would be nice to see the metric system used straight more often, but it's getting there. The bottle of water on my desk is a half liter.
- The US government is one of the oldest in the world (the US is not the oldest country by a long shot, but most other countries have radically changed their government, voluntarily or otherwise, since the US Constitution was ratified), and we have some problems with that. One example is the stupid Electoral College, another is the Second Amendment that makes it extremely difficult to restrict weapons. It's not a competence problem, it's a structural problem.
- Universal basic health care - you're dead on there. It would also be nice if the US government, like all others I'm aware of, was legally permitted to negotiate drug prices using it's vast bargaining power.
- The only decent way to write dates is some form of YYYY-MM-DD. DD-MM-YY and MM-DD-YY are both unsatisfactory.
- Once more you've hit on a real US problem. It's more difficult to change since we have a minimum of fifty-one court systems required by the Constitution, and it's difficult to regulate campaign spending without violating the First Amendment to the Constitution.
We make account-to-account transfers, although they really aren't convenient.
Then some friends of ours needed a substantial loan fast, and transferring a few thousand from one of our accounts to theirs was going to be slow and expensive. We wound up sending them a check.
(They'd asked us to cosign, but I don't do that with friends. If I lend money to friends, I don't want to have to think about it afterwards. Nor do I lend more money than I'm willing to lose, since I'm not going to trash a friendship over money.)
One neighborhood over, the lines are buried, and I'm not aware that they get charged any more. The electric company publishes its rates. Is it that much more expensive?
There's nothing wrong with the US customers. There's no point in remembering four digits, since almost nobody accepts chip & pin. Swiping is a one-second action that keeps my card in my hand at all times. Using the chip is a slow process in which my card sits in the machine. If someone leaves their card in the machine and walks away, there's no reason some other person couldn't grab the card, and since it's chip and signature rather than chip and pin the card would work for anyone.
If you want to criticize something about US card processing, there's plenty of blame, but blaming US shoppers for not using capabilities that aren't enabled or not wanting to switch to a considerably less convenient transaction method is just wrong.
With the waitress handling the card, I can sit at the table uninterrupted and then get up and walk out when I please. There's usually delays when I have to pay at a register, and the chip implementation in the US will only make that worse.
Some posters have claimed that the credit card companies are not only involved in setting the chip deadline, but also were cozy with the companies that make the machines, which apparently cost a lot more, and and require certification that they don't provide in a timely manner, so it has been impossible for quite a few businesses to get their chip machines operating by the deadline.
As a credit card user, I wouldn't mind a class action suit against the companies that slow down the chip payment process (it isn't the retailers, it's too universal for that).
Its faster than swiping. The hold up is not with the reader, it's with the network. If your merchant has a slow link, any processing is going to be slow.
Dude, not all of us can live in a First World nation. Some of us are in the US. I don't know the technical details, but chip transactions are always far slower than magnetic swipes and require the card to be stuck in the reader the whole time. In a swipe transaction, I take the card from my wallet, swipe it, and put it back in my wallet. It is never out of both my hand and my wallet. The time needed to get the damn transaction to work is plenty enough for people to get distracted and forget their card is still there, particularly if they're not used to it yet. People talk about fast transactions if they live in fully developed countries, and that would help a lot with the problem.
From my point of view, it doesn't matter if my bank sucks or somehow every retailer in the area has a slow unreliable internet connection (which I don't believe for a moment). Not being an insider, I can only report on my experience, which is that chip transactions suck.
I've actually been at one US retailer that had chip and PIN enabled, and it took me a moment to remember which PIN it had. I don't remember it as being significantly faster than the agonizlingly slow chip & signature.
0 degrees being a horribly bone-chillingly frigid day
Speaking as a Minnesotan - Wimp! I lost a lot of my cold resistance a few years back, but 0 still isn't that bad. You're saying that the Fahrenheit system suits your own temperature preferences more than Celsius. That isn't a really good argument for people living in areas that actually get cold or hot.
Some people really don't have time for serious exercise (not as many as will claim lack of time). Lots of people have motivational issues that aren't going to be helped by people telling them to exercise.
It's really easy to tell people to get more physical activity, and pretty much useless.
All you need is one cheap-ass phone that doesn't have fancy things like being cordless. It's not like you're gong to be using this daily, so it can be a piece of crap as long as it works. We bought ours at Radio Shack quite s few years ago, and haven't used it.
