Personally, I welcome anyone who wants to be a programmer. Show me you want to learn, and I will mentor you. I will also listen to your ideas and will likely learn something from your fresh insight.
Yikes, another geek who thinks God appointed him to teach everything to everyone. Oh, you'll let your young apprentice get a word in edgewise? How magnanimous of you! I'll bet you'll also wince patronizingly when s/he completes his thought.
I'm sick of finding myself becoming a Jedi padawan every time I ask some elder geek a damn question.
so you propose the government is risking its newest, most expensive and top secret spy technology to spy on public gatherings?
No, just the last-gen stuff that's mass produced and ready to go into the field. The newest, cutting-edge stuff is 10 to 20 years from the light of day.
Of course they could just send some guys with a camcorder without raising any suspicion whatsoever, since every other attender at any gathering will be taking photos anyway. or they could simply get the photos from flicker later.
Or they may want to see how their new high-tech works in a real-life, low-stakes situation.
So what's the solution? If you get rid of the restrictions on people moving you destroy national sovereignty and identity. If you get rid of free trade/adopt protectionism you drag the economy down a few pegs and probably destroy at least as many jobs as you save.
The solution is tariffs and protection for national industries. They work, and have worked for two centuries. It's only recently been repealed (since the 1980s) and now we are starting to witness the long-term ramifications of it.
Relatively soon? The planet has 4 billion people and growing. How many people belong to the global middle class? Corporations are not interested in making the whole globe wealthy; they only want profit. Have pools of poor to draw from around the world is in the interest of corporations.
I say it's far more likely that multinational corporations keep jumping from poor nation to poor nation, making a global class of elites in business and government, and leaving the rest of the population as peasants waiting for the next investment in their locality. When the divestment happens, the population becomes poor again. It would be a global middle ages of worker serfdom. The only way to break this cycle of worker poverty is to organize. Otherwise, we'd still have 16 hour days, 7 days a week, no benefits, lousy pay.
Your proposal is to take us back to the 1930s, which, if I might remind you, didn't work out so well.
The propsal would take us back to the 1780s, when tariffs and protectionism fostered the US's nacent industries, and built it into the industrial powerhouse that it became. What didn't work out so well was the housing bubble, stock market speculation, and banking deregulation that happened in the 1920s.
Read Alexander Hamilton's Advice To The Obama Administration . This article is about the report Hamilton delivered to the first congress, about how to grow the economy and industry in the newly created United States, and its relevance to the modern day. It's past time to get back to basics.
On worker protection: the country with the least worker protection laws in the world is the United States
This is patently false. The US has the least laws in the whole world? Can you cite a reference for this? It has less laws, than say, Zimbabwe?
That's a very nerdy analysis. By nerdy, I mean it doesn't take human psychology into account. People don't feel secure in the dark. In almost every culture, light is a associated with knowledge. If you don't know something, you're "in the dark". This isn't just a metaphor. Light is Knowing, in the psychological sense. If you can't see well enough, you don't know what's going on, and you feel trapped and insecure.
Also, it's a hell of a lot easier to trip over things in the dark.
There was a case from Ohio, I believe, where a prison inmate had kept a diary. This person, IIRC, was a sex offender. In this diary, he wrote down a fantasy he had involving minors. The diary wasn't private, but part of his therapy, and of course the authorities read it. He was charged with creating and possessing child pornography, IIRC. It went either to the Ohio Supreme Court, I believe --
Actually, I got a lot of the details wrong. It was a private diary, and it went to the common pleas court. But he did get charged 11 years for posession. Story.
So it was a win for privacy and rationality. But, you can see where the law enforcement folks want this to go. Maybe you'll be arrested for owning a copy of the movie "The Aristocrats".
I've had mine since they came in. ( Well, I guess that's a redundant statement )
How/why did your dentist convince you to get them removed? Were they bothering you? Did you have other problems that they thought might be related? Has there been an improvement in your life?
I've been bothered by migraine and cluster headaches, and neck and back tension for a long time. However, they started when I was 13, about five years before my wisdom teeth came in.
And there have been famines, disasters, wars, and persecutions since the beginning of time. Predicting the apocalypse isn't a bad gig; they come around regularly.
You have a good point. I was trying to argue against op's "These women can't have it both ways..." It has the scent of strawman in it. I doubt that *all* women who support breastfeeding but are against nudity?
And all men, for that matter! I'm a man, and I think breastfeeding pics are okay, and public nudity on facebook is wrong. Age-restricted nudity could be okay, I suppose. OP has a mysogynistic streak, I suppose. "You ask these women..." Who are these women? Has he actually asked them? I doubt it.
But this was human civilization from 75,000 years ago, which intellectually and technologically pales in comparison to human civilization today.
