Why you singled out China is surprising, especially given the rate of growth their economy is showing and the sheer number of graduates in the sciences that China produces each year
Agreed, folks in the US seem to think they hold a monopoly on scientific acumen, when in fact, our hold isn't "slipping", it's passed into "slipped". Other nations have been rocketing past us in terms of not only scientific growth, but social and financial as well. The people in the US are told on a daily basis that they live in "the greatest country in the world", and believe it totally. At our current pace, it's only going to be a few more years before mothers in China will be saying "there's kids starving in the US, do you want me to send your dinner to them?!"
Oh, wait, that's right, in the land of plenty, there's already kids starving every day. My bad, sorry. Got caught up in the provincialism. China, little help?
Which is good, because it leaves a lot more time for you to be a real dumbass. It may have been syntactically incorrect, but did you understand what he meant by "RAID array"? Then, the language did its job. Grammar nazis like you need to grok that language isn't about sentences and structure, it's about communication. As long as the idea is communicated properly, it doesn't matter if it's "formatted" EXACTLY right. If he had said he had a "RAID array of TV tuners", THEN he would be an idiot.
free speech does not mean you can act like a jackass on the school's time and not have to worry about getting a (pretty normal) punishment for it.
funny, I was always taught my freedom of speech was meant to protect me from idiots who would label me a jackass because my opinion differed from theirs.
My apologies. Slashdot sent me the alert that your reply was to me. When I hit the site, it continued to appear that way.
As for free health care, yes, it would help as the cost of our reactive healthcare system is higher than being proactive. All of the suggestions I made (healthcare, education and alternative energies) are proactive measures that reduce costs in the long run and allow the US to become a productive member of the world society again. There's a reason that the one industrialized nation that doesn't provide for the care and education of its populace is quickly sliding down the ladder.
Really? And, how exactly does initiating a war with what is essentially a third-world country do that? Hmmm? With the money that's been spent on the war so far, we could've given every person in the US free healthcare, increased the educational standards across the board AND come up with a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels. I would say that would make our country a lot more prosperous than killing our children to clean up "Gee, Dubya's" father's mistakes and REALLY pissing off those terrorists the pussy 'pubs are so afraid of.
I think the problem is you forgot to remove your head from your ass this morning.
Spoken like a True Republican...you know..the kind of idiot who thinks our criminal "rehabilitation" system does anything more than breed more, better, stronger, well-connected criminals.
As the Constitution is the basis for the entire United States government, by definition, if you reject the Constitution and want to replace it with something more modern/European, you are un-American and more pro-European.
And, your point, besides flawed, is? The Constitution was written over 200 years ago by people who had no concept of the issues faced by a modern society. Beyond that, it's now ignored on a regular basis by the "elected" officials so it is meaningless. The real basis of the US government is that real Americans value freedom above all else, and the Constitution no longer provides that freedom. It's time for a change.
"most of us would prefer a more European system." Citations or it's just your desires being projected onto everyone else to bolster your internal support for your ideology
Do your own research. I don't think it would be hard to find stats showing most people want some form of universal health care (or at the very least GOOD healthcare or even AFFORDABLE healthcare), better wages, more free time and more freedom. The problem is, they've been brainwashed to think "America good, everyone else bad". The European systems emerged after ours and were able to see the many, many, many, many flaws in our system and correct them and improve their own. Are they perfect? Hardly, but they're obviously working better than ours.
Each of those standards have steadily decreased as government interference increased.
In the US, yes. In other countries, government "meddling" has caused those stats to go up. Why? Couldn't tell you. I suppose it's all part of a vicious cycle: reduce education, people have less and less of a clue of how to better themselves and their society, people vote for morons who are "prettier" than the others (Gee Dubya being the exception, but since he got in by massive fraud, we can let it slide), the morons vote for lower education standards, people have less and less of a clue...then they end up using ad hominem attacks like "you're un-American" on Slashdot. The proof is in the posting.
