(Much) faster, more stable and more consistent alternatives currently include Mono (C# - an excellent language), Python, Java and possibly Ruby 2.0, from the looks of it.
I hear this a lot. PHP has a massive installed base of working apps. There is no compelling reason to move to a new language simply because it appears to be more secure at the expense of not having functional applications.
Never said he couldn't advocate for change. I said he shouldn't use such obvious tricks as they're unconvincing. In fact I encouraged him to advocate truthfully rather than hide his opinions in sham intellectualism. You're not really adept at this reading thing, are you?
For one thing, the military actions of the United States often make the world more dangerous, not less. For example, I don't see any action on our parts to get rid of our ten-thousand warhead nuclear arsenal, despite our promise to do so when we ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This calls into question the very premise of the treaty, and the questions grow louder when we provide technical support to countries like India, which possess the bomb in violation of the treaty.
That's a question of practicality, not safety. Unilateral disarmament is not in the U.S.'s interests. As for whether we make the world more dangerous rather than less, the last time we left Europe more or less alone they started two World Wars. Your argument is not compelling.
More examples: in the eighties, the U.S. government decided that the Sandinistas of Nicaragua were puppets of the Soviets, and sought to overthrow them by funding the Contras. Tens of thousands dead because of Reagan and the domino theory. But at least we kept a foreign nation from choosing Communism-lite.
You're assuming that Communism would not have killed as many or more. The history of the Soviet Union tells us that they certainly could have. But why you blame this solely on the U.S. and not on the Soviets, who were also meddling, tells me a lot about your motivations.
Then we come to our interdictions in the Middle East. Make no mistake, our actions there have primarily been targeted at ensuring access to oil for ourselves and (to a lesser extent) our allies.
You say that as if it's a big surprise. NOBODY would care about the Middle East except for its resources. This is not brain surgery. Until we can harness the energy of the stupid, oil is a major component in ensuring that the free world has copious time to dither about foreign policy instead of grubbing in the dirt for their next meal.
Certainly more people have died in Iraq because of our meddling (from the first Gulf War, to the disastrous embargo, to our ill-conceived invasion in 2003) than Saddam could have possibly killed directly.
You've marked yourself as an uncritical thinker, and have slandered Saddam with a lack of imagination. That guy had an industrial people-shredder--I think he could have managed to trump our (unintentional) civilian death toll with an (intentional) civilian death toll. I stopped reading your post right about here.
Look, I know what you're doing. You don't like capitalism, and you don't like America. At least you don't like the America we have now, nor the America we had 20 years ago, nor the America of 50 years ago. I'm sure you tell yourself that you love the America that could be, but usually when I press people like yourself it turns out that the America that could be is an awful lot like the Canada or Sweden of today. I say if that's what you're looking for, emigrate. You're free to do that in America, unlike the Soviet society of not-that-long-ago. We can do this dance for days--you say something one-sided and naive, and I point it out--but let's cut to the chase. You will not be happy until America is subservient to the "international community", and we endure some kind of pain and/or punishment to atone for past sins, real or imagined. That's fine. I suggest that if you think this is such a great idea that you sell that rather than the baby-logic you're offering now. Ideologues aren't convinced by it, and intelligent people see through your rhetorical games.
but socialism, in the form of socio-democracy applied in countries like Sweden or Germany, works fine.
It works non-badly. Neither of them have much in the way of economic growth on average. Not that they're doing poorly, but they're no great shakes when compared to a more capitalistic society such as the US.
But it's important to point out that these countries are not operating on a level playing field. They spend a tiny fraction of their GDP on defense, while the US spends somewhere around 5%. Considering the US has a GDP that is larger, and spends more as a percentage, and the fact that the US expends a lot of those defense dollars in support of foreign nations, Sweden and Germany are getting a free ride. They have enough of a military to send to various peace-keeping operations, and could probably mount a minor defense of their own countries, but for the most part they rely on US military might, either explicitly or implicitly.
Were the US to pull out of all foreign bases and reduce our forces to only that which is required to defend our borders and territories, not only would incidents like Bosnia be significantly more catastrophic, there would be quite an economic pinch felt by nations that formerly hosted our military.
"Socialism" is a good personal trait, but as a political scheme it leaves something to be desired.
Who is going to enforce so-called "International law"?
