First, are you in one of those countries that has a major political party with the word "Christian" in the name?
Second, let's consider this review of yours.
Loses wars against third-world nations: Belgium vs Congo. France vs Vietnam. France vs Algeria. Germany vs the World (twice). Soviet Union vs Afghanistan. Great Britain vs her American colonies. The US lost against the same people France lost to, and the US is arguably losing in Iraq. What other wars have we lost against third-world countries? (Don't try Korea, we won in Korea until the idiot decided to cross over into China, at which point we stalemated at the current border, and yes, this is the same idiot that fought so successfully against Japan)
Highest murder rates: Has such a study been done on the aggregate of the EU? Individual states in the US compare favorably to nations in Europe, or neutrally. And how do you correlate this data vs for example the Srebrenica massacre?
Advanced: I suppose it depends on how you measure advanced. On the one hand, we've got 48% who don't believe in evolution. How does that correlate to poverty rates? Poverty and ignorance go hand in hand, after all, and we decidedly don't have the socialist economy that is found through so many parts of Europe. On the other hand, we inherited our religious idiocy from Europe, but by being one big country we avoided the trauma that 2 world wars brought to europe and followed it up by providing the most advanced military defenses to all of western europe for 40 years and rebuilt the area. How do you reconcile this information? Note: you're not really allowed to ignore the religious craziness without dealing with the influence of that craziness in rebuilding Europe after the war, we could have just left you for dead.
Terrorism: Spain and the UK are both on board in our war against terror. Italy was until they caved to terrorists holding some italian reporters hostage. If you break it down by population percentage, there's very little doubt in my mind that you'll find the EU looking any different than the US in this irrational fear.
Face it, Europeans aren't in any better shape than the US. You just get to hide behind this half-implemented union, where we are 50 united states. So you get to play with the numbers and say "Well, Germany's obviously better than the US". Yeah, try comparing Germany to Massachussetts. Better yet, let's talk about Russia and Chechnya, and all the other little border conflicts going on over there.
The bottom line is that all this US-hating isn't doing any good either, but I guess you figure if you hate the US, you're doing good for the world. Nevertheless, you are part of the reason we're on a roller-coaster that likely ends in WW3.
You can claim the other industrialized nations are more advanced than the US after the two most destructive wars in history have been fought in the US and primarily by the US.
All those claims are historical facts at this point, whether they're still true or not isn't relevant. The Roman Empire retained many of its pre-imperial traits, even after the split into east/west empires, and the American Empire has done likewise.
I seem to remember Jules Vernes mentioning the possibility in Off on a Comet, a Journey through the Stars, but I could be misremembering. But considering that he was writing about people traveling to the moon in the 19th century, using 19th century technology, it wouldn't surprise me if he or someone else long before came up with the idea.
Think of getting rear-ended by someone without insurance, causing permanent damage to your back. Think of getting fired because your boss is a sexist and doesn't think women should be working. Etc.
No, making it harder to start a lawsuit is definitely worse than alternative solutions. You've got your heart in the right place, no doubt, but all you're going to get is less lawsuits, period. Not just less frivolous lawsuits, less lawsuits, which means more people suffering who could have sued but didn't, because of the price just to start.
I'd rather have the plaintiff pay all legal expenses if he loses. NOt the defendant, just the plaintiff. The defendant has to respond or he gets summary judgement against him. Then, people who really want to fight can theoretically find a lawyer willing to take the case (assuming they have a case to begin with).
It's not as good as the goal you want, but if there's anything I've learned programming, it's that incremental change is the path to success, not sweeping change. Make little changes and test them.
FOr me, this means I"ll finally be able to buy my wife a laptop. Well, I could do it before, but I would have to commit myself to fixing it for her and figuring out all the little things that don't work on my own, but now I'll be able to let Dell deal with it.:) (Yes, a Dell laptop that doesn't burn is worth it to me if I don't have to support the damn thing for my wife)
but most school kids don't know much of the difference between "fact" and "scientific theory."
That's because there isn't a difference. When you say "theory", the scientific term that most matches it is "hypothesis". "Scientific theory" means "fact". At least, as far as translating technical scientific jargon into vernacular is concerned, that's how it is.
It all boils down to faith, indeed. Because without it, we would each be forced as individuals to verify and review all of science, and if we had to do that before we could accept it, we'd still be breaking flint into flakes to attach to the end of sticks and hoping it doesn't rain today.
