Kurzweil must have a significant biotech portfolio, hence he needs the Rest Of Us to believe biotech is the next killer app... to talk up his stock so he can cash out to the Greater Fools. Sorry, Kurzweil, but biotech's been a fucking abortion since its Day Zero. On top of that, any investor twit now can see that biotech's value-add is going to be based in foreign nations in order to exploit the cheapest possible labor, taxes and regulation.
Yes, at 38 years old I am years past being tired and ultimately disgusted of these pie-in-the-sky predictions of techno-utopia.
People hiding in air-conditioned buildings with their huge bank accounts and expensive toys and entertainments tend to think technology is so wonderful that it will change the world in radical ways "just around the corner".
But we've well seen that technoprogress contains huge problems that Humans cannot handle, balk at, and ultimately either reject or get remarkably deformed by it.
Literally, futurists are almost completely ignoring the Human factor in the equation of history. At best, the futurists lower themselves to labeling anyone who points this out, and the term "Luddite" is never that far behind when that happens. The futurist essentially turns into an inadvertent snake-oil salesman who sells his tapes, books and videos... while the purported future arrives, carrying a massive load of unintended consequences and also-rans.
I've read Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix" stories and although they were well thought out, they do represent an impossible future. Humans require orders of magnitude more social stability than that offered in the series. Constant future shock cannot be sustained. Technology cannot shatter society since society readily rejects such forces.
The bald fact of the matter is that technology cannot produce a utopia or even anything that smacks of it. Tech brings as many problems into society as it solves.
In short, in the year 2100, you should expect your great-grandson to eat land-grown food, be warmed by hot liquids and metals, and wear pants... all of which will have to be done in the morning to prepare to go to work, before leaving his mineral-and-wood home. And YOU will be long dead, exactly in line as Humans have always died.
No-one is forcing anyone to buy weapons. They choose to spend their money on weapons. It is their decision. I fail to see how you can blame the west for that.
If you watch your customers plainly commit genocidal actions with your products, you should consider not selling to them any further. It's called MORALITY. You might read a little bit about it, since you seem to lack any of it.
Furthermore, when the White-dominated international financial system and corporations make their play in the countries affected, they generally militarize said societies, resulting in war zones of almost endless rebellions, insurrection, coups, and of course wide areas of a largely lethal envronment placed upon people who would otherwise have homes and hobbies.
I swear, this "[the results are] none of my business" mentality of stupid White Western motherfuckers is getting very tiring. If a war zone is truly none of your business, then have UTTERLY NOTHING to do with it, and that includes making loans, selling them weapons, and buying or exploiting their resources.
Of course, that falls under the MORALITY category again, and we can see where you've failed that particular little test.
It should also be noted that no one is forcing Microsoft to do anything. Microsoft is free to continue using proprietary formats.
No. By insisting that your previous business with Microsoft must change in order for Microsoft to keep your business, then you are forcing them to do something since it only rational that they will feel compelled to keep a customer base. But of course, each time Microsoft changes their document formats, they force their customers to adapt in all manner of ways, too. Force is involved in both ways, and I have no trouble with any of it... but it's still FORCE.
Americans invaded France in 1944 as foreigners from an immense industrial power, part of a coalition of forces, barely singed by resistance forces during their obvious coming over the ocean, and furthermore coming into a nation that itself was occupied by other invaders....
I could go on, but all that was hardly comparable to the (farcical) Commie Invasion of North America. The point is clear that there was NO Commie Invasion being planned seriously. Americans would have blown the unbelievable shit out of any forces that would have tried to cross either ocean or via land routes across the cold north. Americans would have severely met anyone who dared to drive a tank across American native soil.
In short, the Commie Invasion was a myth that was used to keep people scared enough to continue the extremely good times of the military-industrial complex that was created during WWII. The MIC essentially made a Fascist state within the American Republic, and we today are living in the Empire that said Fascism transformed the Republic into.
Now, people are still so scared of America's endless enemies (which are largely manufactured by Americans) that they are willing to attack other nations who have no invasion capability and had no intention of assaulting American native soil whatsoever. Americans under their sick little Empire are so lacking in courage that they are willing to pre-emptively strike and invade just on the possibility of a strike upon themselves. All this is making the world a very unsafe place for civilization.
In short, Americans no longer understand the philosopy of self-defense. They have gone completely offensive, and entirely mistake such things for self-defense. Sad.