There are natural barriers to entry, such as capital costs, network effects, etc. One traditional barrier example is there being many more brands of laundry detergent than companies that make it, so a newcomer into the market gets more limited exposure as just one of many rather than one of a few. Companies that want to stay monopolistic also get into other deals with their customers to make them difficult to replace. Any vendor that can lock you into something proprietary will. A company might pay a grocery store for shelf space. None of these barriers are caused by the government.
More specifically, the Republicans have been taken over by a coalition of highly ideological people who want their candidates to be ideologically pure much more than they want them electable. This happened to the Democrats roughly around 1970, but they recovered faster (and made changes to the process to try to prevent another McGovern).
And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote.
Not in influencing sitting Congressional representatives. Far fewer people write than vote, and their letters are taken to be indicative of how people are likely to vote, and they can address a particular issue.
Consider the TPP, which according to one of my Senators might get voted on after the election. You can, if you like, note if anyone who represents you favors the TPP and vote against them at the next election, but that does exactly no good if the vote is before the next election (neither of my Senators are up for re-election this year), and fails completely to influence your Senators. If they know that some of their constituents are against the TPP, they may take that into account. If you privately decide to vote against a Senator who backs the TPP, your Senator will never find out that the TPP had any influence on his or her reelection.
Seriously, you vote for President once every four years, and your vote matters a lot less if you're not in a swing state. You vote for each Senator once every six years, and Representatives once every two, and a lot of other people are going to vote at the same time. If you bother to send a letter now and then, you are exerting some influence, in a timely manner, on the issues you particularly care about. It's a cheap and easy way to add to your impact on the country.
The DNC is directly involved in getting their chosen people into two of the three branches of government.
Um, yes. If you haven't noticed, the Democrats are a political party, and the DNC wants to get Democrats elected wherever it can. This includes discouraging candidates who are less likely to be elected sometimes. You may also be unaware that private emails were intended to be private, and no matter where they're from often contain things that don't look good in public.
The DNC is nothing like the Praetorian Guard either. It does not accept bribes to assassinate sitting Presidents, and does not determine who will be the next chief executive.
What's your problem with DNC tactics, and why is it worth sacrificing the welfare of the country to object to?
I hate to break it to you, but the DNC is a political organization, which means it deals with politics and gets political. It isn't an absolutely neutral arbiter of opinion. It has a vested interest in getting someone electable nominated, and Sanders is a lot less electable than Clinton. You'll find much the same stuff in the RNC, if you care to hack in.
Also, if you dislike how the DNC operates, the correct thing to do is to join the party and work within it to make the changes you want. That has a chance of being effective. Refusing to vote Democrat because you don't like the DNC will do absolutely nothing to reform the DNC. The connection is too tenuous.
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I'm going with (2), myself, since it seems to me that running an actual simulation would take far more resources than the thing being simulated. and that even a posthuman society wouldn't run many (or perhaps any) detailed simulations of their past. I doubt that the observable Universe has the computrons to run quantum-level simulations of a planetary surface, and that's pretty much what we're talking about. Remember the Douglas Adams computer that started with "I think, therefore I am" when turned on for testing, and had deduced the existence of rice pudding and the graduated income tax before it could be turned off? We're talking about that level of computing power.
If we are a simulation, I suspect it would be that we're not historical simulations, but much simplified from the real universe, and I'm not qualified to speculate intelligently on why they'd be doing this. I doubt I'm capable of understanding creatures that could run our Universe as a simulation.
Clinton is one of the most honest candidates this campaign season (Sanders and Kasich are about as honest). Her security issues were basically about trusting the wrong people. I don't know why you'd think she would be in the pockets of foreign powers, and she's never been convicted of anything criminal despite decades of scrutiny and attempts. She's not under investigation for treason. She wasn't indicted because neither the FBI director nor the Attorney General wanted to treat her differently from people who did what she did.
Psychopathic power crazed loon? What's new? You pretty much have to be one to launch a credible bid for the Presidency, and saying a major party candidate is one is about like saying the water is sure wet today.
I really don't think Nader had much of an effect on the Democratic Party, other than by getting Bush elected. Nader got fewer than three million votes, and only the fact that the race came down to an extremely close election in one state allowed him to potentially make a difference. The voters that influenced the Democratic Party most in recent years are the ones who supported Sanders.
Replacing an organization by another is normally done by working outside the organization. Pushing the organization to be more what you want is best done by working inside the organization.
