What was interesting is that the U.S. Military posts in West Berlin were not necessarily there to actually stop any real Soviet advance into the city, but to be used as effective human shields. That is, if the Soviets invaded West Berlin, the death of American troops (a certainty) would give America the justification it would need to go to war with the Soviets. Therefore, since the Soviets didn't want a full-scale war with America, they would not start a small-scale war against West Germany.
It was the geopolitical equivalent of letting your opponent know that you'll go all-in if he tries to steal the pot.
If I say something that's considered to be insensitive in certain contexts, or a word that has been associated with hate and bigotry, that's political incorrect. It is "politically incorrect" to call black people "colored," even though the octogenerian users of that term may not have even seen anything wrong with it's use, it wasn't always seen as an offensive word, and in fact, is part of the name of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). That's political incorrectness. And you treat political incorrectness with stern correction that the behavior is "not appropriate," and you try to educate, if possible.
Hate speech is when you *know* how hurtful your words are **and that's the entire point of why you say them.** The stuff Reddit banned during Pao's tenure absolutely, positively qualified as "hate speech."
I'm the amateur programmer who first programmed the code for Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC. I don't know if you remember this, but the site went down on May 2, for about 8 hours, when we were raising roughly $10,000/hr.
I had built everything on a LAMP stack and sent everything through a single MySQL database, which just didn't scale. (I was - and still am - an amateur). Luckily, pro developers stepped up and staunched the bleeding, and eventually we moved onto a Ruby-on-Rails system for the front-end and a NodeJS/Google App Engine solution for the backend.
As it turns out, this account was my personal account made back in the 1990s. But in 2006, I took a job with NetQoS, and created a new account, boyko.at.netqos - to submit stories to slashdot (Basically, I wanted to make sure that Slashdot's editors knew my affiliations). When NetQoS was bought out by CA, I left the company, and left the account. So that's why you don't see a lot of activity on this account.
I just finished the rough draft of my book. This is going to be a godsend.
Let me explain. All the thoughts are original; the problem is that I'm referencing one or two books quite often; the worst of it is that I'm not sure if I've cited material correctly. Alot of the book was written in the hours between 3am and 6am, on weekends, when I couldn't sleep. I wouldn't be suprized if something bleary eyed came by without a footnote citing it.
I just paid for the service, and I'm using it to make sure my book has all the proper citations before sending out proposals.
Reading it, I can see why.
Thomas believes that video games, by their "interactive" nature, are not protected speech, and doesn't agree with the idea that free speech automatically applies to new technologies.
Thomas is an jerk, but we knew that.
Breyer, on the other hand, makes the argument that games are protected by free speech, but that California's law doesn't prohibit the consumption of material to minors, only the sale of the material to minors. Viewed from that perspective, it places violent video games in the same category as Playboy magazine. Breyer doesn't make the argument that California has proven that games are harmful, he just makes the argument that it's not unconstitutional to restrict the commerce of goods from minors, and that the rules were not ambiguous or vague. Nor did it restrict consumption of speech - only the *sale* of it to a specific group.
While I happen to agree with the court majority opinion, I can see Breyer's point.
I'm not worried about a P&P game based on EVE Online, as WW has already done P&P based on Everquest, and though no one plays it, I think they made money on it.
And looking at the new WoD lineup, it does look like they designed the games to be more MMORPG-friendly, with emphasis on every supernatural creature being based on five "races" and five "groups" each one having a "power" stat, each one having a limited choice of roughly the same number of powers (Mage, in particular, was severely "nerfed" in the name of play balance.)
But what I'm worried about is that White Wolf has had an absolutely horrible experience in massively-multiplayer gaming. They operated an online chat called "New Bremen" and it was resoundly hated - so much so that people compared other White Wolf mushes (and WW gamers were generally seen as having really bad games to begin with) unfavorably. This was mostly due to the horrible, horrible nature of the administration which functioned on a suck-up/catch-22 model. Those who sucked-up in the "in-crowd" were promoted, everyone else could have their characters deleted for any number of un-written, illogical and arbitrary "catch-22s."
The problem is not America - it's the American people. We're no longer a force for good - and the American people no longer want us to be a force for good.
In 2004, I swore I was going to leave the United States. At the time I was in graduate school, and utterly convinced that I was planning to leave the country upon completion of my degree.
It's 2006, and I'm still here.
The problem, it will come as no surprise to many of you, is money. After getting out of graduate school, I had no savings and tried to find full-time work. Unfortunately, there just wasn't any full-time work - the best I could get was contract work and freelance work, without benifits, and in my best months, I could make rent. In my worst months, I couldn't.
My problem was mostly caused by the fact that I'm smack-dab in the middle of a nasty job area; jobs that require Master's degrees are typically very hard to find, are very rare, and are very specialized if you've got a M.A. in any liberal art. I did try to apply for temp jobs and full-time "joe jobs" but they weren't hiring either, I kept getting rejected, as I was overqualified - and flat out told this, in many cases.
