An interesting example can be found in the myriad attempts to romanize mandarin.
You've got Hanyu pinyin, Wade-Giles pinyin, Zhuyin pinyin, the Postal System pinyin, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, MPS2, Tongyong Pinyin, etc. etc. etc. Literally dozens of methods were developed.
All of them attempting to capture exactly the same sounds, but frequently looking nothing alike on paper.
Which one is right?
In the case of China, the system currently said to be "correct" was decided by the government.
Not entirely sure how they made their decision, but as one who is struggling with learning Chinese, I have to say the official choice is, as far as my language capability is concerned, a poor one. The official pinyin is not nearly as phonetic as I'd hoped for. Their use of the letter 'c' is particularly egregious (the 'ts' used in some of the other pinyin systems gives a much better sense of the pronunciation, since 'c' has several possible pronunciations depending on its context, all of them wrong as far as mandarin is concerned). *rolls eyes*
1) In terms of federal election results, Alaska is so heavily republican leaning anyways that any discrepencies in terms of the presidential election would not have changed the result, I feel 100% confident in saying. I'm not familiar with any other issues that may have been up for voting, but clearly any cover-up would NOT have to do with the presidential election, and probably not with other federal level elections.
2) It is up to each state to decide how to select their electors. No state is under any constitutional obligation to use Diebold machines, or indeed to use popular voting at all! State governments could draw straws, hold snail races, or require prospective electors to duel - it's whatever the state government wants. As such, any state government could very well prefer to use knowingly crooked vote tabulating devices, since anyways it is the state government that gets to decide how electors are choosen. Using a known-to-be-crooked device is a method a state government chooses. It's all quite constitutional, even if it seems "unfair" to the "average Joe".
If you don't like it, get a recall movement going and replace your existing crooked state government. The problem, and thus the solution, lies with the state government end of things, not the federal government end.
Which is perhaps slightly ironic. Given that that area is, as far as the Christians are concerned, the area where God physically manifested himself in this world, you'd think they might have a substantially more vested interest in the spot.
They don't mention whether the water filling in is fresh water or salt water. If it is fresh water, in the middle of a desert, it will initially, for the first few hundred thousand years, provide irrigation water that can enable farming of this desert area. Which leads to the question of whether the rate of draw off for irrigation would be enough to offset the rate of fill-in. Which leads to the more interesting question of just where is the water coming from that is filling this crack up?
Of course, if it is salt water then it won't be terribly useful to the locals, but saltwater lakes (for it will be a lake for a long time to come) are rare. I would expect it would remain fresh water until it actually connected to the ocean.
Just imagine the horror of the environmentalists, of a massive freshwater ecosystem being destroyed when it finally does open up into the ocean. And then as the estuary ecosystem is destroyed and replaced by a salt water system. OMG! ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS BEING DESTROYED!! WE MUST SPEND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING!!!!! WE MUST RAISE THIS MONEY VIA A UN LEVIED GLOBAL TAX!!!
One can only hope that in a million years people will be more sensible.
Liberal in the US has no single definition. In fact, those who would consider themselves liberal in the historical sense now call themselves libertarian, but even that word is becoming twisted. Conservative also has no fixed meaning.
Republicans and democrats have flip-flopped completely SEVERAL times over the past 150 years.
Left-wing and right-wing have no connection to their historical usages.
Political nomenclature in the USA is worse then useless, it's used deceptively as a means to attack people. The nominal descriptive power of these words is long gone.
Goes out of its way to feel sensitive towards those who want to blow up the kids in the schools. Banning Piglet and piggy banks.
What a screwed up sense of priorities. Worry about what the kids are exposed to only AFTER you worry about the kids getting blown up by a member of the religion of peace.
I didn't whine about the changing market needs. Instead, I got some java books and started studying.
I'm rather shocked at the mad rush to implement the entire world in java. There's a whole lot to it that I find quite alarming given its widespread use. But one of the things that annoys me most of all about it is the lack of backwards compatibility between JREs. What a mess that must create when it comes to deployment! *shudder*
I find it hard to believe web developers are the homeless ones. I've been looking for a job for the past 6 weeks and virtually every "application developer" job turns out to be a web developer position, at least here in Georgia. It's just about all anybody is hiring these days, at least if postings on the major job sites are to be believed.
Then again, I suspect the major job boards aren't really the best gauge of the REAL job market, but that's quite a discussion unto itself...
As a C/C++ developer finding it hard to get a job at a time when everybody under the sun wants java or EXPERIENCED C# programmers, I'm not very sympathetic to their concerns of being stranded with obsolete skills.
Then again, I got a verbal offer for a C/UNIX programming job last Friday, so I can't complain too much. Took 6 weeks of looking to finally land a job. *sigh*
Now I'm just awaiting written confirmation by mail so I can seriously enjoy my vacation starting later this week:-)
That's much how we did it at HDI - a base class from which every object in the game was derived that had virtual save and load functions. Every object that needed saving would implement the save and load functions.