Working for lasting change involving third parties means not just favoring a third party to the point where it becomes one of the big two, but giving third parties a role in politics.
Instant runoff voting is good, since it means I can vote for the candidate I like while still favoring the candidate I think electable and acceptable over the candidate I really don't want. This makes third-party candidates more electable.
What would be even more significant is proportional representation, which (as far as I can tell) can be done without amending the Constitution. "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States...." doesn't mandate individual House districts. It would be possible for a state to have parties submit ordered slates of candidates and allot seats based on a party votes. I don't think this is going to happen, because state governments have historically stayed very close to the US Federal government model, but it appears legal,
That's not what came up when I did a Google search on "IBM Linux". IBM has been a fan for a long time, and IIRC made it work on their mainframe architecture.
I'd feel much the same way if he was leaking only RNC documents, except I wouldn't find it quite as annoying. He's a foreigner who is trying to influence a US election by underhanded means. That is bad. (BTW, I like the US military in general.)
I've been something of a compulsive truth-teller, so I have learned how to lie with the facts. In fact, no organization looks good according to their internal emails, so displaying the dirty underwear of one side and not hinting at the other's dirty laundry is deceitful. I see no reason why I shouldn't wonder whether Assange is just publishing what he gets or if he exerts some influence over what he gets or editorial control over what he releases. He's clearly either a liar or mentally disturbed (which I didn't know when he released the Manning leaks).
When did machines and software systems become available to retailers? What about certification? Knowing doom is coming doesn't help if nobody's going to sell doom-proof underwear for another few years.
As far as I can tell, power prices where I live are fairly low still.
Right now, I have plenty of envelopes that are sized right for letter and (sometimes) legal paper sizes. I don't think A3 or A4 would fit nearly as well. There would be hassle during the changeover, and I really don't see the upside.
- The US is on the metric system. All of the customary weights and measures are specified in metric: The inch is defined as 25.4 mm. It isn't an IS unit, but it is metric. It would be nice to see the metric system used straight more often, but it's getting there. The bottle of water on my desk is a half liter.
- The US government is one of the oldest in the world (the US is not the oldest country by a long shot, but most other countries have radically changed their government, voluntarily or otherwise, since the US Constitution was ratified), and we have some problems with that. One example is the stupid Electoral College, another is the Second Amendment that makes it extremely difficult to restrict weapons. It's not a competence problem, it's a structural problem.
- Universal basic health care - you're dead on there. It would also be nice if the US government, like all others I'm aware of, was legally permitted to negotiate drug prices using it's vast bargaining power.
- The only decent way to write dates is some form of YYYY-MM-DD. DD-MM-YY and MM-DD-YY are both unsatisfactory.
- Once more you've hit on a real US problem. It's more difficult to change since we have a minimum of fifty-one court systems required by the Constitution, and it's difficult to regulate campaign spending without violating the First Amendment to the Constitution.
We make account-to-account transfers, although they really aren't convenient.
Then some friends of ours needed a substantial loan fast, and transferring a few thousand from one of our accounts to theirs was going to be slow and expensive. We wound up sending them a check.
(They'd asked us to cosign, but I don't do that with friends. If I lend money to friends, I don't want to have to think about it afterwards. Nor do I lend more money than I'm willing to lose, since I'm not going to trash a friendship over money.)
One neighborhood over, the lines are buried, and I'm not aware that they get charged any more. The electric company publishes its rates. Is it that much more expensive?
There's nothing wrong with the US customers. There's no point in remembering four digits, since almost nobody accepts chip & pin. Swiping is a one-second action that keeps my card in my hand at all times. Using the chip is a slow process in which my card sits in the machine. If someone leaves their card in the machine and walks away, there's no reason some other person couldn't grab the card, and since it's chip and signature rather than chip and pin the card would work for anyone.
If you want to criticize something about US card processing, there's plenty of blame, but blaming US shoppers for not using capabilities that aren't enabled or not wanting to switch to a considerably less convenient transaction method is just wrong.
With the waitress handling the card, I can sit at the table uninterrupted and then get up and walk out when I please. There's usually delays when I have to pay at a register, and the chip implementation in the US will only make that worse.
Some posters have claimed that the credit card companies are not only involved in setting the chip deadline, but also were cozy with the companies that make the machines, which apparently cost a lot more, and and require certification that they don't provide in a timely manner, so it has been impossible for quite a few businesses to get their chip machines operating by the deadline.