The reporter isn't short-sighted, he's single-issued. It's clear that he subscribes to the "free market" mentality, and then applies the further qualification that the market has ALREADY CHOSEN what it wanted to use (i.e. Microsoft-dominated document formats). This viewpoint makes it easy to conclude the specifying an open document format is "anti-competitive" because competition has already occurred.
In short, it's just the prevailing religion called Hypercapitalism. In such a philosophy, whoever has the most money or market share is by definition "correct", and deserves all state and individual support. Any regulation or criticism thereafter is considered "obstruction".
I'm sure if Rush Limbaugh picks up this topic, it'll be another nail in the Liberal coffin that he builds each day. After all, it's all about the Liberal mindset, and Massachusetts (home of RL's favorite Lib Senator, T. Kennedy) is a blazing example of such. Obstructionists!
I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them. What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
What do you mean? Our culture teaches people that money can buy you anything, therefore all you should try to get is money. A college degree is simply a ticket to get a good paying job. If you could buy them outright, people would do so. (And in fact, with degree mills, that's exactly what happens.)
Other than that, there are also a lot of "students" who are nothing of the sort. They are very overworked laborers who are trying to squeeze themselves into a higher wage bracket. They generally work while going to college, hence simply don't have the time to properly be a student. For them, it makes a certain kind of harsh and practical sense to simply buy up blocks of academic effort. They are too busy, hence can only trade money for academic results; they already traded off excess time for money simply by being a working college attendee.
I don't condone any of this, of course, but there's nothing I can do about it except lavish my spite upon it all. Equally of course, being a college dropout myself, my criticisms are inevitably filed under "sour grapes" until my predictions come to pass.
Sure, it was a great theory all around. Gun-toting Commies would have ended up on American shores. After all, it's so easy to invade America. Those oceans aren't much of a barrier. And the US Military? Don't even get me started on them. How can they possibly defend so much coastline?
Speaking of which, the towelheads could be landing at South Carolina as we speak here. Quick, let's bomb all the Middle East to ever preclude that from happening. After all, America can't ever be defended, so that's the best justification for being completely offensive.
A friend of mine's father worked on the Boston T's Red Line extension. He noted by then that these projects had no intention of ever ending anymore. You're right in what you implied; the workforce well knows that once the project is over, they're out of a very good paying job, hence they are highly motivated to never complete it. This mentality runs across all project participants. And the taxpayer boob pays all the bills.
Gawd, yes, that was the first time I saw actual core memory. To this day I'm amazed how they managed to string such tiny wires and ferrite rings together. It looked like metal cloth.
My favorite part of SOANM was the unknown processor bug that was fixed by soldering in a single AND gate (obviously, part of a 7400-series chip). Nobody knew why that gate fixed the processor, but it did.
most DG networks are microturbines or fuels cells, the customer usually picks up the cost of the fuel
Hasn't anyone noticed with that the incredible increase in the price of fuels, that suddenly DG is being pushed? I'm suspecting that DG is one way that utilities are trying to not pay for fuel, hence (as you identified) forcing the customer to shoulder the full cost. In fact, it is MORE than the full cost, since there is less and less economy of scale when delivering fuel to distributed entities.
I'm sure the utility companies would love to install DG at each neighborhood and wash their hands of fuel costs... while each neighborhood groans under the weight of each monthly bill. Of course, the people who will deliver said fuel will be pretty damned happy for all the business; I further suspect that the utilities will have their fingers (likely, hands, even arms) in those businesses.
Those do look familiar, but we're dredging some particularly compressed silt in my brain, so I'm not sure. For instance, I can't remember why bit 16 was always set to 1. My USAF training at Colorado forced us to go through the NOVA processor clock-tick by clock-tick, gate by gate, flipflop by flipflop, watching each instruction change the processor... so it's a shame that I can't remember now.
Did you read "Soul of a New Machine"? It documents the development of the Eclipse.
Terrible, isn't it? Until a catastrophe happens, we workers are simply unable to convince managers, execs, board members and ultimately stockholders to make the continuing investments required to maintain installed plant.
Keep an eye out for accusations of employee incompetence with legacy systems. The IT industry is already being hit with accusations of "being unqualified" with employer needs, hence the use and abuse of the H1B and L1 visas. This kind of thing can carry over into all industries as all the golfing buddies seek to further demonize the American worker.