You have no proof that it was predicated on lies. You have assumptions.
The Lancet study is ridiculous. Using statistical data to extrapolate numbers that fly in the face of all official estimates only convinces those who are already believers. I can't disabuse you of your faith.
You'll have to define "real work". I do "real work" on a Macbook non-Pro just fine. Not that I wouldn't like the Pro--I could play Neverwinter Nights on it, which would be fun.
If I put together a collection of events in your life, selectively edited--Jan 9th: masturbated to picture of rhinos copulating; Jan 10th: ignored wino begging for change who subsequently died; etc.--it would look like you were a real shitstain. That's why these lists are not useful except as agitprop.
Why did they arm Saddam Hussein for decades so he could oppress his own people? Why did the american government not make a big fuss when he first gassed his own people? I could go on and on.
One way of looking at it is a change of US policy. No more "stability", the US is proactively supporting democracy everywhere. That may or may not be a good thing, and that's an important debate to have. But if the government has decided that 9/11 was a result of letting rogue nations be in the interest of stability in the region, then a change in policy is in order.
It doesn't give a damn about the Iraqis. It never has, and it probably never will.
That's a fascinating unsupported assertion, and I'm curious what you think we are there for. If you're thinking "oil", "imperialism", or "Haliburton", you don't have to reply. I'll automatically assume you're a fool.
Tell you what. I'll set up a double-blind test, with a large selection of different kinds of music, covering both kinds of compression. I'm willing to bet you couldn't tell the difference statistically different from random guessing. Most people couldn't, especially with the kind of listening environments most people experience.
Would you take that bet? How much would you be willing to bet?
This is almost certainly the case. Jobs, as I recall, had to do a lot of talking to get major labels online with the iTMS. Just being able to put the same song on more than one computer probably took months of begging, threatening and deal-making. I know it's fun to whale on Jobs, but he really is interested in making his customers happy, and I imagine he's fully aware of how annoying the iTMS DRM is for non-technical people.
Me, I just burn a CD-RW as an audio CD of purchased music and re-import as MP3. Sure there's a quality loss--I bet almost nobody would notice the difference. And using a CD-RW means I'm not even out the $0.10 for a CD-R.
3a. Look at the population densities you idiot. Your false dilemma was really nice, too.
3b. You've ignored the costs--financial and ecological--generated by moving 300M people to a brand-new mode of transportation. As Kunstler says, it's not the fuel, it's the lifestyle. We have a society predicated on easy-motoring. Electric cars displace the emissions, but don't eliminate them.
3c. Too stupid.
3d. More stupid.
If CO2 is the problem, how come we're not giving that guy who claims that a tanker full of iron in the Pacific would kick off a new ice age? Phytoplankton blooms would eat up all our CO2 emissions, and cost nothing. So why don't we look at that route?
You've got a bad case of the Bill Hicks-itis. Simply because there are scoundrels in advertising you damn the entire industry. Sort of like, I dunno, writing off comics because they're drug-addled malcontents.
Marketing promotes awareness. Anything further is an interpretation problem.
But at a typical high school, where the social hierarchy is designed by the school administration so that jocks are number one, actors bullying athletes isn't the way it works, and you know it
I hear this a lot, and I don't doubt it's true in some places, but it's certainly not institutionalized. At my high school, the "jocks" weren't overly lauded or given special treatment. Quite the converse--I was smart, quiet, no trouble, and active in various activities, but not an athlete at all. I was granted extensive leeway by teachers. As a matter of fact, I was well acquainted with the "jock" set. As part of the school newspaper, I religiously covered the under-heralded soccer team, and because of this I got along well with them.
There are some very vicious jocks, I'm sure, but I've never been more viciously attacked (verbally, anyway) than when I've disrespected some nerd's sacred cow. Bad attitudes are much more likely to exhibit themselves in people who are generally loners--nerds--than jocks who have to work as part of a team.
C'mon movie industry.. catch up. Delivering a service means giving people what they want - the people are telling you in a very obvious way now, you aren't doing that.
Exactly. I saw "25 million people pirating movies" and saw "25 million customers". They're not pirating because they love to pirate movies (except for a few folks who obsessively collect downloaded movies). They are people who want to watch something when they choose and don't want to pay a lot for it. I'd say their needs would be met with Netflix, but if they could download it for a buck or two from consistently fast servers, I imagine they'd be fine with that as well.
