I supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, but as soon as Bush anchored our motives to WMD, I cringed. I knew it was going to be a long and delicate road before we actually set foot in Iraq, and Bush was now establishing a tangible, physical object as the sole evidence that we acted in good faith.
I don't believe the Americans were lied to, and I'm only using the definitions of "lied" that our mothers taught us. I can't even fathom how Bush could have accepted that plan. "Hrm hrm, I'll TELL them that Iraq has WMD, and we'll obviously demolish Iraq, and then when everyone figures out I baldly lied, I'll just... uh... talk trash about the Democratic candidates! Yeah, this can't possibly end my political career." If Bush actually lied, it was the ballsiest move any politician has ever made - more so than if Nixon had directly ordered the Watergate break-in, more so than if Clinton pimped a team of hos.
If Bush had kept the justification for invading Iraq to the intangible (Hussein has commited atrocities in the past, he has systematically violated human rights, his government destabilizes the region, etc.) then Hussein would have been powerless to directly harm Bush. He can destroy, hide, or transport his [WMDs|WMD programs] but he can't do a thing about his past or his political enemies.
What really upsets me about this is that it's not like there is no precedent for mobilizing your nation into action. Winston Churchill didn't give a speech about Germans having a "Paris gun", he motivated them with inspirational and intangible language. Not to admire Hitler, but he did transform a post-WW1 wasteland Germany into a military might and he did so by villifying intangible qualities of Jews, foreigners, and Aryans (however false these qualities were.) In World War II the US was motivated by the attacks on Pearl Harbor, something that the Japanese were powerless to change. It's not like the Emporer waited until Japans dying gasps and then could have published new reports to show that Pearl Harbor never happened. In all these cases, we were motivated by something that the enemy was powerless to change, and there was a good goddamn reason for that.
But history apparently wasn't good enough for the Bush administration, who preferred to risk our international legitimacy on a foreign leader's ability to conceal the approximate equivalent of party tricks.
I support the removal of Saddam Hussein, but I cannot in good conscience vote for Bush.
I can always rely on Slashdot for well-reasoned debate...
We seem to agree about that, sarcasm included.
That $1 that you save by buying from Walmart can then be used for other things you wouldn't otherwise be able to buy.
That $1 isn't going to go very far when my employer goes out of business, but this is only obvious and elusive to people who think they're so clever.
My bigger point is that your original post misused the word "isolationism". The correct term was probably "protectionism", which is a vastly different concept. Imperial Japan practiced isolationism and it nearly destroyed the country. Find me a nation that has never protected itself economically and I'll show you an undeveloped cesspool.
You seem to be assuming that [blah blah] These are not necessarily good assumptions.
Fascinating, but what's your point? If you are an American, you're arguing against protecting the American economy. If you're not an American, you're arguing in favor of a global American empire, since such an arrangement is the only way to sustain an out-sourced American economy. Either way, you're giving me strong signals that tying your shoes is a big deal. The only assumption I'm making now is that you're really proud of taking Econ-101 and you were the type of student who beleagured the professor with half-baked "solutions" to complex problems by clinging to the most radical paragraph you found in the textbook. And that much I'm taking as truth.
Like you said, something about well reasoned debates and Slashdot.
Exactly what part of that doesn't sound like isolationism to you?
All of it, dimwit.
I don't think "isolationism" means what you think it means.
If you're such a good capitalist, how could you fail to see that quality and price aren't the only ways to establish the "value" of a product? I'd have to be an unfathomable idiot to think that I should buy a Thing from Walmart and save $1 instead of buy it through my own business or the business that employs me. It's only one level of abstraction away to realize that I'd be an unfathomable idiot to buy a foreign product merely because it's cheaper than a product made domestically, by a company that invests in my economy, by a company that employs the people whom I support and who support me through social government programs.
What part of that sounds like isolationism? Fucking none of it. Isolationism means excluding outside influences out of hand for no reason other than it's from the outside. The original poster suggested that you buy from companies that do not fire American workers and hire foreign workers. If you think that's isolationism --- no, I'll do one better. If you think that's a bad idea, let me suggest your job is the next to go to some far-side-of-the-world country while you experience warm fuzzies for abusing six syllable words.
