The USA is a vast, sparsely populated territory and it's simply unreasonable to expect broadband penetration similar to that of small, densely-populated places like South Korea and Taiwan.
And Canada. Small, densely-populated places like Canada.
Please, try and get out of the early 1990s. Manual dependency resolution hasn't been a problem with Linux siince at least then, and even then, it was only a problem on RedHat systems. You wanna know how I install software (I'm on Ubuntu). I start up Synaptic, I click on what I want, click install, and have the app and it's dependencies all downloaded and installled automatically. Quite a bit easier than any Windows installer I've eer used.
That doesn't really make any sense. The cost of oil is a net loss to the US. The US would *love* to get rid of the oil dependency, because right now our economy is so tied to what OPEC decides to price oil at.
Oh god, not this again. If you don't need anything faster, then don't fricking upgrade! In any case, the 250fps vs 300fps metric is just bad. SolidEdge runs at 10fps on my GeForce4 MX440, if I'm lucky. The limit for comfortable interactive modeling is about 5-10fps. That means I can't strech the detail on my model too far without killing my graphics card. If a $200 GeForce6600 allows me to use two or three times the detail, and still run at 10fps, I'm a happy camper.
Ars-Fartsica originally said that the 747 would get blown up before it could complete its mission. My point was that it wouldn't --- for the same reason B-52s don't get blown up when engaging in bombing runs. Do you disagree with this?
The 747 has a significantly higher cruise speed than a B-52, and a service ceiling that is only 4,000 feet lower. There is no reason the same tactics wouldn't work for the 747.
Well, we do that now anyway (how do you think we created the "Coalition of the Willing?") In general, the people we bribe are only our friends long enough to meet their own interests. Quite often (the Afghans, for example), they turn on us later.
Well, BeOS in the Dano version *was* multiuser. If I remember correctly, a lot of the basic infrastructure for multi-user support was already there --- it just wasn't complete yet. Given that Apple had to completely rewrite the display engine for OS X, I don't think the last measure of work that would be needed for multiuser support would have been a huge issue.
I know you were just being facetious, but the NASA budget is here.
NASA cost $25bn last year. That means the average cost to taxpayers was $191.24. However, for the bottom 95% of the population, the cost came out to less than $95.62 for the year.
Ugh. That's not the way to run an economy. The more you try to restrict it, the more you have to deal with it changing in unexpected ways to get around it. For example, rent controls cause housing black markets, and minimum wages cause unemployment. I do believe the US needs to get with the program and make a concerted effort to reduce it's disgustingly high level of pollution and energy use, but I don't think crippling the economy with restrictions is the way to do it.
Another problem I've always seen, and it has always made me very wary of the "liberal" point of view is the attitude-the belief that only idiots and the brain dead would vote the other way, that if everyone were smart they would vote the same way you do.
I think a lot of this comes from sheer frustration than anything else. Outside the "True Believers", I don't think there are a lot of Democrats who'd say that even conservative republicans like Buchannen believe what they do because they are idiots. Many of us accept that they simply have a different ideology than we do, and rational arguments can be made on both sides.
The thing is, the statistics of this election were just depressing. In 2003, a study revealed the existance of large-scale misunderstandings about the facts in Iraq, and it's correlation with support for Bush. The post-mortem of the election showed that the #1 concern among voters was not the economy, or healthcare, or jobs, or even Iraq or terrorism, as everyone expected, but rather, "moral values." As if that was the President's concern! The fundementally bigoted gay marriage amendments passed in all 11 of the states in which they were on the ballot, and helped Republicans a lot by increasing their turnout. It doesn't help that the Republicans themselves are encouraging the stereotypes by attacking intellectuals and liberals, playing up NASCAR dads, and emphasising the President's down home folksy character. If the democrats are suspicious of the intelligence of Republicans right now, it's not because they have no reason to be.
That's all well and good, and the conservatives have much the same attitude, but they don't go around proclaiming that everyone who votes Democrat is a back woods hick with a first grade education and brain damage. No, they don't claim we're back-woods hicks. They claim we're welfare-draining terrorist sympathizers who are wholly disconnected from reality because we've had too much higher education. Which is not wholly untrue, of course. We've got our embarrassing elements too, particularly the "protest everything" college crowd, and the extreme environmentalists, but they either don't vote, or have nobody else to vote for, so they wield little power.