The historical and anthropological definition of "civilization" is "people living in cities" and cities are only 10-12,000 years old max. Therefore, there was no human civilization 75,000 years ago.
How many minutes did they get with their plans? What was the charge per minute, and what was their average bill ( not just the cost of their plan )?
As I recall, it was something like $50/mo. just to have the phone, and with that you got anywhere from 30 to fifty minutes ( about 1-2 minutes talk time per day in a month). After that, up to 100-300 minutes, the price per minute was $0.30, and then $0.50 and over 1000 was $0.80. Also add into that roaming, if you connected through another carrier's network ( add some fifty cents ), long distance, and the fact that you paid for all calls on the phone, incoming or out going. You could easily be paying $1.50 a minute, if you weren't careful. The value proposition was heavily weighted at that time, as I recall.
I imagine that competition in bigger areas kept rates low.
Columbus, Ohio. I was in high school. The only people I knew that had cell phones were sales people, construction foremen, real estate agents, any "high-contact" business person. The only friend parent's I knew that had a cell phone either worked construction or real-estate. Everyone else was a white collar worker, teacher, librarian, etc. and the home phone worked well enough. At the time, people thought it was rude simply to talk on the phone in public. The phones themselves were around $500 at least, and the new Star-Tac flip phones were $1200, and plans were at least $100 a month, with a 1 to 2 year contract, with some 30 minutes free talk time, roaming charges, long distance fees, connect charges ( both the caller and the 'callee' paid for the call). Nobody that I knew needed them that badly, unless they could write off the expense as business. I was the first person in my group to get a phone ( pagers were the rage back then ), because I had a two-week stint as a phone sales person.
Where were you living, what line of business were your groups of friends in, and are you sure about the year? How much were your cell phone bills back then? $200 a month?
My guess is that what they're talking about is the data being federalized. Sure, this admin did this mail server, this admin did this webserver, etc. etc. Now they are getting *all* of that data, and it's no surprise it's a big unorganized cluster fuck. After all, who would be in charge of that? An IT Czar? Imagine trying to propose that and sell that to the American public and the special interest groups. Civil Libertarians would be concerned about a Big Brother controlling all government data. Conservatives would worry about Yet Another Big Government Bureaucracy.
I was an exchange student in Finland back in '96. This was when *nobody* had a cell phone in the US. Shortly before I left for Finland, my sister and I were in a shoe store. We heard a guy walking down the isle talking to himself, and we both looked nervously at each other, because we were about to encounter an obviously crazy guy. Turned out he was on a cellphone.
Anywho, when I got to Finland, everybody in the high school had a cell phone. Well, almost everyone, and if they didn't have one when I got there, they got one that year. And the thing was, *they texted all the time, because it was cheaper, much cheaper, than a voice call*.
Flash forward five years to the states, and then everyone is getting cell phones, but *without text service*. And now, text service is something that costs per text, or something ridiculous like that. In Finland, and I would guess most of Europe, you get some ridiculous amount of texting included in your plan, or you just have a straight-up bandwidth plan, which covers voice, text, media, etc.
I wish Americans would travel a little more often, to see how the US is becoming a technologically backwards society. Technological improvements which are more efficient are seen as opportunities to gouge customers, instead of compete and offer lower prices. The same thing was going on with banking about five years ago. American banks were charging fees to have people access their accounts online, while Finnish banks were giving it away for free, because then they didn't need to pay tellers. Oh yeah, and you could pay your bills and do banking by text service.:)
Well, South America is a bit cheaper than most places you'll find.
I was looking at plane tickets, and it was $800 round trip to Peru in December from Miami. Figure $15 a day backpacking, and you have a nice 2 weeks for under a grand.
If you don't have the money for that, how would you have the money for a study abroad program? Those things aren't cheap! Although, I guess they would be covered by student loans.
Here's another question -- why study computer science abroad? Why not just backpack around South America during one of your breaks? Visit Macchu Picchu and neat stuff like that.
Are you looking to get something out of studying abroad rather than just travel? An extended stay, deeper contacts with the local citizens?
I don't know, but the Ohio Supreme Court has all of its cases publicized on a community cable channel in Ohio. AFAIK it was their idea. It's a great channel to stop by if you want to get your wonk on. Law is such an interesting mix of common sense and logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, these days, there's someone who would be very willing to do that 'more work' for the same amount of money -- or even less.
Personally, I welcome anyone who wants to be a programmer. Show me you want to learn, and I will mentor you. I will also listen to your ideas and will likely learn something from your fresh insight.