One of the biggest culture clashes is that neither side seems capable of understanding that the other side LIKES their system
Um, no. We don't like our system, we're forced to live under it. Most of us would prefer a more European system, the problem is Americans have been "trained" that such systems are complete failures and the system in the US is better than anywhere else in the world. They ignore all of the statistics showing the US falling behind everyone else in terms of education, healthcare and standard of living because "it's the best system out there!" People like me who believe the US Constitution should be thrown out in its entirety and replaced with something more modern are shouted down as "un-American" despite the fact that our system has failed and we're well down the path forged by the Romans.
Forgot the next election, if we impeach Bush first, we get...President Cheney. If we take out Cheney first, then Bush, we get President Pelosi. And, if Pelosi was the first female president, wouldn't that just twist Hillary's nuts right off?
You forgot the obvious one to pre-respond to: pick up a fucking land line. I realize in an age where every driver you pass has a phone plastered to their head it's hard to remember that there are old-fashioned phones still lying around with wires tied into them that run into the ground and somehow manage to still make calls, but, well...there it is. And, if you're in a business, they've got a land line because no business owner is going to risk their business on the reliability of cell phones. Especially not one who's blocking their signals! Frankly, in an emergency situation, I'd probably ask if I could use the business' phone rather than pull out the phone in my pocket for the simple reason that I want to ensure the call goes through.
Your argument is no better than the "protecting the children" rhetoric the current US administration uses to enforce waterboarding, take away rights and illegally wiretap American citizens.
Yes,but how much faster is XP on it? If you think about it,you are really comparing Apples to Oranges. The reason your laptop is supported in Vista (I'm assuming it is new) and not in Linux is because Hardware manufacturers refuse to share their specs which means for Linux to have drivers they have to reverse engineer every single new bit of hardware. While there have been great strides in the last couple of years, In reality laptops are the WORST place to run Linux for the reason outlined above.
I see you typing, but all I hear is "wahh, wahh, wahh, whiney gripe, whiney gripe". Fact is, it was faster on my desktop and has been on every other platform I've used it on. The "linux is faster" tripe is only true if you take away all of the functionality that makes it usable (did I mention the distro MUST run KDE in order to qualify for competition? Even then it's still years behind Windows.) And, fact is, most vendors share their specs or their specs have been reverse engineered at this point. It still ain't faster. There's a couple of wireless vendors (Broadcomm, I'm looking at you!) who go out of their way to avoid their stuff running on linux boxess, but...don't use Broadcomm.
That said, you can't expect to try a single distro on a laptop and have everything work perfectly out of the box.
Well, I'm certainly not going to try dozens of distros just to find a free OS, that's stupid. My time is more valuable than that. I bought my computer to USE not to beta test every distro on the market.
As a matter of fact, I tried over thirty before I was given a boxed version of Xandros which runs beautifully on my laptop.
Oh, goody, so now all I have to do to use the free OS is BUY it and it's usable? Do I get to use that copy of Xandros on every computer or do I have to buy a license for each one?
And while it still has the power of Debian and the Bash CLI under the hood
Or, I could stick with Windows and have the power of Windows and Bash/Powershell/Cmd propmt CLI under the hood. You do know there's more to Windows than a GUI, right?
its ease of use has allowed me to convert folks who had trouble with even simple Windows tasks.
Please, I've used Linux personally and professional for 14 years and never found anything in Linux to be easier than in Windows. Perhaps they should stop using a hammer to drive in screws? I like linux, as a server platform, nothing more.
Funny, I was thinking that, but replacing "Vista" with "Linux" as I've found Vista to be a whole lot faster than a comparable Linux on it. By comparable, I mean one that's got the same feature sets and hardware support (not that Linux fully supports all of the hardware on my laptop). Sure, Puppy Linux flies, but it don't mean I can get anywhere with it.
But, I'm just an overpaid Microsoft shill sent by them to sow FUD, so what do I know?
Yes, but those certifications are meaningless since you can go into any major (or even minor) city and find a school that will teach you the answers to the tests. The only people who place any value on them are a) the people who put them out and b) HR departments who don't understand their IT department's needs and thus need something they can put into an easy checklist for weeding out resumes. We list them in job postings as "nice to have", but we couldn't care less what paper they're carrying. The overwhelming majority of those who come in with reams of paper barely know what the acronyms mean, let alone anything that they're supposed to represent.