In the media, the conservatives definitely have an edge on character attacks on their opposition. NPR might be leftist, but they don't sit there just attacking the opposition. There must be some "rational conservative" counterpart to NPR, but browsing amongst Rush, Hannity, etc, all I see are counterparts to the likes of Michael Moore and Al Franken.
I'd love to see the Democratic party reform itself as a party focused on fiscal conservatism, a government that keeps its nose out of your personal business, and the belief that people should be able to live their lives without being told how to live day to day by the government, or anyone else for that matter. I would love to see that myself, though I'd probably be on the liberal shades of such a party. I really thought Dean could have turned the democratic party in that direction, but the left won out. I'm really excited with Dean's new organization, though, "Democracy for America", which is trying to push fiscally responsible social progressives into the mainsteam of the democratic party. They even have a sensical "each state to its own" gun policy.
Hey, that's not fair. 48% of Americans didn't vote for Bush. The only reason he won is because Christian conservatives came out of the woodworks as a result of all the "anti gay marriage" bans that were on the ballots in a lot of midwest and southern states. Fully 20% of the voters this year were evangelical Christians, and in Ohio, where the election was decided, 25% of voters were evangelical Christians.
Liberals have to face the reality that the Conservatives do not want true proportional representation and will fight it to the death.
It doesn't matter what they want, what matters is what's right and what's wrong. The President is a national office. He should be elected by an even national election. One person, one vote, no silly weighting of votes.
If local issues are being delegated to him, the correct response isn't to bias the election to take into account local concerns, but strip him of the power to have impact over local concerns.
I don't know if you can really say that. I've been checking the site regularly for the last week or so, and it's jumped back and forth several times in that time. Indeed, just two days ago Bush was ahead by 37 electoral votes. The day before, Bush was ahead by over 40 votes. Besides, all his data is right there --- you're welcome to run the results yourself and see.
To elaborate on my previous post: the President's core responsibilities are stuff like foreign policy and national economic policy. These things aren't sensitive to regional differences (we share, for example, the same national debt), so there is no point in giving small states more influence in these matters than large states.
Why? Because there *are* different concerns and it's a bad idea for one segment of the population (large city dwellers) to dictate policy for the whole country, when they have no understanding of the issues that face people in other environments.
This is why we should cut the power of the president, and go back to Congress (and the Senate being supreme. The President is a national office, with responsibility over national concerns. Let him be elected by an straight national vote. It's the job of congress to deal with local issues (to the extent it's the job of the federal government to deal with local issues), so let that remain the way it is.
Um, what? People aren't really campaigning in the big population centers. People are campaigning in the swing states. When was the last time a Bush or Kerry went to Texas or California? They're not going there, because those places are locks. Nobody is going to North Dakota (or my home state of Virginia, or my current residence of Georgia), because those states are Republican locks.
Just for reference, our forefathers did not design the current election system. It kind of congealed over time. Originally, the president was not elected by the popular vote at all, and we had none of this "electors must vote for who wins the popular vote in their state" nonesense.
Ugh. Why should we do that? That just gives even more influence to small states, and frankly, they're not enough of a contribution to our economy or our society to warrent giving them even more priority than they already have!
There is a flaw in that logic, having to do with how the system has changed since it was designed. Electors no longer cast their vote freely. They are bound, by law in most states, to vote with how the popular vote turns out in their state. So in reality, the system is not at all insulated from the whims of the voters. All the electoral college does is create a weighting system favoring small states.
This is where the "obsolete" comes in. Small states no longer need protecting. Given the strong alignment between small populations and conservative leanings (the average Kerry-leaning state is twice as populous as the average Bush-leaning state), they've created a significantly unified voting bloc, which has allowed them to exert a great amount of influence.
Essentially, the electoral college has created a conservative bias in American politics. A place like Wyoming carries 6x as many electoral votes, per person, than a place like California. Rural priorities and values exert an influence way out of line with their proportion of the population.
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The USA is a vast, sparsely populated territory and it's simply unreasonable to expect broadband penetration similar to that of small, densely-populated places like South Korea and Taiwan.
And Canada. Small, densely-populated places like Canada.