HOLY CHRIST! Are people still using Data General minicomputers? I worked on those in the mid 1980s in the Air Force... on the NOVA 840 and 1220 models. Here we are 20 years later and you're telling me that people haven't at least upgraded those systems to DEC, Honeywell, or Unisys systems?
I fondly recall flipping those front-panel dip-switches to load and diagnose the NOVA 840.
Yes it will cost money to covert it, but in the long run you save.
Long run? What long run? You (the manager or exec in charge of the legacy system) have to justify the expense NOW... and there's hardly any justification for "saving support money in the future". This is DOUBLY true when the executive class is completely hot for outsourcing and offshoring. There's no point in making long-term infrastructural investments when much of said infrastructure will not be owned by the company within 5 years.
For the 1-2 year period prior to my outsourcing, my previous company stalled even more alarmingly on buying virtually anything -- parts, tools, stock equipment, training, etc. They well knew that there was no point in investing in us, just to get rid of us. I'm sure they also tried to underfund the operation for many fiscal periods so the outsourcer wouldn't realize the true extents of the costs of running the operation... hence screwing over the outsourcer for the length of the contract.
How does voir dire differ in any meaningful sense from jury stacking?
Because voir dire is the SYSTEM stacking the jury, not just one side or another. The legal system has unsurprisingly set itself up with rules that confer itself significant advantages that are really nothing but disadvantages for individuals seeking justice.
Since you seem inquisitive, lookup "fully informed jury" (or FIJA) to see the alternative view to the legal system's view of juries.
In my own opinion, juries should be selected by lot, not human subjectivity. After all, all men being "created equal", there's no rational reason to exclude citizens from jury placement due to association, philosophy, or otherwise. Other than the philosophy of the fully informed jury, voir dire rankles me therefore all that much more.
Gee, I dunno, pud, but some of us have this old-fashioned idea that you should make better products and have better support for them, and then customers will frequent YOUR business and not the other guy's. But no, fucking Republican freaks like yourself want to spend company resources on "driving the competition out of business".
Here's a clue for ya, pud: Customers eventually notice that your products suck and the competitor's are better, and they also notice that instead of improving things, you're just attacking said competitor. This environment of contempt leads to higher costs and vicious behavior all around. So eventually another competitor comes along and -- while you're too busy eating some other guy for breakfast -- underprices and overproduces in your market, and your customers go bye-bye in great heaving sighs of gusty relief.
Bother to run your business under the philosophy of respecting the customer, and you'll find that you just don't have time to "destroy the competition". Real businessmen are busy working on their business, and any time spent looking at competitors is for analysis only. The new class of Republican freaks are instead experts at looking busy... while they kill off the long-term potential of their business.
Pud, you can now go back to your sad, pathetic little life of "business is war" thinking. The pain that that philosophy buys you is something that makes me smile. RETARD!
What's the point of a standard if it's not pervasive and useful? Most standards are useful, and just by being standards, they are pervasive. But being widely accepted also means incredible costs for invoking changes across most sectors of society on the basis of marginal increases in performance.
There are proposals to change time, but like changes to the English alphabet, the benefits have to outweigh the almost impossibly large costs of transforming. Look at the English/Metric systems. The USA still has not changed. Metric's benefits still have not outweighed the costs of changing all rulers, indicators, speedometers, odometers, signs, etc. -- and as well, the internal rulers in people's minds that have used feet and miles for centuries.
P.S. The number 60 has these low factors: 2 3 4 5 6. That means that if you use the number 60 for measuring, it's easy to divide whatever you're doing into 2 to 6 parts, and each part is another integer. The number 10 only has factors 2 and 5. Arguably, the number 12 (having factors of 2 3 4 6) is more useful than 10. 10's usefulness is that it matches the base (10) that we use... but only having 2 factors makes it insufficient for other uses.
P.P.S. If there was some real political will behind it, the USA might be able to change all typing keyboards to Dvorak from Qwerty. But that would be a social "Apollo Project" in scale, hence it's never going to be done. Keyboards will probably change format when the entire concept of a keyboard changes, like if pervasive voice recognition or neural connections arise. But then the change will be invoked as the standard becomes nonstandard, and the keyboard fades away.
When I made the leap into the calculus in college, I soon found myself condemning all prior math teachers for their structural failure to teach it to us all in high school.