Diversity of thought is nice and all that, but I certainly don't want someone who hasn't discarded the flat earth theory, for example, to be predicting the weather for me and would want the American Meteoroligcal Society to pull their seal of approval. I live in Florida, and hurricane prediction is serious business.
You'd probably be surprised at what wacky things people you trust believe. These are usually things outside of their immediate area of expertise, and although meteorologists deal with weather, they are not necessarily experts on global climate. Just what they read in the trade journals, I imagine. Hurricane prediction has nothing to do with global warming.
A silly example: every time I use a sextant for celestial navigation, I believe that the Earth is the center of the Universe and the stars move around it. Doesn't make it less of a useful tool.
Re:Replacing the electoral college
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Do you consider that fair?
To have a simple majority decide would mean that a few densely populated states--California, Texas, Florida and New York--would determine the presidency. Do you find that fair? The E.C. means that a candidate has to appeal to a broad spectrum. Without the E.C., the race for the presidency has to address CA, TX, FL and NY issues only. Electioneering becomes the order of the day, by which I mean hordes of Get Out The Vote vans shuttling warm bodies to the polls in L.A., Dallas, NYC, Miami, etc.
Either method has downsides. Which one has more or the worse downsides? I'd say a simple majority vote would. We don't do a simple majority vote for, say, Constitutional amendments--why the Presidency?
There was considerable concern in the 2000 election that Gore would lose the popular vote but win the electoral vote. Nobody seemed that worried about the fate of democracy then. Why now?
Re:Replacing the electoral college
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So your solution is to have the citizens of L.A., New York and Florida decide who becomes President? That only urban issues are considered, not rural? That's part of why the E.C. is there.
Slashdot Mirror
(Much) faster, more stable and more consistent alternatives currently include Mono (C# - an excellent language), Python, Java and possibly Ruby 2.0, from the looks of it.
I hear this a lot. PHP has a massive installed base of working apps. There is no compelling reason to move to a new language simply because it appears to be more secure at the expense of not having functional applications.
A little military support from each country goes a long way...
You let me know how well that multi-language, multi-cultural piecemeal army works out when it actually happens.
Never said he couldn't advocate for change. I said he shouldn't use such obvious tricks as they're unconvincing. In fact I encouraged him to advocate truthfully rather than hide his opinions in sham intellectualism. You're not really adept at this reading thing, are you?
For one thing, the military actions of the United States often make the world more dangerous, not less. For example, I don't see any action on our parts to get rid of our ten-thousand warhead nuclear arsenal, despite our promise to do so when we ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This calls into question the very premise of the treaty, and the questions grow louder when we provide technical support to countries like India, which possess the bomb in violation of the treaty.
That's a question of practicality, not safety. Unilateral disarmament is not in the U.S.'s interests. As for whether we make the world more dangerous rather than less, the last time we left Europe more or less alone they started two World Wars. Your argument is not compelling.
More examples: in the eighties, the U.S. government decided that the Sandinistas of Nicaragua were puppets of the Soviets, and sought to overthrow them by funding the Contras. Tens of thousands dead because of Reagan and the domino theory. But at least we kept a foreign nation from choosing Communism-lite.
You're assuming that Communism would not have killed as many or more. The history of the Soviet Union tells us that they certainly could have. But why you blame this solely on the U.S. and not on the Soviets, who were also meddling, tells me a lot about your motivations.
Then we come to our interdictions in the Middle East. Make no mistake, our actions there have primarily been targeted at ensuring access to oil for ourselves and (to a lesser extent) our allies.
You say that as if it's a big surprise. NOBODY would care about the Middle East except for its resources. This is not brain surgery. Until we can harness the energy of the stupid, oil is a major component in ensuring that the free world has copious time to dither about foreign policy instead of grubbing in the dirt for their next meal.
Certainly more people have died in Iraq because of our meddling (from the first Gulf War, to the disastrous embargo, to our ill-conceived invasion in 2003) than Saddam could have possibly killed directly.
You've marked yourself as an uncritical thinker, and have slandered Saddam with a lack of imagination. That guy had an industrial people-shredder--I think he could have managed to trump our (unintentional) civilian death toll with an (intentional) civilian death toll. I stopped reading your post right about here.