Although we did from time to time use globals as well, but frequently those ended up in ini files instead of save game files since they were more likely not directly game variables, but rather variables like whether or not to show videos.
Bingo. Schools reflect the condition of the community in which they exist, not the other way around. We need to fix the communities, not the schools. Fix the communties and the schools will improve as a matter of course.
Of course, how one goes about fixing broken communities is not something I have an answer for. Well, not one that most people would consider acceptable, anyways....
But if the federal government provides funding to schools, then the federal government gets to control what is taught and how. Because if the schools don't teach the way the feds want, the feds can cut their funding to the offending schools.
The schools become dependent and the feds get a big stick to force schools to teach things their way.
It's the worst possible disaster when it comes to education. It's also why, historically, schools were funded locally.
We're at the point now where state governments are basically just administrative units of the federal government. Some people may think that's just great, but I think it's horrible. And it's going to get a LOT worse before it gets better, if it ever does get better.
I'm not advocating that all levels of government ever be prevented from doing anything for the social good. I'm advocating the FEDERAL government limit itself to what's in the constitution.
This is a HUGE difference that people like tmp ignore in order to build up strawmen they can have fun knocking down.
If local or state governments want to install and maintain fire hydrants (to pick his first example), that's just peachy. Indeed, I support fire hydrants, paid for at the appropriate level. But the feds shouldn't (and don't, for now) pay for fire hydrants unless perhaps they are being put on federal land.
There are too many people who have been educated in government schools who believe government is the answer to all their problems. This is hardly surprising, and while I share your sentiments, the government has already made it not only impossible to accomplish this, but even socially unacceptable to the majority of folks.
Government schools were never a good idea, and now we're getting the final results of it. It won't be islamic terrorism that destroys us, nor budget deficits nor the decline of the dollar.
Social welfare programs are what will kill us, first and foremost being government run education.
It isn't a matter of hating the poor, it's a matter of constitutional authority. There's nothing in the constitution that permits the government to spend a penny on education.
Like it or not, that's the way it's set up.
And frankly, I think it's a good thing. And we need to go much further and cut all the other communist agenda items. See if you can match up US spending with Communist Manifesto agenda items:
1. Abolition of private property. Have you kept up with all the gross eminent domain abuses lately?
2. Heavy progressive income tax. Duh.
3. Abolition to all rights of inheritance. Any idea what the death tax is like? It's not 100%, but it does go up over 50%, and is likely to only go up even further in the future.
4. Confiscation of property of all emigrants & rebels. Try reading up on the tax laws and what happens to people who flee the country with the intent of evading taxes...
5. A Central bank. Federal Reserve.
6. Government control of communications & transportation. FCC and FTC.
7. Government ownership of factories & agriculture. Farm subsidies and corporate welfare are just the first step in this direction!
8. Government control of labor. Minimum wages, OSHA, department of labor, etc. etc.
10. Free education for all children in government controlled schools. And this is exactly what we're talking about now - too many people saying the government needs to seize more control over our government rather than less.
Mind boggling.
We're turning into a bunch of flaming commies and nobody even realizes it.
For better or worse, there is nothing in the US constitution that would allow the federal government to spend anything at all on education. There is, however, authorization for them to operate a military.
And why in the world would anybody in their right mind want the federal government educating their kids in the first place? That's something that just boggles my mind. That comes directly out of the Communist Manifesto. Are we becoming a bunch of flaming commies in this country? Sadly, I believe the answer is yes, only the average person on the street hasn't the faintest clue in the world this is happening. Pretty soon we'll embarass the Chinese government with how much more communist we are then them:-p
The ratio needed of skilled labor & business leaders to unskilled labor & grunts is very low.
As it is today, 50% of the US population over the age of 22 has at best a high school degree, and half of those don't even have that much. There's plenty of need for those poorly educated folks, even today.
And the skilled labor and business leaders will just be the product of private schools, while the public schools churn out the mindless masses that will do the grunt work.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting example can be found in the myriad attempts to romanize mandarin.
You've got Hanyu pinyin, Wade-Giles pinyin, Zhuyin pinyin, the Postal System pinyin, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, MPS2, Tongyong Pinyin, etc. etc. etc. Literally dozens of methods were developed.
All of them attempting to capture exactly the same sounds, but frequently looking nothing alike on paper.
Which one is right?
In the case of China, the system currently said to be "correct" was decided by the government.
Not entirely sure how they made their decision, but as one who is struggling with learning Chinese, I have to say the official choice is, as far as my language capability is concerned, a poor one. The official pinyin is not nearly as phonetic as I'd hoped for. Their use of the letter 'c' is particularly egregious (the 'ts' used in some of the other pinyin systems gives a much better sense of the pronunciation, since 'c' has several possible pronunciations depending on its context, all of them wrong as far as mandarin is concerned).