The calculus is a much more natural way to examine real problems and to calculate answers for them. The calculus seems to be an extension (using "infinite numbers of infinitesimals") of algebra.
Grab yourself some wacky pamphlets on alternative ways of looking at the calculus. I slogged through collegiate instruction, then ran across one of these, and the clarity it offered made it clear that yes, once again, formalized instruction had screwed me. It could be that the calculus at a college level snips all that preparatory algebraic stuff, which is a disservice to understanding.
Anyway. Don't deny yourself. Study the calculus even if you have to use a generic text from some sh*tbag college. Open your mind's eye to the larger world of calculation.
I believe company-sponsored insurance began in WWII when labor shortages combined with wage controls forced companies to seek other incentives to attract or retain employees. In short, and as ever, regulation created unregulated adaptive behavior.
The Conservative part of me knows that Americans existed well enough without company involvement in their insurance. That part of me accepts we can do away with such schemes and people will adapt.
The Liberal in me is hesitant to invoke such measures. If America could also afford health insurance before, then why not try to fix what ails it so it can be affordable again?
The concept of a planned economy does not work either in it's more true forms or in the bastardized forms as exhibited in the communist countries.
So, somehow in the vast hypocrisy mechanism of the American mind, it becomes perfectly sensible and acceptable to use grants, abatements and subsidies to centrally plan the economics of corporations?
If you ever want to really see a Republican asshole squirm like an eel in boiling water, mention that little viewpoint to him. Great fun!
Yeah, RIIIIGHT, bunky. A market with over 330 million people, and companies will just skip over it. You may as well ignore America (295M).
Even if this DOES become ideological as you imply, skipping over Europe will make many public shareholders draw-and-quarter their BODs for playing politics over pursuing profits. Securing market share is a fiscal duty, ace. DUH.
Slashdot Mirror
Kurzweil must have a significant biotech portfolio, hence he needs the Rest Of Us to believe biotech is the next killer app ... to talk up his stock so he can cash out to the Greater Fools. Sorry, Kurzweil, but biotech's been a fucking abortion since its Day Zero. On top of that, any investor twit now can see that biotech's value-add is going to be based in foreign nations in order to exploit the cheapest possible labor, taxes and regulation.
Yes, at 38 years old I am years past being tired and ultimately disgusted of these pie-in-the-sky predictions of techno-utopia.
... while the purported future arrives, carrying a massive load of unintended consequences and also-rans.
... all of which will have to be done in the morning to prepare to go to work, before leaving his mineral-and-wood home. And YOU will be long dead, exactly in line as Humans have always died.
People hiding in air-conditioned buildings with their huge bank accounts and expensive toys and entertainments tend to think technology is so wonderful that it will change the world in radical ways "just around the corner".
But we've well seen that technoprogress contains huge problems that Humans cannot handle, balk at, and ultimately either reject or get remarkably deformed by it.
Literally, futurists are almost completely ignoring the Human factor in the equation of history. At best, the futurists lower themselves to labeling anyone who points this out, and the term "Luddite" is never that far behind when that happens. The futurist essentially turns into an inadvertent snake-oil salesman who sells his tapes, books and videos
I've read Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix" stories and although they were well thought out, they do represent an impossible future. Humans require orders of magnitude more social stability than that offered in the series. Constant future shock cannot be sustained. Technology cannot shatter society since society readily rejects such forces.
The bald fact of the matter is that technology cannot produce a utopia or even anything that smacks of it. Tech brings as many problems into society as it solves.
In short, in the year 2100, you should expect your great-grandson to eat land-grown food, be warmed by hot liquids and metals, and wear pants
No-one is forcing anyone to buy weapons. They choose to spend their money on weapons. It is their decision. I fail to see how you can blame the west for that.
If you watch your customers plainly commit genocidal actions with your products, you should consider not selling to them any further. It's called MORALITY. You might read a little bit about it, since you seem to lack any of it.
Furthermore, when the White-dominated international financial system and corporations make their play in the countries affected, they generally militarize said societies, resulting in war zones of almost endless rebellions, insurrection, coups, and of course wide areas of a largely lethal envronment placed upon people who would otherwise have homes and hobbies.