Look, I know what you're doing. You don't like capitalism, and you don't like America. At least you don't like the America we have now, nor the America we had 20 years ago, nor the America of 50 years ago. I'm sure you tell yourself that you love the America that could be, but usually when I press people like yourself it turns out that the America that could be is an awful lot like the Canada or Sweden of today. I say if that's what you're looking for, emigrate. You're free to do that in America, unlike the Soviet society of not-that-long-ago. We can do this dance for days--you say something one-sided and naive, and I point it out--but let's cut to the chase. You will not be happy until America is subservient to the "international community", and we endure some kind of pain and/or punishment to atone for past sins, real or imagined. That's fine. I suggest that if you think this is such a great idea that you sell that rather than the baby-logic you're offering now. Ideologues aren't convinced by it, and intelligent people see through your rhetorical games.
but socialism, in the form of socio-democracy applied in countries like Sweden or Germany, works fine.
It works non-badly. Neither of them have much in the way of economic growth on average. Not that they're doing poorly, but they're no great shakes when compared to a more capitalistic society such as the US.
But it's important to point out that these countries are not operating on a level playing field. They spend a tiny fraction of their GDP on defense, while the US spends somewhere around 5%. Considering the US has a GDP that is larger, and spends more as a percentage, and the fact that the US expends a lot of those defense dollars in support of foreign nations, Sweden and Germany are getting a free ride. They have enough of a military to send to various peace-keeping operations, and could probably mount a minor defense of their own countries, but for the most part they rely on US military might, either explicitly or implicitly.
Were the US to pull out of all foreign bases and reduce our forces to only that which is required to defend our borders and territories, not only would incidents like Bosnia be significantly more catastrophic, there would be quite an economic pinch felt by nations that formerly hosted our military.
"Socialism" is a good personal trait, but as a political scheme it leaves something to be desired.
Boy, you sure told me. Your logic is irrefutable. Gosh.
Who is going to enforce so-called "International law"?
You have no proof that it was predicated on lies. You have assumptions.
The Lancet study is ridiculous. Using statistical data to extrapolate numbers that fly in the face of all official estimates only convinces those who are already believers. I can't disabuse you of your faith.
You'll have to define "real work". I do "real work" on a Macbook non-Pro just fine. Not that I wouldn't like the Pro--I could play Neverwinter Nights on it, which would be fun.
Illegal how? Immoral how?
Your 600,000 number is ridiculous.
If I put together a collection of events in your life, selectively edited--Jan 9th: masturbated to picture of rhinos copulating; Jan 10th: ignored wino begging for change who subsequently died; etc.--it would look like you were a real shitstain. That's why these lists are not useful except as agitprop.
Why did they arm Saddam Hussein for decades so he could oppress his own people? Why did the american government not make a big fuss when he first gassed his own people? I could go on and on.
One way of looking at it is a change of US policy. No more "stability", the US is proactively supporting democracy everywhere. That may or may not be a good thing, and that's an important debate to have. But if the government has decided that 9/11 was a result of letting rogue nations be in the interest of stability in the region, then a change in policy is in order.
It doesn't give a damn about the Iraqis. It never has, and it probably never will.
That's a fascinating unsupported assertion, and I'm curious what you think we are there for. If you're thinking "oil", "imperialism", or "Haliburton", you don't have to reply. I'll automatically assume you're a fool.
That's awesome, but I don't see "iPods" on there. I say it's worthless.
If your first instinct is to shout "BushCo! War criminal! 9/11 was an inside job!", don't.
Which leads me to: How does someone labeled as an 'insurgent' get out of the database if they've been incorrectly implicated?
Become an informant. Tell them where to find real insurgents.
Tell you what. I'll set up a double-blind test, with a large selection of different kinds of music, covering both kinds of compression. I'm willing to bet you couldn't tell the difference statistically different from random guessing. Most people couldn't, especially with the kind of listening environments most people experience.
Would you take that bet? How much would you be willing to bet?
This is almost certainly the case. Jobs, as I recall, had to do a lot of talking to get major labels online with the iTMS. Just being able to put the same song on more than one computer probably took months of begging, threatening and deal-making. I know it's fun to whale on Jobs, but he really is interested in making his customers happy, and I imagine he's fully aware of how annoying the iTMS DRM is for non-technical people.