Yeah, I see what you're saying and it's right. The guy is obviously proud of his costume and he should be - he had a goal, worked toward that goal, won an award, and wants to show it off. I really hope he isn't disheartened by the multitude of +5 Funny posts here, because once you're proud of something, it's excruciating to be suddenly confronted with doubts that you wasted your time.
That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the guy gets a cup. Funny jokes aside, it WOULD be a significant improvement in the costume, and it might even improve the judging when he shows off the costume again.
That aspect of the costume is so glaringly embarassing that I have to wonder if the webpage is something of a hoax... To me, wearing a cup with that bodysuit would have been so obvious that I have to think that NOT wearing one could only have been a deliberate decision, making it possible to prank a bunch of people into looking at an unattractive man in spandex.
In any event, if the site is legitimate, it looks like the guy is really proud of his TRON costume. I'd strongly suggest getting a cup and trying to show it off again.
Re:An ice age depending on melting ice?
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The History Channel or The Discovery Channel has a very revealing documentary on this topic exactly. It hardly even touches the topic of global warming. It carefully explains the deep ocean currents that run from the Atlantic NE around Africa to the Indian Ocean and around Australia to the S Pacific, and how this current circulates the Earth's water supply and regulates climates. It goes on to point out that these deep ocean currents travel at something like six inches per hour, and a water sample pulled from the bottom of the S Pacific can be dated to roughly 2000 years ago (based on atmospheric conditions and contaminants in the water.)
This is a pretty strong argument that the higher lattitudes are temperate because of the regulating effects of the currents. Siberia is a frozen waste because it benefits from no nearby warm current, and the Sahara bakes while the Amazon is merely tropical because of the proximity to a regulating surface current. If the deep ocean current were disrupted, there is reasonable and significant doubt that a different suitable global ocean current system would develop to prevent the low lattitudes from turning into a planet-wide desert while the high lattitudes make Siberia look like a warm vacation spot.
Then it demonstrates in a fish tank how cold water currents cannot descend in fresh water as well as in salt water. This is exactly what happens near Iceland, where the warm Atlantic surface current hits Arctic waters and drops to the ocean floor to fuel the deep ocean current. Already they have scientific measurements to suggest that the deep ocean current is being fueled less now than it was 30 years ago, before which nobody understood the importance of salinity in the oceans and the deep ocean currents. This correlates to the alarming increase in icebergs which have broken away from the polar ice caps over the last few decades (something like a 500% increase, by the way.)
And the documentary takes only 60 minutes, including commercials.
If you're a prize fighter, you want your first professional fight to be against some out-of-shape opponent who stands a slim chance of winning but wouldn't mind the paycheck. In a lot of ways, SCO was the ideal opponent. They talked up the hype, they were bringing the payday to the ring, and they had a very slim chance of defeating Linux (and more notably, Linux's trainers in the forms of IBM, etc.)
So if this "fight" doesn't actually occur, it scares away other potential easy wins for Linux's professional debut in the courtroom. A prizefighter whose opponents cancel the fights doesn't get a chance at the title - he's still an unproven amateur.
Says the blurb: many people to look to supernatural causes
Says the first sentence of the article: this tiny [...] village
Says the article: The blazes, originally blamed on the devil, have not hurt anyone.
Says the priest: "Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods."
Yeah, genius, it really is the Slashdot crowd's fault for thinking that these people are superstitious. What really sickens me about dimwitted liberalism is that too many people use it as a crutch for their own faults. Life hard? Don't adapt - force the world to adapt to you. Don't like how you're portrayed in the media? Don't let that motivate you to rise up and defy the stereotype - sit on your ass and complain about how stereotypes are unfair. Don't like the facts? Don't bother changing yourself - claim you've been victimized and the rest of the world is obligated to adjust just for you, you special little victim.
Why is there an attitude about this story that the people in "this tiny Sicilian village" are superstitious? BECAUSE THE FARKING ARTICLE SAYS SO.
I don't claim to know much about Italian people in Italy, but if this was happening in a rural southern town in the USA, of course I would expect the people to think it's some religious phenomena. If it were happening in a rural town in the NE USA, I would be shocked if they think it's a religious phenomena.
I don't know if the stereotype about religious Italians truly applies in this case, but stereotypes are not always wrong as a rule.