Yikes, another geek who thinks God appointed him to teach everything to everyone. Oh, you'll let your young apprentice get a word in edgewise? How magnanimous of you! I'll bet you'll also wince patronizingly when s/he completes his thought.
I'm sick of finding myself becoming a Jedi padawan every time I ask some elder geek a damn question.
How about a great movie or cryptozoological creature?
so you propose the government is risking its newest, most expensive and top secret spy technology to spy on public gatherings?
No, just the last-gen stuff that's mass produced and ready to go into the field. The newest, cutting-edge stuff is 10 to 20 years from the light of day.
Of course they could just send some guys with a camcorder without raising any suspicion whatsoever, since every other attender at any gathering will be taking photos anyway. or they could simply get the photos from flicker later.
Or they may want to see how their new high-tech works in a real-life, low-stakes situation.
Any evidence for this claim?
Washington Post: Robotic Insects Spy on Protestors?
Also in Columbus, Ohio
So what's the solution? If you get rid of the restrictions on people moving you destroy national sovereignty and identity. If you get rid of free trade/adopt protectionism you drag the economy down a few pegs and probably destroy at least as many jobs as you save.
I beg to disagree. Protectionism and tariffs create jobs and protect the economy and nation. Economics haven't changed since the late 1700s; check out Alexander Hamilton's Advice To The Obama Administration
The solution is tariffs and protection for national industries. They work, and have worked for two centuries. It's only recently been repealed (since the 1980s) and now we are starting to witness the long-term ramifications of it.
Relatively soon? The planet has 4 billion people and growing. How many people belong to the global middle class? Corporations are not interested in making the whole globe wealthy; they only want profit. Have pools of poor to draw from around the world is in the interest of corporations.
I say it's far more likely that multinational corporations keep jumping from poor nation to poor nation, making a global class of elites in business and government, and leaving the rest of the population as peasants waiting for the next investment in their locality. When the divestment happens, the population becomes poor again. It would be a global middle ages of worker serfdom. The only way to break this cycle of worker poverty is to organize. Otherwise, we'd still have 16 hour days, 7 days a week, no benefits, lousy pay.
Your proposal is to take us back to the 1930s, which, if I might remind you, didn't work out so well.
The propsal would take us back to the 1780s, when tariffs and protectionism fostered the US's nacent industries, and built it into the industrial powerhouse that it became. What didn't work out so well was the housing bubble, stock market speculation, and banking deregulation that happened in the 1920s.
Read Alexander Hamilton's Advice To The Obama Administration . This article is about the report Hamilton delivered to the first congress, about how to grow the economy and industry in the newly created United States, and its relevance to the modern day. It's past time to get back to basics.
On worker protection: the country with the least worker protection laws in the world is the United States
This is patently false. The US has the least laws in the whole world? Can you cite a reference for this? It has less laws, than say, Zimbabwe?
That's a very nerdy analysis. By nerdy, I mean it doesn't take human psychology into account. People don't feel secure in the dark. In almost every culture, light is a associated with knowledge. If you don't know something, you're "in the dark". This isn't just a metaphor. Light is Knowing, in the psychological sense. If you can't see well enough, you don't know what's going on, and you feel trapped and insecure.
Also, it's a hell of a lot easier to trip over things in the dark.
Maybe the both of you should check out this website. It's for people on the Autistic spectrum, no joke.
There was a case from Ohio, I believe, where a prison inmate had kept a diary. This person, IIRC, was a sex offender. In this diary, he wrote down a fantasy he had involving minors. The diary wasn't private, but part of his therapy, and of course the authorities read it. He was charged with creating and possessing child pornography, IIRC. It went either to the Ohio Supreme Court, I believe --
Actually, I got a lot of the details wrong. It was a private diary, and it went to the common pleas court. But he did get charged 11 years for posession.
Story.
So it was a win for privacy and rationality. But, you can see where the law enforcement folks want this to go. Maybe you'll be arrested for owning a copy of the movie "The Aristocrats".
Most people grow them twice! :)
I've had mine since they came in. ( Well, I guess that's a redundant statement )
How/why did your dentist convince you to get them removed? Were they bothering you? Did you have other problems that they thought might be related? Has there been an improvement in your life?
I've been bothered by migraine and cluster headaches, and neck and back tension for a long time. However, they started when I was 13, about five years before my wisdom teeth came in.
And there have been famines, disasters, wars, and persecutions since the beginning of time. Predicting the apocalypse isn't a bad gig; they come around regularly.
Can you tell us more about how your friend got into that position?
You have a good point. I was trying to argue against op's "These women can't have it both ways..." It has the scent of strawman in it. I doubt that *all* women who support breastfeeding but are against nudity?