I swear, this "[the results are] none of my business" mentality of stupid White Western motherfuckers is getting very tiring. If a war zone is truly none of your business, then have UTTERLY NOTHING to do with it, and that includes making loans, selling them weapons, and buying or exploiting their resources.
Of course, that falls under the MORALITY category again, and we can see where you've failed that particular little test.
It should also be noted that no one is forcing Microsoft to do anything. Microsoft is free to continue using proprietary formats.
... but it's still FORCE.
No. By insisting that your previous business with Microsoft must change in order for Microsoft to keep your business, then you are forcing them to do something since it only rational that they will feel compelled to keep a customer base. But of course, each time Microsoft changes their document formats, they force their customers to adapt in all manner of ways, too. Force is involved in both ways, and I have no trouble with any of it
Americans invaded France in 1944 as foreigners from an immense industrial power, part of a coalition of forces, barely singed by resistance forces during their obvious coming over the ocean, and furthermore coming into a nation that itself was occupied by other invaders ....
I could go on, but all that was hardly comparable to the (farcical) Commie Invasion of North America. The point is clear that there was NO Commie Invasion being planned seriously. Americans would have blown the unbelievable shit out of any forces that would have tried to cross either ocean or via land routes across the cold north. Americans would have severely met anyone who dared to drive a tank across American native soil.
In short, the Commie Invasion was a myth that was used to keep people scared enough to continue the extremely good times of the military-industrial complex that was created during WWII. The MIC essentially made a Fascist state within the American Republic, and we today are living in the Empire that said Fascism transformed the Republic into.
Now, people are still so scared of America's endless enemies (which are largely manufactured by Americans) that they are willing to attack other nations who have no invasion capability and had no intention of assaulting American native soil whatsoever. Americans under their sick little Empire are so lacking in courage that they are willing to pre-emptively strike and invade just on the possibility of a strike upon themselves. All this is making the world a very unsafe place for civilization.
In short, Americans no longer understand the philosopy of self-defense. They have gone completely offensive, and entirely mistake such things for self-defense. Sad.
The reporter isn't short-sighted, he's single-issued. It's clear that he subscribes to the "free market" mentality, and then applies the further qualification that the market has ALREADY CHOSEN what it wanted to use (i.e. Microsoft-dominated document formats). This viewpoint makes it easy to conclude the specifying an open document format is "anti-competitive" because competition has already occurred.
In short, it's just the prevailing religion called Hypercapitalism. In such a philosophy, whoever has the most money or market share is by definition "correct", and deserves all state and individual support. Any regulation or criticism thereafter is considered "obstruction".
I'm sure if Rush Limbaugh picks up this topic, it'll be another nail in the Liberal coffin that he builds each day. After all, it's all about the Liberal mindset, and Massachusetts (home of RL's favorite Lib Senator, T. Kennedy) is a blazing example of such. Obstructionists!
Ah. Global Swarming. Recording industry executives are, after all, rodents.
I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them. What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
What do you mean? Our culture teaches people that money can buy you anything, therefore all you should try to get is money. A college degree is simply a ticket to get a good paying job. If you could buy them outright, people would do so. (And in fact, with degree mills, that's exactly what happens.)
Other than that, there are also a lot of "students" who are nothing of the sort. They are very overworked laborers who are trying to squeeze themselves into a higher wage bracket. They generally work while going to college, hence simply don't have the time to properly be a student. For them, it makes a certain kind of harsh and practical sense to simply buy up blocks of academic effort. They are too busy, hence can only trade money for academic results; they already traded off excess time for money simply by being a working college attendee.
I don't condone any of this, of course, but there's nothing I can do about it except lavish my spite upon it all. Equally of course, being a college dropout myself, my criticisms are inevitably filed under "sour grapes" until my predictions come to pass.
Sure, it was a great theory all around. Gun-toting Commies would have ended up on American shores. After all, it's so easy to invade America. Those oceans aren't much of a barrier. And the US Military? Don't even get me started on them. How can they possibly defend so much coastline?
Speaking of which, the towelheads could be landing at South Carolina as we speak here. Quick, let's bomb all the Middle East to ever preclude that from happening. After all, America can't ever be defended, so that's the best justification for being completely offensive.
By the way, all that was sarcasm.
A friend of mine's father worked on the Boston T's Red Line extension. He noted by then that these projects had no intention of ever ending anymore. You're right in what you implied; the workforce well knows that once the project is over, they're out of a very good paying job, hence they are highly motivated to never complete it. This mentality runs across all project participants. And the taxpayer boob pays all the bills.