If you think breaking into computers is hacking, you don't belong at slashdot.
Huh, that's funny...20+ years ago when I was hacking into stuff with my TI-99/4A, we called it hacking. Cracking, on the other hand, was limited to software piracy (cracking the copy protection on disks, specifically). So, it sounds to me as if we've discovered the clueless dweeb, but alas, like most clueless dweebs he posted anonymously.
Regardless, language is dynamic and ever-changing. Just because a word meant something in the past does not mean it will remain that way in the future. Those who fail to keep up are clueless putzes who like living in the past, all the while not grasping that Bill Shakespeare and I speak the same language, just different iterations. Decimate is my favorite example of this. It comes from the Roman practice of killing every tenth person in a land they'd taken over. It grew to mean "to reduce by large numbers" and now the common vernacular uses it to mean "to destroy utterly". If, however, you used it today to mean "kill every tenth person", you'd be using it wrong. Just like if you used the word "cracking" to describe breaking into computer systems.
The world changes quickly, if you can't keep up, you've found the right place by coming to Slashdot.
Current stats: 85% of Americans self-identify as Christians. (2002)
Not so current. I'll have to dig for it, but that's down to 79%.
This is one nation under God.
Any moron stupid enough to be planning to vote for one of these 'pubs needs to be aware that they all feel the same way. Ron Paul has specifically said he BELIEVES the Consitution is "replete with references establishing the US as a christian nation". Considering the first sentence they say as president is "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States", it's obvious any 'pub who takes office will be lying (and probably should read the fucking thing before throwing in their hat). I'm not a fan of the dems, either, but considering we've eliminated choice from the election system, we're stuck with 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
So, in this case, I was right. Jackass. :)
Why you singled out China is surprising, especially given the rate of growth their economy is showing and the sheer number of graduates in the sciences that China produces each year
Agreed, folks in the US seem to think they hold a monopoly on scientific acumen, when in fact, our hold isn't "slipping", it's passed into "slipped". Other nations have been rocketing past us in terms of not only scientific growth, but social and financial as well. The people in the US are told on a daily basis that they live in "the greatest country in the world", and believe it totally. At our current pace, it's only going to be a few more years before mothers in China will be saying "there's kids starving in the US, do you want me to send your dinner to them?!"
Oh, wait, that's right, in the land of plenty, there's already kids starving every day. My bad, sorry. Got caught up in the provincialism. China, little help?
Which is good, because it leaves a lot more time for you to be a real dumbass. It may have been syntactically incorrect, but did you understand what he meant by "RAID array"? Then, the language did its job. Grammar nazis like you need to grok that language isn't about sentences and structure, it's about communication. As long as the idea is communicated properly, it doesn't matter if it's "formatted" EXACTLY right. If he had said he had a "RAID array of TV tuners", THEN he would be an idiot.
free speech does not mean you can act like a jackass on the school's time and not have to worry about getting a (pretty normal) punishment for it.
funny, I was always taught my freedom of speech was meant to protect me from idiots who would label me a jackass because my opinion differed from theirs.
I believe he was referring to open source software as a prime example of "you get what you paid for". MS software, in comparision, is cheap.
Go ahead, call me a troll. Takes one to know one.
My apologies. Slashdot sent me the alert that your reply was to me. When I hit the site, it continued to appear that way.
As for free health care, yes, it would help as the cost of our reactive healthcare system is higher than being proactive. All of the suggestions I made (healthcare, education and alternative energies) are proactive measures that reduce costs in the long run and allow the US to become a productive member of the world society again. There's a reason that the one industrialized nation that doesn't provide for the care and education of its populace is quickly sliding down the ladder.
Really? And, how exactly does initiating a war with what is essentially a third-world country do that? Hmmm? With the money that's been spent on the war so far, we could've given every person in the US free healthcare, increased the educational standards across the board AND come up with a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels. I would say that would make our country a lot more prosperous than killing our children to clean up "Gee, Dubya's" father's mistakes and REALLY pissing off those terrorists the pussy 'pubs are so afraid of.
I think the problem is you forgot to remove your head from your ass this morning.
No, but it does take money away from other efforts.