And all men, for that matter! I'm a man, and I think breastfeeding pics are okay, and public nudity on facebook is wrong. Age-restricted nudity could be okay, I suppose. OP has a mysogynistic streak, I suppose. "You ask these women..." Who are these women? Has he actually asked them? I doubt it.
But this was human civilization from 75,000 years ago, which intellectually and technologically pales in comparison to human civilization today.
The historical and anthropological definition of "civilization" is "people living in cities" and cities are only 10-12,000 years old max. Therefore, there was no human civilization 75,000 years ago.
This is a straw man argument. Your mythical woman who are against nudity but are for breast-feeding images on FaceBook don't exist.
How many minutes did they get with their plans? What was the charge per minute, and what was their average bill ( not just the cost of their plan )?
As I recall, it was something like $50/mo. just to have the phone, and with that you got anywhere from 30 to fifty minutes ( about 1-2 minutes talk time per day in a month). After that, up to 100-300 minutes, the price per minute was $0.30, and then $0.50 and over 1000 was $0.80. Also add into that roaming, if you connected through another carrier's network ( add some fifty cents ), long distance, and the fact that you paid for all calls on the phone, incoming or out going. You could easily be paying $1.50 a minute, if you weren't careful. The value proposition was heavily weighted at that time, as I recall.
I imagine that competition in bigger areas kept rates low.
Columbus, Ohio. I was in high school. The only people I knew that had cell phones were sales people, construction foremen, real estate agents, any "high-contact" business person. The only friend parent's I knew that had a cell phone either worked construction or real-estate. Everyone else was a white collar worker, teacher, librarian, etc. and the home phone worked well enough. At the time, people thought it was rude simply to talk on the phone in public. The phones themselves were around $500 at least, and the new Star-Tac flip phones were $1200, and plans were at least $100 a month, with a 1 to 2 year contract, with some 30 minutes free talk time, roaming charges, long distance fees, connect charges ( both the caller and the 'callee' paid for the call). Nobody that I knew needed them that badly, unless they could write off the expense as business. I was the first person in my group to get a phone ( pagers were the rage back then ), because I had a two-week stint as a phone sales person.
Where were you living, what line of business were your groups of friends in, and are you sure about the year? How much were your cell phone bills back then? $200 a month?
My guess is that what they're talking about is the data being federalized. Sure, this admin did this mail server, this admin did this webserver, etc. etc. Now they are getting *all* of that data, and it's no surprise it's a big unorganized cluster fuck. After all, who would be in charge of that? An IT Czar? Imagine trying to propose that and sell that to the American public and the special interest groups. Civil Libertarians would be concerned about a Big Brother controlling all government data. Conservatives would worry about Yet Another Big Government Bureaucracy.
I was an exchange student in Finland back in '96. This was when *nobody* had a cell phone in the US. Shortly before I left for Finland, my sister and I were in a shoe store. We heard a guy walking down the isle talking to himself, and we both looked nervously at each other, because we were about to encounter an obviously crazy guy. Turned out he was on a cellphone.
:)
Anywho, when I got to Finland, everybody in the high school had a cell phone. Well, almost everyone, and if they didn't have one when I got there, they got one that year. And the thing was, *they texted all the time, because it was cheaper, much cheaper, than a voice call*.
Flash forward five years to the states, and then everyone is getting cell phones, but *without text service*. And now, text service is something that costs per text, or something ridiculous like that. In Finland, and I would guess most of Europe, you get some ridiculous amount of texting included in your plan, or you just have a straight-up bandwidth plan, which covers voice, text, media, etc.
I wish Americans would travel a little more often, to see how the US is becoming a technologically backwards society. Technological improvements which are more efficient are seen as opportunities to gouge customers, instead of compete and offer lower prices. The same thing was going on with banking about five years ago. American banks were charging fees to have people access their accounts online, while Finnish banks were giving it away for free, because then they didn't need to pay tellers. Oh yeah, and you could pay your bills and do banking by text service.
Well, South America is a bit cheaper than most places you'll find.
I was looking at plane tickets, and it was $800 round trip to Peru in December from Miami. Figure $15 a day backpacking, and you have a nice 2 weeks for under a grand.
If you don't have the money for that, how would you have the money for a study abroad program? Those things aren't cheap! Although, I guess they would be covered by student loans.
Here's another question -- why study computer science abroad? Why not just backpack around South America during one of your breaks? Visit Macchu Picchu and neat stuff like that.
Are you looking to get something out of studying abroad rather than just travel? An extended stay, deeper contacts with the local citizens?
I don't know, but the Ohio Supreme Court has all of its cases publicized on a community cable channel in Ohio. AFAIK it was their idea. It's a great channel to stop by if you want to get your wonk on. Law is such an interesting mix of common sense and logic.