The choice in who to place your faith in is similarly simple. Do I trust millions, consisting of my peers, colleagues, friends, and family with a modern viewpoint and the benefit of education? Or do I trust what by today's standards are a handful of illiterate and superstitious people whose very existence can't even be known for certain, based on books whose original copies have long since been destroyed?
For added effect, spell Canada as "US Copies". This will annoy them every time. Lump New Zealand in with Oz and you've got everybody in the commonwealth! (and by pretending those are the only countries in the commonwealth, you get all the rest, too!)
I guess I'll be the one to tell you. THere's a flat spot between each song, you can just pick the needle up and place it down in the flat spot to here the next song.
I think the problem is viewing music as the product. I don't think music is the product. I think the band is the product. That's why endorsements are worth so much, licensing the music so you can stick it in your commercials, etc. I really think that every band out there needs to be focused on building a community around themselves and similar bands, and trying to link up their communities. If you go on tour with this band over here, then you probably ought to share some online forums with that band. Serve up ads for extra revenue, maybe not. Get people to spend time on your website. Then you can promote your shows, merchandise, etc. If you want to be paid to make an appearance on letterman, show letterman that you've got 20,000 people who will watch for you. Ok, letterman's probably over the top, but you can probably milk some extra money while on tour by visiting the local radio stations.
Make your presence worth money by being valued as a musician and a person, and people will pay. Make money from the music directly when you can, but don't rely on it. Musicians give away too much for free these days that they could easily make a few bucks from, I think. Throwing the baby out with the bath water...
THat's because you used to live in a pink cloud of wonder. Sadly, you can't even call what passes for an "average artist" an artist anymore, nor could you ever. They're performers, not much different than fry cooks. I.e. you could hire anybody to do the job and train them accordingly. Someone else writes the music, someone else arranges it, someone else plays it, someone else does the choreography, etc. The only thing the performer does is sing the song and do what they're told, and if they have trouble doing what they're told, they're all drugged up and driven into debt until they either quit or learn better.
Heh, my own experience with calling the ISP when the intarwebby was down basically went like this:
Me: The network is down, when will it be fixed?
Them: How do you know the network is down?
Me: It looks like it
Them: Did you try reinstalling Windows?
Me: No, my operating system is fine, I just want to know how long it's expected to be down.
Them: You need to try reinstalling Windows.
Me: Tht would mean formatting my harddrive
Them: No it doesn't, it's very easy.
Me: Not when my hard drive already contains Linux
Them: We don't support any non-Windows os, and I can ping your cable router, so it's an os problem.
Me: Ok, let me install Mac OS X real quick...
Them: We do support Macs, but not OS X, whatever that is.
Me: It's ok, I run x86 anyway, I was just seeing how smart you were.
Them: ???
Me: Can we escalate this? You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
Them: No
*click*
My neighbor called to ask why the cable tv was out and got a much better answer, complete with ETA of repair. Ping my router? Fucking liar.
The real question that you've avoided is "how much difference to these non-genuine votes make?"
I was working for a company awhile back that decided to start sending out surveys to customers to find out what they thought of our service. They found that if they sent out 100, they got 10 back. When they started plotting the results of the 10 they got back, 1 and 2 surveys caused fuzzy results, but the curve developed with just 3 surveys. And it stayed that way predictably up to about 8 surveys. 9 and 10 scrambled it a bit, but still didn't hurt it that much.
So, they just need to slice their data set a few different ways and see how much difference it makes to the results. In the end, even if 10000 votes were fake, if they predict the results of the genuine votes it doesn't matter one bit.
Indeed, we should all go vote, and then if they take the votes and wrap up a system for us, take it and run with it. The simple fact is, Dell doesn't have to offer Linux preloaded to make us all happy, they just have to make it possible for us to put whatever linux we want on it. Another poster pointed out that if Dell puts their special drivers out as open source and gets code into the kernel directly to support them, then all distributions can provide packages. This is a big deal! It's not so much "Dell needs to give us options", it's "Dell needs to make it possible for us to provide our own options". Who gives a shit if Dell ships Fedora in the end? As long as Mandriva/Ubuntu/whatever can take the drivers and ship 'em, that's Good Enough. And those of us who don't use Fedora (or whatever they pick) can still happily buy the Fedora-packed machine, blast it, and put the one we really want on it, and 99% of the headaches we face now will be gone. The remaining 1% will be us figuring out our favorite distribution wasn't as good as we thought, once they were all put on a level playing field.