Slashdot editors/fans really need to understand the difference between "using" a home linux desktop and "administering" a home linux desktop.
It's like this: If your grandparents lived 1,000 miles away from you; you were their #1 tech support person; and they wanted a computer that would let them do office apps, email, IM, surf the internet, and a few games; would you set them up with a WinXP box or with a KDE|Gnome desktop?
USING either is basically the same, but with a linux machine, you don't have to worry about the old folks getting popups, Outlook virii, BonzaiBuddy, WeatherBug, or malware that overwrites important.dlls. You don't have to worry about them downloading nifty free games that turns their computer into a DDoS zombie. By virtue of running a non-Windows box, they are forced to embrace a certain paranoia about the internet --- and think about it, if everyone had a certain level of paranoia about emails with attachments, free games, and banner ads that have detected security weaknesses on your machine, wouldn't we all be better off?
So for me, there is no question about it. Grandma and Grandpa can't set up that linux box, but they sure as heck can use it. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the casual computer user would have a far better experience with linux than winXP, but I don't hear many people trumpeting this point of view like I think they should.
Dear Troll,
Some people are dumb and nothing can be done about that.
Dumb people do not represent all people.
You got that one for free, next time you'll owe me a dime.
Space time trade-off. One of the professors who repeatedly told me that "memory is cheap" was teaching my graduate-level Theory of Algorithms course, one specifically intended to design speed-efficient code.
You can have it fast, light on memory, or neither. There are without doubt lower bounds on the space-time complexity of loads of problems.
For software in general you have a good point, but I've never had a professor give me any advice about that. (I'm a theory and algorithms person.)
I just got back my third karma today, and it had a sticker saying, "We will respect your initial warranty, but this unit does not come with an additional warranty."... Plus, I think it's illegal not to give a warranty on RMA'd products.
This is EXACTLY the policy at my ex-employer's business, and if this is actually illegal, I would love to get them nailed for it. I wonder if this is the type of thing that would be regulated by state or local laws? Not only am I not a lawyer, I wouldn't even know how to search for the answer. Presumably Google isn't a good source, else everyone would be a lawyer...
I've seen the South Park kids travel to French Canada. They have square wheels on their bicycles as well as their cars. I really don't see what the big excitement is all about.
Pure capitalism doesn't prohibit others from paying the cost (perhaps the doctor would work without pay, or many other possibilities that can and do happen today without government involvement).
And the other side of that coin is that it doesn't save the sick and the old from being beggars whose survival depends on the mercy of others. That pretty much brings us full circle to the original poster's complaint. Without some flavor of socialized health care, if you can't afford the medicine, you are left for dead -- Oh, unless you beg appropriately or someone takes pity on you.
The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor. Capitalism will never adjust that situation.
Microsoft uses an "Advanced Options" button to separate their novice/expert configurations.
Coulda sworn I specifically stated that the complicated stuff needs to be separated from the simple stuff. As it stands, the linux desktop only comes in complicated mode.
People want to USE their PC, not learn HOW it works.
Which just goes to show that linux is dead. Oh wait...
As for the "either/or" mentality, I guess it doesn't matter much. The important thing, I think, is to draw a line and decide which is part of the "easy to use" desktop and which is part of the "experts only" desktop. Then you can support one or the other without telling Grandma to open up her config file in vi and edit the daemon options to support more client connections.
There are plenty of "easy to use" packages for linux, but having 10 easy to use programs with 30 hard to use programs makes for a desktop that's hard to use. Even if it's 50/50, it's a desktop that's hard to use. If you make it an "either/or" choice, then some people can have a fully easy to use desktop but you still get to sell the complete linux clockworks.
I really don't see a way to give both at the same time without frustrating the hell out of both the expert and the novice.
I feel so justified. I was talking about this long ago. I think for (any distribution of) Linux to be really successful on the desktop market, they'll need to deliver at least two versions of the product. This can be chosen at installation time or literally be different products, but desktop success NEEDS to have a wizard/automatic driven desktop for people who just want the thing to work, and linux NEEDS to have the geeky engine exposed to be accepted by the experts.
The company that does this well and gets their product on machines will have a significant lead in becoming the dominant linux on the desktop and, I believe, will be well on the way to taking profits right out of Microsoft's hands.