Me, I just burn a CD-RW as an audio CD of purchased music and re-import as MP3. Sure there's a quality loss--I bet almost nobody would notice the difference. And using a CD-RW means I'm not even out the $0.10 for a CD-R.
3a. Look at the population densities you idiot. Your false dilemma was really nice, too.
3b. You've ignored the costs--financial and ecological--generated by moving 300M people to a brand-new mode of transportation. As Kunstler says, it's not the fuel, it's the lifestyle. We have a society predicated on easy-motoring. Electric cars displace the emissions, but don't eliminate them.
3c. Too stupid.
3d. More stupid.
If CO2 is the problem, how come we're not giving that guy who claims that a tanker full of iron in the Pacific would kick off a new ice age? Phytoplankton blooms would eat up all our CO2 emissions, and cost nothing. So why don't we look at that route?
You've got a bad case of the Bill Hicks-itis. Simply because there are scoundrels in advertising you damn the entire industry. Sort of like, I dunno, writing off comics because they're drug-addled malcontents.
Marketing promotes awareness. Anything further is an interpretation problem.
But at a typical high school, where the social hierarchy is designed by the school administration so that jocks are number one, actors bullying athletes isn't the way it works, and you know it
I hear this a lot, and I don't doubt it's true in some places, but it's certainly not institutionalized. At my high school, the "jocks" weren't overly lauded or given special treatment. Quite the converse--I was smart, quiet, no trouble, and active in various activities, but not an athlete at all. I was granted extensive leeway by teachers. As a matter of fact, I was well acquainted with the "jock" set. As part of the school newspaper, I religiously covered the under-heralded soccer team, and because of this I got along well with them.
There are some very vicious jocks, I'm sure, but I've never been more viciously attacked (verbally, anyway) than when I've disrespected some nerd's sacred cow. Bad attitudes are much more likely to exhibit themselves in people who are generally loners--nerds--than jocks who have to work as part of a team.
C'mon movie industry.. catch up. Delivering a service means giving people what they want - the people are telling you in a very obvious way now, you aren't doing that.
Exactly. I saw "25 million people pirating movies" and saw "25 million customers". They're not pirating because they love to pirate movies (except for a few folks who obsessively collect downloaded movies). They are people who want to watch something when they choose and don't want to pay a lot for it. I'd say their needs would be met with Netflix, but if they could download it for a buck or two from consistently fast servers, I imagine they'd be fine with that as well.
The FCC has already stated that they will fine any company that abuses their ability to Tier bandwidth. Bush said he would bring peace to Iraq.
Ahh, Slashdot. The Mecca of preening, self-important non-sequiturs.
Google it if you want. Celestial navigation uses the Ptolemaic model of the heavens. I probably should have put "believe" in quotes, however.
Diversity of thought is nice and all that, but I certainly don't want someone who hasn't discarded the flat earth theory, for example, to be predicting the weather for me and would want the American Meteoroligcal Society to pull their seal of approval. I live in Florida, and hurricane prediction is serious business.
You'd probably be surprised at what wacky things people you trust believe. These are usually things outside of their immediate area of expertise, and although meteorologists deal with weather, they are not necessarily experts on global climate. Just what they read in the trade journals, I imagine. Hurricane prediction has nothing to do with global warming.
A silly example: every time I use a sextant for celestial navigation, I believe that the Earth is the center of the Universe and the stars move around it. Doesn't make it less of a useful tool.
Do you consider that fair?
To have a simple majority decide would mean that a few densely populated states--California, Texas, Florida and New York--would determine the presidency. Do you find that fair? The E.C. means that a candidate has to appeal to a broad spectrum. Without the E.C., the race for the presidency has to address CA, TX, FL and NY issues only. Electioneering becomes the order of the day, by which I mean hordes of Get Out The Vote vans shuttling warm bodies to the polls in L.A., Dallas, NYC, Miami, etc.
Either method has downsides. Which one has more or the worse downsides? I'd say a simple majority vote would. We don't do a simple majority vote for, say, Constitutional amendments--why the Presidency?
There was considerable concern in the 2000 election that Gore would lose the popular vote but win the electoral vote. Nobody seemed that worried about the fate of democracy then. Why now?
So your solution is to have the citizens of L.A., New York and Florida decide who becomes President? That only urban issues are considered, not rural? That's part of why the E.C. is there.