Ummm, that's true, however the GNU tools have been around for many many years. You can call it bloatware (or the OP, I didn't notice if you were the OP or not), but the other programmer's code isn't going to have the wide deployment and testing to go with it. GNU ls may seem large, but it also works *everywhere*. Will yours?
It's very easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that you can write a program smaller and faster and just as functional as the one you're using. Sometimes that's actually true, but most of the time it's not. The program you're using, for all you know, is 80% workarounds to deal with (take your pick) broken platforms/non-standard drivers/broken filesystems/etc. Your code, fresh and virgin, will *not* have any of that stuff in it. Can you be certain that when your code is as widely deployed on as many different platforms as the one you're replacing that it will still be as small as it was when it was new?
Slashdot Mirror
First, are you in one of those countries that has a major political party with the word "Christian" in the name?
Second, let's consider this review of yours.
Face it, Europeans aren't in any better shape than the US. You just get to hide behind this half-implemented union, where we are 50 united states. So you get to play with the numbers and say "Well, Germany's obviously better than the US". Yeah, try comparing Germany to Massachussetts. Better yet, let's talk about Russia and Chechnya, and all the other little border conflicts going on over there.
The bottom line is that all this US-hating isn't doing any good either, but I guess you figure if you hate the US, you're doing good for the world. Nevertheless, you are part of the reason we're on a roller-coaster that likely ends in WW3.
You can claim the other industrialized nations are more advanced than the US after the two most destructive wars in history have been fought in the US and primarily by the US.
All those claims are historical facts at this point, whether they're still true or not isn't relevant. The Roman Empire retained many of its pre-imperial traits, even after the split into east/west empires, and the American Empire has done likewise.
Tatooine also predates HHGTTG.
I seem to remember Jules Vernes mentioning the possibility in Off on a Comet, a Journey through the Stars, but I could be misremembering. But considering that he was writing about people traveling to the moon in the 19th century, using 19th century technology, it wouldn't surprise me if he or someone else long before came up with the idea.
Less lawsuits = less legitimate lawsuits
Think of getting rear-ended by someone without insurance, causing permanent damage to your back. Think of getting fired because your boss is a sexist and doesn't think women should be working. Etc.
No, making it harder to start a lawsuit is definitely worse than alternative solutions. You've got your heart in the right place, no doubt, but all you're going to get is less lawsuits, period. Not just less frivolous lawsuits, less lawsuits, which means more people suffering who could have sued but didn't, because of the price just to start.
I'd rather have the plaintiff pay all legal expenses if he loses. NOt the defendant, just the plaintiff. The defendant has to respond or he gets summary judgement against him. Then, people who really want to fight can theoretically find a lawyer willing to take the case (assuming they have a case to begin with).
It's not as good as the goal you want, but if there's anything I've learned programming, it's that incremental change is the path to success, not sweeping change. Make little changes and test them.
They could just buy a wrench and tighten that fucker up.
FOr me, this means I"ll finally be able to buy my wife a laptop. Well, I could do it before, but I would have to commit myself to fixing it for her and figuring out all the little things that don't work on my own, but now I'll be able to let Dell deal with it. :) (Yes, a Dell laptop that doesn't burn is worth it to me if I don't have to support the damn thing for my wife)
That's because there isn't a difference. When you say "theory", the scientific term that most matches it is "hypothesis". "Scientific theory" means "fact". At least, as far as translating technical scientific jargon into vernacular is concerned, that's how it is.
As a firm Turdist, what do I get when I tell you the difference between evolution and natural selection?
It all boils down to faith, indeed. Because without it, we would each be forced as individuals to verify and review all of science, and if we had to do that before we could accept it, we'd still be breaking flint into flakes to attach to the end of sticks and hoping it doesn't rain today.
The choice in who to place your faith in is similarly simple. Do I trust millions, consisting of my peers, colleagues, friends, and family with a modern viewpoint and the benefit of education? Or do I trust what by today's standards are a handful of illiterate and superstitious people whose very existence can't even be known for certain, based on books whose original copies have long since been destroyed?
limited nuclear exchange, buddy.
Either way, though, if it's a survivable nuclear winter or complete destruction of mankind, the problem is still solved. :)
You think that's bad, I *am* an American, and the idiots misspell my country's name all the time!