As a credit card user, I wouldn't mind a class action suit against the companies that slow down the chip payment process (it isn't the retailers, it's too universal for that).
Dude, not all of us can live in a First World nation. Some of us are in the US. I don't know the technical details, but chip transactions are always far slower than magnetic swipes and require the card to be stuck in the reader the whole time. In a swipe transaction, I take the card from my wallet, swipe it, and put it back in my wallet. It is never out of both my hand and my wallet. The time needed to get the damn transaction to work is plenty enough for people to get distracted and forget their card is still there, particularly if they're not used to it yet. People talk about fast transactions if they live in fully developed countries, and that would help a lot with the problem.
From my point of view, it doesn't matter if my bank sucks or somehow every retailer in the area has a slow unreliable internet connection (which I don't believe for a moment). Not being an insider, I can only report on my experience, which is that chip transactions suck.
I've actually been at one US retailer that had chip and PIN enabled, and it took me a moment to remember which PIN it had. I don't remember it as being significantly faster than the agonizlingly slow chip & signature.
Speaking as a Minnesotan - Wimp! I lost a lot of my cold resistance a few years back, but 0 still isn't that bad. You're saying that the Fahrenheit system suits your own temperature preferences more than Celsius. That isn't a really good argument for people living in areas that actually get cold or hot.
Some people really don't have time for serious exercise (not as many as will claim lack of time). Lots of people have motivational issues that aren't going to be helped by people telling them to exercise.
It's really easy to tell people to get more physical activity, and pretty much useless.
All you need is one cheap-ass phone that doesn't have fancy things like being cordless. It's not like you're gong to be using this daily, so it can be a piece of crap as long as it works. We bought ours at Radio Shack quite s few years ago, and haven't used it.
There are natural barriers to entry, such as capital costs, network effects, etc. One traditional barrier example is there being many more brands of laundry detergent than companies that make it, so a newcomer into the market gets more limited exposure as just one of many rather than one of a few. Companies that want to stay monopolistic also get into other deals with their customers to make them difficult to replace. Any vendor that can lock you into something proprietary will. A company might pay a grocery store for shelf space. None of these barriers are caused by the government.
More specifically, the Republicans have been taken over by a coalition of highly ideological people who want their candidates to be ideologically pure much more than they want them electable. This happened to the Democrats roughly around 1970, but they recovered faster (and made changes to the process to try to prevent another McGovern).
Not in influencing sitting Congressional representatives. Far fewer people write than vote, and their letters are taken to be indicative of how people are likely to vote, and they can address a particular issue.
Consider the TPP, which according to one of my Senators might get voted on after the election. You can, if you like, note if anyone who represents you favors the TPP and vote against them at the next election, but that does exactly no good if the vote is before the next election (neither of my Senators are up for re-election this year), and fails completely to influence your Senators. If they know that some of their constituents are against the TPP, they may take that into account. If you privately decide to vote against a Senator who backs the TPP, your Senator will never find out that the TPP had any influence on his or her reelection.
Seriously, you vote for President once every four years, and your vote matters a lot less if you're not in a swing state. You vote for each Senator once every six years, and Representatives once every two, and a lot of other people are going to vote at the same time. If you bother to send a letter now and then, you are exerting some influence, in a timely manner, on the issues you particularly care about. It's a cheap and easy way to add to your impact on the country.
Um, yes. If you haven't noticed, the Democrats are a political party, and the DNC wants to get Democrats elected wherever it can. This includes discouraging candidates who are less likely to be elected sometimes. You may also be unaware that private emails were intended to be private, and no matter where they're from often contain things that don't look good in public.
The DNC is nothing like the Praetorian Guard either. It does not accept bribes to assassinate sitting Presidents, and does not determine who will be the next chief executive.
What's your problem with DNC tactics, and why is it worth sacrificing the welfare of the country to object to?
I hate to break it to you, but the DNC is a political organization, which means it deals with politics and gets political. It isn't an absolutely neutral arbiter of opinion. It has a vested interest in getting someone electable nominated, and Sanders is a lot less electable than Clinton. You'll find much the same stuff in the RNC, if you care to hack in.
Also, if you dislike how the DNC operates, the correct thing to do is to join the party and work within it to make the changes you want. That has a chance of being effective. Refusing to vote Democrat because you don't like the DNC will do absolutely nothing to reform the DNC. The connection is too tenuous.