Cable companies have been given a monopoly. To be perfectly accurate, this is called an oligopoly.
I've had plenty of choices everywhere I've lived.
And I've never had cancer. Therefore, cancer is not a problem in America. Way to go, Ace.
who wants to pay 25$/mo for 5 channels?
For crying out loud, THAT IS THE POINT. I'm paying $54 per month for basic+expanded cable and there's only 10 channels that I ever watch. Thanks for making my point for me. If I can save $5 per month by cutting out the 40 channels I never watch, that's a 10% reduction in price. I guess we'll just have to agree that we have different priorities, but I dislike paying $25 for every 5 channels I watch and I also like to save money.
What your donut shop hasn't accounted for is the fact that cable companies have been given a monopoly by the government. If your donut shop were put into business by the government, and you were assured by the government that you would face no competition from other donut shops, THEN the government said that you're going to have to offer what the cops want, you'd be crying a different tune, wouldn't you?
In the case of the cable companies, who have been handed a monopoly by the government, you might say that the customer they need to please IS the government, and this is one form of letting the market decide. If the cable companies don't please this very important customer, they could have their license to do business pulled. It certainly sounds to me like a case of "letting the market decide", though the traditional example of a donut shop doesn't fit.
Even if it were bad, I do not get any such thing as a lesser-watched, niche channel to begin with. I'm living in the rural area surrounding Virginia Tech where the cable companies extort outrageous fees from college students. This is a small town in the mountains and I'm paying $93 per month for basic+expanded cable (about 50 channels) and crappy cable internet.
Included in those 50 channels is 5 home shopping networks, every variation of C-Span, NASA's channel (which I appreciate but has permanent technical problems with the audio) and the full slew of Food network, Home & Garden channel, Paint Your House channel, Thrift Shop Remodeling Network, and probably 3 more that run interior decorating shows 24x7. Tell me where I'm missing out on the lesser-watched channels? They're just making me pay for as much crap as they can.
This is exactly how I spent my summers as an undergrad. Lots and lots of Excel VBA to make custom interfaces for specific projects, lots of data aggregation, even systems to produce html summaries so they had something slightly pretty to show at the monthly reviews. On one project I saved them an estimated $100,000 in labor costs annually.
None of it was stellar coding or truly professional, but I made myself useful and exploited the tools that the company already owned. I don't really have a point, but VBA isn't a completely lame tool.
Fucking A man. I'm not going to sit around and say, "Shit, I guess I'll eat cat food, thank God that I'm still a capitalist! I'm just glad my job is going to the cheapest labor possible!" Some people get common sense from a school, some people get it from a baseball bat to the skull. You know where the line is, so pick a side.
It does have to start somewhere, but if this company martyrs itself for the cause of domestic labor, where's the reward in that? Would anybody care? We (Americans) need some job protection from outside the free market. That's all I'm saying.
Which would be fine if the cost of living in America were to simultaneously drop. It won't. This isn't going to be the end of the American economic machine, but it could be a very ugly 10, 20, or 50 years. I'm 24 years old. I do not want to live through this bullshit. I will give my presidential vote to whichever moron will protect my life and lifestyle. Period.
Perhaps this just happens to be a point in history in this sector of the economy where R&D has gotten ahead of the profit machines. I'm currently an unemployed CS grad student who would rather be earning $20 an hour rather than getting a graduate degree, and every day I see somebody selling something that makes me say, "Damnit, I'd do that for 75% of their prices." The fact that Dell advertises "Award Winning Support" which WE all know is outsourced to India and a great deal on a "Pentium 4" which WE all know is the cheapest possible equipment they can sell --- and they're STILL MAKING A KILLING --- ought to indicate that there's enough profit available that R&D isn't so critical at the present time.
Not that R&D isn't good - but academia specializes in that. I'm just saying that it's no surprise to me that companies heavy in R&D spending aren't doing so great. It's a tough time in technology and there's still room to capitalize on the R&D we already have.
Slashdot Mirror
I supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, but as soon as Bush anchored our motives to WMD, I cringed. I knew it was going to be a long and delicate road before we actually set foot in Iraq, and Bush was now establishing a tangible, physical object as the sole evidence that we acted in good faith.