Gawd, yes, that was the first time I saw actual core memory. To this day I'm amazed how they managed to string such tiny wires and ferrite rings together. It looked like metal cloth.
My favorite part of SOANM was the unknown processor bug that was fixed by soldering in a single AND gate (obviously, part of a 7400-series chip). Nobody knew why that gate fixed the processor, but it did.
most DG networks are microturbines or fuels cells, the customer usually picks up the cost of the fuel
... while each neighborhood groans under the weight of each monthly bill. Of course, the people who will deliver said fuel will be pretty damned happy for all the business; I further suspect that the utilities will have their fingers (likely, hands, even arms) in those businesses.
Hasn't anyone noticed with that the incredible increase in the price of fuels, that suddenly DG is being pushed? I'm suspecting that DG is one way that utilities are trying to not pay for fuel, hence (as you identified) forcing the customer to shoulder the full cost. In fact, it is MORE than the full cost, since there is less and less economy of scale when delivering fuel to distributed entities.
I'm sure the utility companies would love to install DG at each neighborhood and wash their hands of fuel costs
Those do look familiar, but we're dredging some particularly compressed silt in my brain, so I'm not sure. For instance, I can't remember why bit 16 was always set to 1. My USAF training at Colorado forced us to go through the NOVA processor clock-tick by clock-tick, gate by gate, flipflop by flipflop, watching each instruction change the processor ... so it's a shame that I can't remember now.
Did you read "Soul of a New Machine"? It documents the development of the Eclipse.
Terrible, isn't it? Until a catastrophe happens, we workers are simply unable to convince managers, execs, board members and ultimately stockholders to make the continuing investments required to maintain installed plant.
Keep an eye out for accusations of employee incompetence with legacy systems. The IT industry is already being hit with accusations of "being unqualified" with employer needs, hence the use and abuse of the H1B and L1 visas. This kind of thing can carry over into all industries as all the golfing buddies seek to further demonize the American worker.
HOLY CHRIST! Are people still using Data General minicomputers? I worked on those in the mid 1980s in the Air Force ... on the NOVA 840 and 1220 models. Here we are 20 years later and you're telling me that people haven't at least upgraded those systems to DEC, Honeywell, or Unisys systems?
I fondly recall flipping those front-panel dip-switches to load and diagnose the NOVA 840.
Yes it will cost money to covert it, but in the long run you save.
... and there's hardly any justification for "saving support money in the future". This is DOUBLY true when the executive class is completely hot for outsourcing and offshoring. There's no point in making long-term infrastructural investments when much of said infrastructure will not be owned by the company within 5 years.
... hence screwing over the outsourcer for the length of the contract.
Long run? What long run? You (the manager or exec in charge of the legacy system) have to justify the expense NOW
For the 1-2 year period prior to my outsourcing, my previous company stalled even more alarmingly on buying virtually anything -- parts, tools, stock equipment, training, etc. They well knew that there was no point in investing in us, just to get rid of us. I'm sure they also tried to underfund the operation for many fiscal periods so the outsourcer wouldn't realize the true extents of the costs of running the operation
For that question, Corporate America has 2 answers:
...
1. An older surgeon who is forced to take a younger surgeon's pay, OR
2. The younger surgeon, and we simply pretend he's doing a GREAT job.
You can live without certain organs, right? There are lower levels of "living" that corporations are willing to accept.
How did your last customer support call go for you? There's a fine example of lowered expectations.
How does voir dire differ in any meaningful sense from jury stacking?
Because voir dire is the SYSTEM stacking the jury, not just one side or another. The legal system has unsurprisingly set itself up with rules that confer itself significant advantages that are really nothing but disadvantages for individuals seeking justice.
Since you seem inquisitive, lookup "fully informed jury" (or FIJA) to see the alternative view to the legal system's view of juries.
In my own opinion, juries should be selected by lot, not human subjectivity. After all, all men being "created equal", there's no rational reason to exclude citizens from jury placement due to association, philosophy, or otherwise. Other than the philosophy of the fully informed jury, voir dire rankles me therefore all that much more.
This is no longer necessary since we have a full time standing army.
Then it should be a cinch to change the 2nd Amendment, which is still the law of the land unless amended.