My handes are pretty big, and even I find the original XBox controller uncomfortable.
Please, try and get out of the early 1990s. Manual dependency resolution hasn't been a problem with Linux siince at least then, and even then, it was only a problem on RedHat systems. You wanna know how I install software (I'm on Ubuntu). I start up Synaptic, I click on what I want, click install, and have the app and it's dependencies all downloaded and installled automatically. Quite a bit easier than any Windows installer I've eer used.
Sony has announced that PSP games will not be region-locked. I'm planning to import one from Japan when it comes out :)
That doesn't really make any sense. The cost of oil is a net loss to the US. The US would *love* to get rid of the oil dependency, because right now our economy is so tied to what OPEC decides to price oil at.
Oh god, not this again. If you don't need anything faster, then don't fricking upgrade! In any case, the 250fps vs 300fps metric is just bad. SolidEdge runs at 10fps on my GeForce4 MX440, if I'm lucky. The limit for comfortable interactive modeling is about 5-10fps. That means I can't strech the detail on my model too far without killing my graphics card. If a $200 GeForce6600 allows me to use two or three times the detail, and still run at 10fps, I'm a happy camper.
Ars-Fartsica originally said that the 747 would get blown up before it could complete its mission. My point was that it wouldn't --- for the same reason B-52s don't get blown up when engaging in bombing runs. Do you disagree with this?
The 747 has a significantly higher cruise speed than a B-52, and a service ceiling that is only 4,000 feet lower. There is no reason the same tactics wouldn't work for the 747.
You know, the plane can use anti-missile counter-measures. How do you think B-52 bombers manage to avoid getting shot down?
It's spelled Berkeley you ignorant twit.
Well, we do that now anyway (how do you think we created the "Coalition of the Willing?") In general, the people we bribe are only our friends long enough to meet their own interests. Quite often (the Afghans, for example), they turn on us later.
Do you think they'd send out one of these without a whole bunch of fighter escorts?
Well, BeOS in the Dano version *was* multiuser. If I remember correctly, a lot of the basic infrastructure for multi-user support was already there --- it just wasn't complete yet. Given that Apple had to completely rewrite the display engine for OS X, I don't think the last measure of work that would be needed for multiuser support would have been a huge issue.
I know you were just being facetious, but the NASA budget is here.
NASA cost $25bn last year. That means the average cost to taxpayers was $191.24. However, for the bottom 95% of the population, the cost came out to less than $95.62 for the year.
Ugh. That's not the way to run an economy. The more you try to restrict it, the more you have to deal with it changing in unexpected ways to get around it. For example, rent controls cause housing black markets, and minimum wages cause unemployment. I do believe the US needs to get with the program and make a concerted effort to reduce it's disgustingly high level of pollution and energy use, but I don't think crippling the economy with restrictions is the way to do it.
Another problem I've always seen, and it has always made me very wary of the "liberal" point of view is the attitude-the belief that only idiots and the brain dead would vote the other way, that if everyone were smart they would vote the same way you do.
I think a lot of this comes from sheer frustration than anything else. Outside the "True Believers", I don't think there are a lot of Democrats who'd say that even conservative republicans like Buchannen believe what they do because they are idiots. Many of us accept that they simply have a different ideology than we do, and rational arguments can be made on both sides.
The thing is, the statistics of this election were just depressing. In 2003, a study revealed the existance of large-scale misunderstandings about the facts in Iraq, and it's correlation with support for Bush. The post-mortem of the election showed that the #1 concern among voters was not the economy, or healthcare, or jobs, or even Iraq or terrorism, as everyone expected, but rather, "moral values." As if that was the President's concern! The fundementally bigoted gay marriage amendments passed in all 11 of the states in which they were on the ballot, and helped Republicans a lot by increasing their turnout. It doesn't help that the Republicans themselves are encouraging the stereotypes by attacking intellectuals and liberals, playing up NASCAR dads, and emphasising the President's down home folksy character. If the democrats are suspicious of the intelligence of Republicans right now, it's not because they have no reason to be.
That's all well and good, and the conservatives have much the same attitude, but they don't go around proclaiming that everyone who votes Democrat is a back woods hick with a first grade education and brain damage.