I don't believe the Americans were lied to, and I'm only using the definitions of "lied" that our mothers taught us. I can't even fathom how Bush could have accepted that plan. "Hrm hrm, I'll TELL them that Iraq has WMD, and we'll obviously demolish Iraq, and then when everyone figures out I baldly lied, I'll just... uh... talk trash about the Democratic candidates! Yeah, this can't possibly end my political career." If Bush actually lied, it was the ballsiest move any politician has ever made - more so than if Nixon had directly ordered the Watergate break-in, more so than if Clinton pimped a team of hos.
If Bush had kept the justification for invading Iraq to the intangible (Hussein has commited atrocities in the past, he has systematically violated human rights, his government destabilizes the region, etc.) then Hussein would have been powerless to directly harm Bush. He can destroy, hide, or transport his [WMDs|WMD programs] but he can't do a thing about his past or his political enemies.
What really upsets me about this is that it's not like there is no precedent for mobilizing your nation into action. Winston Churchill didn't give a speech about Germans having a "Paris gun", he motivated them with inspirational and intangible language. Not to admire Hitler, but he did transform a post-WW1 wasteland Germany into a military might and he did so by villifying intangible qualities of Jews, foreigners, and Aryans (however false these qualities were.) In World War II the US was motivated by the attacks on Pearl Harbor, something that the Japanese were powerless to change. It's not like the Emporer waited until Japans dying gasps and then could have published new reports to show that Pearl Harbor never happened. In all these cases, we were motivated by something that the enemy was powerless to change, and there was a good goddamn reason for that.
But history apparently wasn't good enough for the Bush administration, who preferred to risk our international legitimacy on a foreign leader's ability to conceal the approximate equivalent of party tricks.
I support the removal of Saddam Hussein, but I cannot in good conscience vote for Bush.
We seem to agree about that, sarcasm included.
That $1 that you save by buying from Walmart can then be used for other things you wouldn't otherwise be able to buy.
That $1 isn't going to go very far when my employer goes out of business, but this is only obvious and elusive to people who think they're so clever.
My bigger point is that your original post misused the word "isolationism". The correct term was probably "protectionism", which is a vastly different concept. Imperial Japan practiced isolationism and it nearly destroyed the country. Find me a nation that has never protected itself economically and I'll show you an undeveloped cesspool.
You seem to be assuming that [blah blah] These are not necessarily good assumptions.
Fascinating, but what's your point? If you are an American, you're arguing against protecting the American economy. If you're not an American, you're arguing in favor of a global American empire, since such an arrangement is the only way to sustain an out-sourced American economy. Either way, you're giving me strong signals that tying your shoes is a big deal. The only assumption I'm making now is that you're really proud of taking Econ-101 and you were the type of student who beleagured the professor with half-baked "solutions" to complex problems by clinging to the most radical paragraph you found in the textbook. And that much I'm taking as truth.
Like you said, something about well reasoned debates and Slashdot.
All of it, dimwit.
I don't think "isolationism" means what you think it means.
If you're such a good capitalist, how could you fail to see that quality and price aren't the only ways to establish the "value" of a product? I'd have to be an unfathomable idiot to think that I should buy a Thing from Walmart and save $1 instead of buy it through my own business or the business that employs me. It's only one level of abstraction away to realize that I'd be an unfathomable idiot to buy a foreign product merely because it's cheaper than a product made domestically, by a company that invests in my economy, by a company that employs the people whom I support and who support me through social government programs.
What part of that sounds like isolationism? Fucking none of it. Isolationism means excluding outside influences out of hand for no reason other than it's from the outside. The original poster suggested that you buy from companies that do not fire American workers and hire foreign workers. If you think that's isolationism --- no, I'll do one better. If you think that's a bad idea, let me suggest your job is the next to go to some far-side-of-the-world country while you experience warm fuzzies for abusing six syllable words.
That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the guy gets a cup. Funny jokes aside, it WOULD be a significant improvement in the costume, and it might even improve the judging when he shows off the costume again.
That aspect of the costume is so glaringly embarassing that I have to wonder if the webpage is something of a hoax... To me, wearing a cup with that bodysuit would have been so obvious that I have to think that NOT wearing one could only have been a deliberate decision, making it possible to prank a bunch of people into looking at an unattractive man in spandex.