Where does rewriting history and continuing Bush' attempts to solidify a theocracy in the US come on the list?
"And, your friend, Korben Dallas, has been cleared as well."
Spoken like a True Republican...you know..the kind of idiot who thinks our criminal "rehabilitation" system does anything more than breed more, better, stronger, well-connected criminals.
CompUSAs were always overpriced
:)
Hence why we called them Comp-U-Overpay. Silly, but accurate.
As the Constitution is the basis for the entire United States government, by definition, if you reject the Constitution and want to replace it with something more modern/European, you are un-American and more pro-European.
And, your point, besides flawed, is? The Constitution was written over 200 years ago by people who had no concept of the issues faced by a modern society. Beyond that, it's now ignored on a regular basis by the "elected" officials so it is meaningless. The real basis of the US government is that real Americans value freedom above all else, and the Constitution no longer provides that freedom. It's time for a change.
"most of us would prefer a more European system." Citations or it's just your desires being projected onto everyone else to bolster your internal support for your ideology
Do your own research. I don't think it would be hard to find stats showing most people want some form of universal health care (or at the very least GOOD healthcare or even AFFORDABLE healthcare), better wages, more free time and more freedom. The problem is, they've been brainwashed to think "America good, everyone else bad". The European systems emerged after ours and were able to see the many, many, many, many flaws in our system and correct them and improve their own. Are they perfect? Hardly, but they're obviously working better than ours.
Each of those standards have steadily decreased as government interference increased.
In the US, yes. In other countries, government "meddling" has caused those stats to go up. Why? Couldn't tell you. I suppose it's all part of a vicious cycle: reduce education, people have less and less of a clue of how to better themselves and their society, people vote for morons who are "prettier" than the others (Gee Dubya being the exception, but since he got in by massive fraud, we can let it slide), the morons vote for lower education standards, people have less and less of a clue...then they end up using ad hominem attacks like "you're un-American" on Slashdot. The proof is in the posting.
One of the biggest culture clashes is that neither side seems capable of understanding that the other side LIKES their system
Um, no. We don't like our system, we're forced to live under it. Most of us would prefer a more European system, the problem is Americans have been "trained" that such systems are complete failures and the system in the US is better than anywhere else in the world. They ignore all of the statistics showing the US falling behind everyone else in terms of education, healthcare and standard of living because "it's the best system out there!" People like me who believe the US Constitution should be thrown out in its entirety and replaced with something more modern are shouted down as "un-American" despite the fact that our system has failed and we're well down the path forged by the Romans.
Nobody did, but we ended up with Gee Dubya anyway.
Welcome to Slashdot, Gee Dubya!
Forgot the next election, if we impeach Bush first, we get...President Cheney. If we take out Cheney first, then Bush, we get President Pelosi. And, if Pelosi was the first female president, wouldn't that just twist Hillary's nuts right off?
In pre-response to:
You forgot the obvious one to pre-respond to: pick up a fucking land line. I realize in an age where every driver you pass has a phone plastered to their head it's hard to remember that there are old-fashioned phones still lying around with wires tied into them that run into the ground and somehow manage to still make calls, but, well...there it is. And, if you're in a business, they've got a land line because no business owner is going to risk their business on the reliability of cell phones. Especially not one who's blocking their signals! Frankly, in an emergency situation, I'd probably ask if I could use the business' phone rather than pull out the phone in my pocket for the simple reason that I want to ensure the call goes through.
Your argument is no better than the "protecting the children" rhetoric the current US administration uses to enforce waterboarding, take away rights and illegally wiretap American citizens.
Yes, because we all know the NY Times is a paragon of journalistic integrity.
I thought it was the devil that was planting them to throw us off the scent or lead us away from the "true" knowledge or something like that.
Yes,but how much faster is XP on it? If you think about it,you are really comparing Apples to Oranges. The reason your laptop is supported in Vista (I'm assuming it is new) and not in Linux is because Hardware manufacturers refuse to share their specs which means for Linux to have drivers they have to reverse engineer every single new bit of hardware. While there have been great strides in the last couple of years, In reality laptops are the WORST place to run Linux for the reason outlined above.