No, they don't claim we're back-woods hicks. They claim we're welfare-draining terrorist sympathizers who are wholly disconnected from reality because we've had too much higher education. Which is not wholly untrue, of course. We've got our embarrassing elements too, particularly the "protest everything" college crowd, and the extreme environmentalists, but they either don't vote, or have nobody else to vote for, so they wield little power.
In the media, the conservatives definitely have an edge on character attacks on their opposition. NPR might be leftist, but they don't sit there just attacking the opposition. There must be some "rational conservative" counterpart to NPR, but browsing amongst Rush, Hannity, etc, all I see are counterparts to the likes of Michael Moore and Al Franken.
I'd love to see the Democratic party reform itself as a party focused on fiscal conservatism, a government that keeps its nose out of your personal business, and the belief that people should be able to live their lives without being told how to live day to day by the government, or anyone else for that matter.
I would love to see that myself, though I'd probably be on the liberal shades of such a party. I really thought Dean could have turned the democratic party in that direction, but the left won out. I'm really excited with Dean's new organization, though, "Democracy for America", which is trying to push fiscally responsible social progressives into the mainsteam of the democratic party. They even have a sensical "each state to its own" gun policy.
Hey, that's not fair. 48% of Americans didn't vote for Bush. The only reason he won is because Christian conservatives came out of the woodworks as a result of all the "anti gay marriage" bans that were on the ballots in a lot of midwest and southern states. Fully 20% of the voters this year were evangelical Christians, and in Ohio, where the election was decided, 25% of voters were evangelical Christians.
Liberals have to face the reality that the Conservatives do not want true proportional representation and will fight it to the death.
It doesn't matter what they want, what matters is what's right and what's wrong. The President is a national office. He should be elected by an even national election. One person, one vote, no silly weighting of votes.
If local issues are being delegated to him, the correct response isn't to bias the election to take into account local concerns, but strip him of the power to have impact over local concerns.
I don't know if you can really say that. I've been checking the site regularly for the last week or so, and it's jumped back and forth several times in that time. Indeed, just two days ago Bush was ahead by 37 electoral votes. The day before, Bush was ahead by over 40 votes. Besides, all his data is right there --- you're welcome to run the results yourself and see.
To elaborate on my previous post: the President's core responsibilities are stuff like foreign policy and national economic policy. These things aren't sensitive to regional differences (we share, for example, the same national debt), so there is no point in giving small states more influence in these matters than large states.
Why? Because there *are* different concerns and it's a bad idea for one segment of the population (large city dwellers) to dictate policy for the whole country, when they have no understanding of the issues that face people in other environments.
This is why we should cut the power of the president, and go back to Congress (and the Senate being supreme. The President is a national office, with responsibility over national concerns. Let him be elected by an straight national vote. It's the job of congress to deal with local issues (to the extent it's the job of the federal government to deal with local issues), so let that remain the way it is.
Um, what? People aren't really campaigning in the big population centers. People are campaigning in the swing states. When was the last time a Bush or Kerry went to Texas or California? They're not going there, because those places are locks. Nobody is going to North Dakota (or my home state of Virginia, or my current residence of Georgia), because those states are Republican locks.
Just for reference, our forefathers did not design the current election system. It kind of congealed over time. Originally, the president was not elected by the popular vote at all, and we had none of this "electors must vote for who wins the popular vote in their state" nonesense.
Ugh. Why should we do that? That just gives even more influence to small states, and frankly, they're not enough of a contribution to our economy or our society to warrent giving them even more priority than they already have!
There is a flaw in that logic, having to do with how the system has changed since it was designed. Electors no longer cast their vote freely. They are bound, by law in most states, to vote with how the popular vote turns out in their state. So in reality, the system is not at all insulated from the whims of the voters. All the electoral college does is create a weighting system favoring small states.
This is where the "obsolete" comes in. Small states no longer need protecting. Given the strong alignment between small populations and conservative leanings (the average Kerry-leaning state is twice as populous as the average Bush-leaning state), they've created a significantly unified voting bloc, which has allowed them to exert a great amount of influence.
Essentially, the electoral college has created a conservative bias in American politics. A place like Wyoming carries 6x as many electoral votes, per person, than a place like California. Rural priorities and values exert an influence way out of line with their proportion of the population.