In any event, if the site is legitimate, it looks like the guy is really proud of his TRON costume. I'd strongly suggest getting a cup and trying to show it off again.
This is a pretty strong argument that the higher lattitudes are temperate because of the regulating effects of the currents. Siberia is a frozen waste because it benefits from no nearby warm current, and the Sahara bakes while the Amazon is merely tropical because of the proximity to a regulating surface current. If the deep ocean current were disrupted, there is reasonable and significant doubt that a different suitable global ocean current system would develop to prevent the low lattitudes from turning into a planet-wide desert while the high lattitudes make Siberia look like a warm vacation spot.
Then it demonstrates in a fish tank how cold water currents cannot descend in fresh water as well as in salt water. This is exactly what happens near Iceland, where the warm Atlantic surface current hits Arctic waters and drops to the ocean floor to fuel the deep ocean current. Already they have scientific measurements to suggest that the deep ocean current is being fueled less now than it was 30 years ago, before which nobody understood the importance of salinity in the oceans and the deep ocean currents. This correlates to the alarming increase in icebergs which have broken away from the polar ice caps over the last few decades (something like a 500% increase, by the way.)
And the documentary takes only 60 minutes, including commercials.
If you're a prize fighter, you want your first professional fight to be against some out-of-shape opponent who stands a slim chance of winning but wouldn't mind the paycheck. In a lot of ways, SCO was the ideal opponent. They talked up the hype, they were bringing the payday to the ring, and they had a very slim chance of defeating Linux (and more notably, Linux's trainers in the forms of IBM, etc.)
So if this "fight" doesn't actually occur, it scares away other potential easy wins for Linux's professional debut in the courtroom. A prizefighter whose opponents cancel the fights doesn't get a chance at the title - he's still an unproven amateur.
many people to look to supernatural causes
Says the first sentence of the article:
this tiny [...] village
Says the article:
The blazes, originally blamed on the devil, have not hurt anyone.
Says the priest:
"Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods."
Yeah, genius, it really is the Slashdot crowd's fault for thinking that these people are superstitious. What really sickens me about dimwitted liberalism is that too many people use it as a crutch for their own faults. Life hard? Don't adapt - force the world to adapt to you. Don't like how you're portrayed in the media? Don't let that motivate you to rise up and defy the stereotype - sit on your ass and complain about how stereotypes are unfair. Don't like the facts? Don't bother changing yourself - claim you've been victimized and the rest of the world is obligated to adjust just for you, you special little victim.
Why is there an attitude about this story that the people in "this tiny Sicilian village" are superstitious? BECAUSE THE FARKING ARTICLE SAYS SO.
I don't know if the stereotype about religious Italians truly applies in this case, but stereotypes are not always wrong as a rule.
It's like this: If your grandparents lived 1,000 miles away from you; you were their #1 tech support person; and they wanted a computer that would let them do office apps, email, IM, surf the internet, and a few games; would you set them up with a WinXP box or with a KDE|Gnome desktop?
USING either is basically the same, but with a linux machine, you don't have to worry about the old folks getting popups, Outlook virii, BonzaiBuddy, WeatherBug, or malware that overwrites important .dlls. You don't have to worry about them downloading nifty free games that turns their computer into a DDoS zombie. By virtue of running a non-Windows box, they are forced to embrace a certain paranoia about the internet --- and think about it, if everyone had a certain level of paranoia about emails with attachments, free games, and banner ads that have detected security weaknesses on your machine, wouldn't we all be better off?
So for me, there is no question about it. Grandma and Grandpa can't set up that linux box, but they sure as heck can use it. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the casual computer user would have a far better experience with linux than winXP, but I don't hear many people trumpeting this point of view like I think they should.
Dear Troll,
Some people are dumb and nothing can be done about that.
Dumb people do not represent all people.
You got that one for free, next time you'll owe me a dime.
Yours truly,
~Graduated third grade
Space time trade-off. One of the professors who repeatedly told me that "memory is cheap" was teaching my graduate-level Theory of Algorithms course, one specifically intended to design speed-efficient code.
You can have it fast, light on memory, or neither. There are without doubt lower bounds on the space-time complexity of loads of problems.
For software in general you have a good point, but I've never had a professor give me any advice about that. (I'm a theory and algorithms person.)