I see you typing, but all I hear is "wahh, wahh, wahh, whiney gripe, whiney gripe". Fact is, it was faster on my desktop and has been on every other platform I've used it on. The "linux is faster" tripe is only true if you take away all of the functionality that makes it usable (did I mention the distro MUST run KDE in order to qualify for competition? Even then it's still years behind Windows.) And, fact is, most vendors share their specs or their specs have been reverse engineered at this point. It still ain't faster. There's a couple of wireless vendors (Broadcomm, I'm looking at you!) who go out of their way to avoid their stuff running on linux boxess, but...don't use Broadcomm.
That said, you can't expect to try a single distro on a laptop and have everything work perfectly out of the box.
Well, I'm certainly not going to try dozens of distros just to find a free OS, that's stupid. My time is more valuable than that. I bought my computer to USE not to beta test every distro on the market.
As a matter of fact, I tried over thirty before I was given a boxed version of Xandros which runs beautifully on my laptop.
Oh, goody, so now all I have to do to use the free OS is BUY it and it's usable? Do I get to use that copy of Xandros on every computer or do I have to buy a license for each one?
And while it still has the power of Debian and the Bash CLI under the hood
Or, I could stick with Windows and have the power of Windows and Bash/Powershell/Cmd propmt CLI under the hood. You do know there's more to Windows than a GUI, right?
its ease of use has allowed me to convert folks who had trouble with even simple Windows tasks.
Please, I've used Linux personally and professional for 14 years and never found anything in Linux to be easier than in Windows. Perhaps they should stop using a hammer to drive in screws? I like linux, as a server platform, nothing more.
Funny, I was thinking that, but replacing "Vista" with "Linux" as I've found Vista to be a whole lot faster than a comparable Linux on it. By comparable, I mean one that's got the same feature sets and hardware support (not that Linux fully supports all of the hardware on my laptop). Sure, Puppy Linux flies, but it don't mean I can get anywhere with it.
But, I'm just an overpaid Microsoft shill sent by them to sow FUD, so what do I know?
Yes, but those certifications are meaningless since you can go into any major (or even minor) city and find a school that will teach you the answers to the tests. The only people who place any value on them are a) the people who put them out and b) HR departments who don't understand their IT department's needs and thus need something they can put into an easy checklist for weeding out resumes. We list them in job postings as "nice to have", but we couldn't care less what paper they're carrying. The overwhelming majority of those who come in with reams of paper barely know what the acronyms mean, let alone anything that they're supposed to represent.
If you think breaking into computers is hacking, you don't belong at slashdot.
Huh, that's funny...20+ years ago when I was hacking into stuff with my TI-99/4A, we called it hacking. Cracking, on the other hand, was limited to software piracy (cracking the copy protection on disks, specifically). So, it sounds to me as if we've discovered the clueless dweeb, but alas, like most clueless dweebs he posted anonymously.
Regardless, language is dynamic and ever-changing. Just because a word meant something in the past does not mean it will remain that way in the future. Those who fail to keep up are clueless putzes who like living in the past, all the while not grasping that Bill Shakespeare and I speak the same language, just different iterations. Decimate is my favorite example of this. It comes from the Roman practice of killing every tenth person in a land they'd taken over. It grew to mean "to reduce by large numbers" and now the common vernacular uses it to mean "to destroy utterly". If, however, you used it today to mean "kill every tenth person", you'd be using it wrong. Just like if you used the word "cracking" to describe breaking into computer systems.
The world changes quickly, if you can't keep up, you've found the right place by coming to Slashdot.
Current stats: 85% of Americans self-identify as Christians. (2002)
Not so current. I'll have to dig for it, but that's down to 79%.
This is one nation under God.
Any moron stupid enough to be planning to vote for one of these 'pubs needs to be aware that they all feel the same way. Ron Paul has specifically said he BELIEVES the Consitution is "replete with references establishing the US as a christian nation". Considering the first sentence they say as president is "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States", it's obvious any 'pub who takes office will be lying (and probably should read the fucking thing before throwing in their hat). I'm not a fan of the dems, either, but considering we've eliminated choice from the election system, we're stuck with 'em.
Bring back electoral fusion!!