*rolls eyes*
Why does it surprise anybody he'd run as a democrat?
It's not as if there's any substantive difference between the two parties. Oh, maybe abortion, but other than that it's all the same.
Make politicians wear sponsor patches like race car drivers and it'd be immediately obvious why this is so...
neither Bush NOR Kerry are options in the new election.
Um, we're trying it your way with Iran and North Korea.
IT IS NOT WORKING.
In regards to either country.
And the stakes in both situations are infinitely higher than they were with Iraq.
1) In terms of federal election results, Alaska is so heavily republican leaning anyways that any discrepencies in terms of the presidential election would not have changed the result, I feel 100% confident in saying. I'm not familiar with any other issues that may have been up for voting, but clearly any cover-up would NOT have to do with the presidential election, and probably not with other federal level elections.
2) It is up to each state to decide how to select their electors. No state is under any constitutional obligation to use Diebold machines, or indeed to use popular voting at all! State governments could draw straws, hold snail races, or require prospective electors to duel - it's whatever the state government wants. As such, any state government could very well prefer to use knowingly crooked vote tabulating devices, since anyways it is the state government that gets to decide how electors are choosen. Using a known-to-be-crooked device is a method a state government chooses. It's all quite constitutional, even if it seems "unfair" to the "average Joe".
If you don't like it, get a recall movement going and replace your existing crooked state government. The problem, and thus the solution, lies with the state government end of things, not the federal government end.
Which is perhaps slightly ironic. Given that that area is, as far as the Christians are concerned, the area where God physically manifested himself in this world, you'd think they might have a substantially more vested interest in the spot.
They don't mention whether the water filling in is fresh water or salt water. If it is fresh water, in the middle of a desert, it will initially, for the first few hundred thousand years, provide irrigation water that can enable farming of this desert area. Which leads to the question of whether the rate of draw off for irrigation would be enough to offset the rate of fill-in. Which leads to the more interesting question of just where is the water coming from that is filling this crack up?
Of course, if it is salt water then it won't be terribly useful to the locals, but saltwater lakes (for it will be a lake for a long time to come) are rare. I would expect it would remain fresh water until it actually connected to the ocean.
Just imagine the horror of the environmentalists, of a massive freshwater ecosystem being destroyed when it finally does open up into the ocean. And then as the estuary ecosystem is destroyed and replaced by a salt water system. OMG! ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS BEING DESTROYED!! WE MUST SPEND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING!!!!! WE MUST RAISE THIS MONEY VIA A UN LEVIED GLOBAL TAX!!!
One can only hope that in a million years people will be more sensible.
Liberal in the US has no single definition. In fact, those who would consider themselves liberal in the historical sense now call themselves libertarian, but even that word is becoming twisted. Conservative also has no fixed meaning.
Republicans and democrats have flip-flopped completely SEVERAL times over the past 150 years.
Left-wing and right-wing have no connection to their historical usages.
Political nomenclature in the USA is worse then useless, it's used deceptively as a means to attack people. The nominal descriptive power of these words is long gone.
And no law is retroactive (or rather: no law should be retroactive)
0 0.html
- 263:
Tax laws are frequently retroactive. And so far, the supreme court has upheld such ex post facto tax laws.
For example, tax rates being made retoractive in 2003:
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=109817,
Here's a juicy one from 1993, retroactively applying a law back TWENTY YEARS into the past:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r103:E06MY3
Plenty of other abuses are out there if you do some research.
If you can see no other reason to support the Fair Tax, abolition of the IRS should be plenty of reason enough.
Goes out of its way to feel sensitive towards those who want to blow up the kids in the schools. Banning Piglet and piggy banks.
What a screwed up sense of priorities. Worry about what the kids are exposed to only AFTER you worry about the kids getting blown up by a member of the religion of peace.
Huh? I was just in Shanghai this past March and had zero problem breathing without a mask.
And juse a few short decades everybody was getting hysterical over global COOLING. Which was a measurable phenomenon.
It means the UN can (try to) tax it.
I didn't whine about the changing market needs. Instead, I got some java books and started studying.
I'm rather shocked at the mad rush to implement the entire world in java. There's a whole lot to it that I find quite alarming given its widespread use. But one of the things that annoys me most of all about it is the lack of backwards compatibility between JREs. What a mess that must create when it comes to deployment! *shudder*
I find it hard to believe web developers are the homeless ones. I've been looking for a job for the past 6 weeks and virtually every "application developer" job turns out to be a web developer position, at least here in Georgia. It's just about all anybody is hiring these days, at least if postings on the major job sites are to be believed.
Then again, I suspect the major job boards aren't really the best gauge of the REAL job market, but that's quite a discussion unto itself...