This is EXACTLY the policy at my ex-employer's business, and if this is actually illegal, I would love to get them nailed for it. I wonder if this is the type of thing that would be regulated by state or local laws? Not only am I not a lawyer, I wouldn't even know how to search for the answer. Presumably Google isn't a good source, else everyone would be a lawyer...
I've seen the South Park kids travel to French Canada. They have square wheels on their bicycles as well as their cars. I really don't see what the big excitement is all about.
And the other side of that coin is that it doesn't save the sick and the old from being beggars whose survival depends on the mercy of others. That pretty much brings us full circle to the original poster's complaint. Without some flavor of socialized health care, if you can't afford the medicine, you are left for dead -- Oh, unless you beg appropriately or someone takes pity on you.
The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor. Capitalism will never adjust that situation.
Coulda sworn I specifically stated that the complicated stuff needs to be separated from the simple stuff. As it stands, the linux desktop only comes in complicated mode.
People want to USE their PC, not learn HOW it works.
Which just goes to show that linux is dead. Oh wait...
There are plenty of "easy to use" packages for linux, but having 10 easy to use programs with 30 hard to use programs makes for a desktop that's hard to use. Even if it's 50/50, it's a desktop that's hard to use. If you make it an "either/or" choice, then some people can have a fully easy to use desktop but you still get to sell the complete linux clockworks.
I really don't see a way to give both at the same time without frustrating the hell out of both the expert and the novice.
The company that does this well and gets their product on machines will have a significant lead in becoming the dominant linux on the desktop and, I believe, will be well on the way to taking profits right out of Microsoft's hands.
I've had plenty of choices everywhere I've lived.
And I've never had cancer. Therefore, cancer is not a problem in America. Way to go, Ace.
who wants to pay 25$/mo for 5 channels?
For crying out loud, THAT IS THE POINT. I'm paying $54 per month for basic+expanded cable and there's only 10 channels that I ever watch. Thanks for making my point for me. If I can save $5 per month by cutting out the 40 channels I never watch, that's a 10% reduction in price. I guess we'll just have to agree that we have different priorities, but I dislike paying $25 for every 5 channels I watch and I also like to save money.
What your donut shop hasn't accounted for is the fact that cable companies have been given a monopoly by the government. If your donut shop were put into business by the government, and you were assured by the government that you would face no competition from other donut shops, THEN the government said that you're going to have to offer what the cops want, you'd be crying a different tune, wouldn't you?
In the case of the cable companies, who have been handed a monopoly by the government, you might say that the customer they need to please IS the government, and this is one form of letting the market decide. If the cable companies don't please this very important customer, they could have their license to do business pulled. It certainly sounds to me like a case of "letting the market decide", though the traditional example of a donut shop doesn't fit.
Included in those 50 channels is 5 home shopping networks, every variation of C-Span, NASA's channel (which I appreciate but has permanent technical problems with the audio) and the full slew of Food network, Home & Garden channel, Paint Your House channel, Thrift Shop Remodeling Network, and probably 3 more that run interior decorating shows 24x7. Tell me where I'm missing out on the lesser-watched channels? They're just making me pay for as much crap as they can.
None of it was stellar coding or truly professional, but I made myself useful and exploited the tools that the company already owned. I don't really have a point, but VBA isn't a completely lame tool.
Fucking A man. I'm not going to sit around and say, "Shit, I guess I'll eat cat food, thank God that I'm still a capitalist! I'm just glad my job is going to the cheapest labor possible!" Some people get common sense from a school, some people get it from a baseball bat to the skull. You know where the line is, so pick a side.
It does have to start somewhere, but if this company martyrs itself for the cause of domestic labor, where's the reward in that? Would anybody care? We (Americans) need some job protection from outside the free market. That's all I'm saying.
Which would be fine if the cost of living in America were to simultaneously drop. It won't. This isn't going to be the end of the American economic machine, but it could be a very ugly 10, 20, or 50 years. I'm 24 years old. I do not want to live through this bullshit. I will give my presidential vote to whichever moron will protect my life and lifestyle. Period.
Not that R&D isn't good - but academia specializes in that. I'm just saying that it's no surprise to me that companies heavy in R&D spending aren't doing so great. It's a tough time in technology and there's still room to capitalize on the R&D we already have.