Gee, I dunno, pud, but some of us have this old-fashioned idea that you should make better products and have better support for them, and then customers will frequent YOUR business and not the other guy's. But no, fucking Republican freaks like yourself want to spend company resources on "driving the competition out of business".
... while they kill off the long-term potential of their business.
Here's a clue for ya, pud: Customers eventually notice that your products suck and the competitor's are better, and they also notice that instead of improving things, you're just attacking said competitor. This environment of contempt leads to higher costs and vicious behavior all around. So eventually another competitor comes along and -- while you're too busy eating some other guy for breakfast -- underprices and overproduces in your market, and your customers go bye-bye in great heaving sighs of gusty relief.
Bother to run your business under the philosophy of respecting the customer, and you'll find that you just don't have time to "destroy the competition". Real businessmen are busy working on their business, and any time spent looking at competitors is for analysis only. The new class of Republican freaks are instead experts at looking busy
Pud, you can now go back to your sad, pathetic little life of "business is war" thinking. The pain that that philosophy buys you is something that makes me smile. RETARD!
What's the point of a standard if it's not pervasive and useful? Most standards are useful, and just by being standards, they are pervasive. But being widely accepted also means incredible costs for invoking changes across most sectors of society on the basis of marginal increases in performance.
... but only having 2 factors makes it insufficient for other uses.
There are proposals to change time, but like changes to the English alphabet, the benefits have to outweigh the almost impossibly large costs of transforming. Look at the English/Metric systems. The USA still has not changed. Metric's benefits still have not outweighed the costs of changing all rulers, indicators, speedometers, odometers, signs, etc. -- and as well, the internal rulers in people's minds that have used feet and miles for centuries.
P.S. The number 60 has these low factors: 2 3 4 5 6. That means that if you use the number 60 for measuring, it's easy to divide whatever you're doing into 2 to 6 parts, and each part is another integer. The number 10 only has factors 2 and 5. Arguably, the number 12 (having factors of 2 3 4 6) is more useful than 10. 10's usefulness is that it matches the base (10) that we use
P.P.S. If there was some real political will behind it, the USA might be able to change all typing keyboards to Dvorak from Qwerty. But that would be a social "Apollo Project" in scale, hence it's never going to be done. Keyboards will probably change format when the entire concept of a keyboard changes, like if pervasive voice recognition or neural connections arise. But then the change will be invoked as the standard becomes nonstandard, and the keyboard fades away.
When I made the leap into the calculus in college, I soon found myself condemning all prior math teachers for their structural failure to teach it to us all in high school.
The calculus is a much more natural way to examine real problems and to calculate answers for them. The calculus seems to be an extension (using "infinite numbers of infinitesimals") of algebra.
Grab yourself some wacky pamphlets on alternative ways of looking at the calculus. I slogged through collegiate instruction, then ran across one of these, and the clarity it offered made it clear that yes, once again, formalized instruction had screwed me. It could be that the calculus at a college level snips all that preparatory algebraic stuff, which is a disservice to understanding.
Anyway. Don't deny yourself. Study the calculus even if you have to use a generic text from some sh*tbag college. Open your mind's eye to the larger world of calculation.
I believe company-sponsored insurance began in WWII when labor shortages combined with wage controls forced companies to seek other incentives to attract or retain employees. In short, and as ever, regulation created unregulated adaptive behavior.
The Conservative part of me knows that Americans existed well enough without company involvement in their insurance. That part of me accepts we can do away with such schemes and people will adapt.
The Liberal in me is hesitant to invoke such measures. If America could also afford health insurance before, then why not try to fix what ails it so it can be affordable again?
The concept of a planned economy does not work either in it's more true forms or in the bastardized forms as exhibited in the communist countries.
So, somehow in the vast hypocrisy mechanism of the American mind, it becomes perfectly sensible and acceptable to use grants, abatements and subsidies to centrally plan the economics of corporations?
If you ever want to really see a Republican asshole squirm like an eel in boiling water, mention that little viewpoint to him. Great fun!
Yeah, RIIIIGHT, bunky. A market with over 330 million people, and companies will just skip over it. You may as well ignore America (295M).
Even if this DOES become ideological as you imply, skipping over Europe will make many public shareholders draw-and-quarter their BODs for playing politics over pursuing profits. Securing market share is a fiscal duty, ace. DUH.