As a C/C++ developer finding it hard to get a job at a time when everybody under the sun wants java or EXPERIENCED C# programmers, I'm not very sympathetic to their concerns of being stranded with obsolete skills.
:-)
Then again, I got a verbal offer for a C/UNIX programming job last Friday, so I can't complain too much. Took 6 weeks of looking to finally land a job.
*sigh*
Now I'm just awaiting written confirmation by mail so I can seriously enjoy my vacation starting later this week
That's much how we did it at HDI - a base class from which every object in the game was derived that had virtual save and load functions. Every object that needed saving would implement the save and load functions.
Although we did from time to time use globals as well, but frequently those ended up in ini files instead of save game files since they were more likely not directly game variables, but rather variables like whether or not to show videos.
Bingo. Schools reflect the condition of the community in which they exist, not the other way around. We need to fix the communities, not the schools. Fix the communties and the schools will improve as a matter of course.
Of course, how one goes about fixing broken communities is not something I have an answer for. Well, not one that most people would consider acceptable, anyways....
But if the federal government provides funding to schools, then the federal government gets to control what is taught and how. Because if the schools don't teach the way the feds want, the feds can cut their funding to the offending schools.
The schools become dependent and the feds get a big stick to force schools to teach things their way.
It's the worst possible disaster when it comes to education. It's also why, historically, schools were funded locally.
We're at the point now where state governments are basically just administrative units of the federal government. Some people may think that's just great, but I think it's horrible. And it's going to get a LOT worse before it gets better, if it ever does get better.
I'm not advocating that all levels of government ever be prevented from doing anything for the social good. I'm advocating the FEDERAL government limit itself to what's in the constitution.
This is a HUGE difference that people like tmp ignore in order to build up strawmen they can have fun knocking down.
If local or state governments want to install and maintain fire hydrants (to pick his first example), that's just peachy. Indeed, I support fire hydrants, paid for at the appropriate level. But the feds shouldn't (and don't, for now) pay for fire hydrants unless perhaps they are being put on federal land.
There are too many people who have been educated in government schools who believe government is the answer to all their problems. This is hardly surprising, and while I share your sentiments, the government has already made it not only impossible to accomplish this, but even socially unacceptable to the majority of folks.
Government schools were never a good idea, and now we're getting the final results of it. It won't be islamic terrorism that destroys us, nor budget deficits nor the decline of the dollar.
Social welfare programs are what will kill us, first and foremost being government run education.
It isn't a matter of hating the poor, it's a matter of constitutional authority. There's nothing in the constitution that permits the government to spend a penny on education.
Like it or not, that's the way it's set up.
And frankly, I think it's a good thing. And we need to go much further and cut all the other communist agenda items. See if you can match up US spending with Communist Manifesto agenda items:
1. Abolition of private property.
Have you kept up with all the gross eminent domain abuses lately?
2. Heavy progressive income tax.
Duh.
3. Abolition to all rights of inheritance.
Any idea what the death tax is like? It's not 100%, but it does go up over 50%, and is likely to only go up even further in the future.
4. Confiscation of property of all emigrants & rebels.
Try reading up on the tax laws and what happens to people who flee the country with the intent of evading taxes...
5. A Central bank.
Federal Reserve.
6. Government control of communications & transportation.
FCC and FTC.
7. Government ownership of factories & agriculture.
Farm subsidies and corporate welfare are just the first step in this direction!
8. Government control of labor.
Minimum wages, OSHA, department of labor, etc. etc.
9. Corporate farms, & regional planning.
Got those.
10. Free education for all children in government controlled schools.
And this is exactly what we're talking about now - too many people saying the government needs to seize more control over our government rather than less.
Mind boggling.
We're turning into a bunch of flaming commies and nobody even realizes it.
Makes me sick.
For better or worse, there is nothing in the US constitution that would allow the federal government to spend anything at all on education. There is, however, authorization for them to operate a military.
:-p
And why in the world would anybody in their right mind want the federal government educating their kids in the first place? That's something that just boggles my mind. That comes directly out of the Communist Manifesto. Are we becoming a bunch of flaming commies in this country? Sadly, I believe the answer is yes, only the average person on the street hasn't the faintest clue in the world this is happening. Pretty soon we'll embarass the Chinese government with how much more communist we are then them
The ratio needed of skilled labor & business leaders to unskilled labor & grunts is very low.
As it is today, 50% of the US population over the age of 22 has at best a high school degree, and half of those don't even have that much. There's plenty of need for those poorly educated folks, even today.
And the skilled labor and business leaders will just be the product of private schools, while the public schools churn out the mindless masses that will do the grunt work.
This has been the goal of public education ever since it was founded over 100 years ago.
It's got nothing to do with the current government, it's just always been the goal of government in general.