For added effect, spell Canada as "US Copies". This will annoy them every time. Lump New Zealand in with Oz and you've got everybody in the commonwealth! (and by pretending those are the only countries in the commonwealth, you get all the rest, too!)
Foolish me, and here I was thinking a limited nuclear exchange would deal with global warming nicely.
IN 2010, they intend to ship planes with Klinger as well.
>DROP TWIN >DROP NOTWIN
That's the way you do it.
I guess I'll be the one to tell you. THere's a flat spot between each song, you can just pick the needle up and place it down in the flat spot to here the next song.
I think the problem is viewing music as the product. I don't think music is the product. I think the band is the product. That's why endorsements are worth so much, licensing the music so you can stick it in your commercials, etc. I really think that every band out there needs to be focused on building a community around themselves and similar bands, and trying to link up their communities. If you go on tour with this band over here, then you probably ought to share some online forums with that band. Serve up ads for extra revenue, maybe not. Get people to spend time on your website. Then you can promote your shows, merchandise, etc. If you want to be paid to make an appearance on letterman, show letterman that you've got 20,000 people who will watch for you. Ok, letterman's probably over the top, but you can probably milk some extra money while on tour by visiting the local radio stations.
Make your presence worth money by being valued as a musician and a person, and people will pay. Make money from the music directly when you can, but don't rely on it. Musicians give away too much for free these days that they could easily make a few bucks from, I think. Throwing the baby out with the bath water...
THat's because you used to live in a pink cloud of wonder. Sadly, you can't even call what passes for an "average artist" an artist anymore, nor could you ever. They're performers, not much different than fry cooks. I.e. you could hire anybody to do the job and train them accordingly. Someone else writes the music, someone else arranges it, someone else plays it, someone else does the choreography, etc. The only thing the performer does is sing the song and do what they're told, and if they have trouble doing what they're told, they're all drugged up and driven into debt until they either quit or learn better.
And sadly, it's always been like that.
When the sheep has a human vagina, then it's no longer bestiality.
Heh, my own experience with calling the ISP when the intarwebby was down basically went like this:
My neighbor called to ask why the cable tv was out and got a much better answer, complete with ETA of repair. Ping my router? Fucking liar.
The real question that you've avoided is "how much difference to these non-genuine votes make?"
I was working for a company awhile back that decided to start sending out surveys to customers to find out what they thought of our service. They found that if they sent out 100, they got 10 back. When they started plotting the results of the 10 they got back, 1 and 2 surveys caused fuzzy results, but the curve developed with just 3 surveys. And it stayed that way predictably up to about 8 surveys. 9 and 10 scrambled it a bit, but still didn't hurt it that much.
So, they just need to slice their data set a few different ways and see how much difference it makes to the results. In the end, even if 10000 votes were fake, if they predict the results of the genuine votes it doesn't matter one bit.
Indeed, we should all go vote, and then if they take the votes and wrap up a system for us, take it and run with it. The simple fact is, Dell doesn't have to offer Linux preloaded to make us all happy, they just have to make it possible for us to put whatever linux we want on it. Another poster pointed out that if Dell puts their special drivers out as open source and gets code into the kernel directly to support them, then all distributions can provide packages. This is a big deal! It's not so much "Dell needs to give us options", it's "Dell needs to make it possible for us to provide our own options". Who gives a shit if Dell ships Fedora in the end? As long as Mandriva/Ubuntu/whatever can take the drivers and ship 'em, that's Good Enough. And those of us who don't use Fedora (or whatever they pick) can still happily buy the Fedora-packed machine, blast it, and put the one we really want on it, and 99% of the headaches we face now will be gone. The remaining 1% will be us figuring out our favorite distribution wasn't as good as we thought, once they were all put on a level playing field.
Ummm, that's true, however the GNU tools have been around for many many years. You can call it bloatware (or the OP, I didn't notice if you were the OP or not), but the other programmer's code isn't going to have the wide deployment and testing to go with it. GNU ls may seem large, but it also works *everywhere*. Will yours?
It's very easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that you can write a program smaller and faster and just as functional as the one you're using. Sometimes that's actually true, but most of the time it's not. The program you're using, for all you know, is 80% workarounds to deal with (take your pick) broken platforms/non-standard drivers/broken filesystems/etc. Your code, fresh and virgin, will *not* have any of that stuff in it. Can you be certain that when your code is as widely deployed on as many different platforms as the one you're replacing that it will still be as small as it was when it was new?