Eventually, I had to start traveling across America - I was based in Williamburg, VA, and interviewed for jobs in Richmond, VA, Washington DC, Philadelphia, PA, and Bennington, VT; phone interviews included several in San Francisco (including Wired Magazine, actually - I applied for the Gadgets internship and got up to the interview stage.)
I lined up an interview with a company in Austin, TX and agreed to fly in (on my parent's dime) - then hurriedly applied for other jobs, informing them I'd be in Austin during a short time period. The job I applied for kept me waiting but another position I applied for finally paid off. I am now fully employed, making a salary of $45k/yr, working in my field. But if you count the times I was contracting and freelancing and couldn't make ends meet, I've been unemployed for about a year and a half...
I've got some "golden handcuffs" on me right now - my sign-on bonus goes bye-bye if I leave before two years are up. That's fine, I figure it'll take about 2 years for me to save up enough money to leave. I still intend to do it, and hopefully I'll have enough money to visit places before deciding on a country. But I think it's a bit depressing - and sad - that Bush will (presumably) be out of office by the time I plan to leave.
I still plan to leave, though. This country got broken during the 2004 election, and once something gets broken like that, you can't put it back together.
My top choices are: New Zealand (best government, but I'm worried about there being not much to do - I'm an urban guy), Germany (Perfect if it wasn't for the language barrier - I can learn the language but I'm better off learning through immersion,) The U.K. (Yes, they're U.S. lite, but even though their government is screwed up as ours is, the -people- there aren't as screwed up as ours is. The U.S. has the government it's people want, generally, while the U.K.'s government is mostly based the flukes of the 3-party FPTP system,) Canada (Really an obvious choice, but if you could live anywhere in the world...) Australia (John Howard's government sucks, but the people have bicameral proportional electoral system that makes sense... sort of the flip-side of the U.K., really.)
Here's my main concern with Macs. They're better machines with better OSes, but here's what I can't do with a Mac.
I can upgrade a component in the Macintosh but only after doing extensive research on what is and what is not Macintosh compatable. This was a major problem for me when I moved to a house that did not have Wired ethernet, only unwired ethernet, and my computer could only take Airport instead of Airport Express -- eventually I looked around for a compatable card, and found a Motorola - but I was very lucky in that regard.
If the power supply goes bad in my Macintosh, I have to order a special part. There are no "off the shelf" MacCPUs or MacMotherboards that I can quickly replace.
The Macintosh is tied to the Macintosh chassis - I got a little burned by the fact that my 800mhz PowerMac did not allow for two optical disc drives - when I already had a DVD-Rom drive that I could have used.
I'm not -unsatisfied- with my Mac experience - I used a Macintosh for three years... but the problem was that in the intervening time, I couldn't make the tiny little upgrades - esp. to the CPU/motherboard - that would have enabled me to keep it. Instead it just ran slower and slower to the point that I was frustrated with response times. After three years, I just built my own, and for the cost of a Mac Mini, I have a PC that can be upgraded; I plan to drop in a dual core Athlon 939 chipset chip when I save up the money for it - I'm thinking of adding a TV tuner for $60 (instead of $200 for the Mac) etc, etc, etc.
The thing is, I'm not happy with either proprietary vendor - Apple's DRM forbids you from running MacOSX on your own hardware, Microsoft's DRM forbids you from upgrading your computer (with Vista, which is why I'm not upgrading.) But if I'm going to get screwed, I'd rather be screwed to the order of $500 for an upgradable box than $500 for a tiny, non-upgradable box.
When I signed up for an MMORPG, I went with Guild Wars precisely because I can only manage about 2-3 hours a month. (Busy life. Not too busy to read some morning slashdot, but too busy to grind and power-level) WoW at $15 would not be a good deal - especially after considering that you pay $40-50 for the box...
But that's getting to a point. I used to play roleplaying games - the pen and paper type. And they have no fee. You just buy the books and play. They're expensive books, but I kept hitting the argument that "You pay $8.25 for a movie, and that's only 2 hours of fun, compared to a $40 game book that you can have an unlimited amount of fun with."
Here's what I've learned.
1) $8.25 for a movie is overpriced, but if I go buy a ticket, I'm pretty damn sure that I'm going to have fun for those two hours.
2) I don't need to wrangle 4 other people together to watch a movie.
3) If a movie has boring parts, I'm honestly surprised.
4) Gaming may provide you with 20 minutes of fun-- crammed into 4 hours.
What you buy for your WoW subscription is not "as much fun as you can handle" for $15/mo. What you buy is the -potential- to have fun. Which is why I'm more likely to go to two movies a month at $8.25 (or, actually, 5 movies a month at $3.00 at the rental store... who GOES to theatres anymore?) than I am these days to either buy a roleplaying book or grind on an MMORPG that has a monthly fee.
One of the big problems is that it is true - we have only two choices, and if you're anywhere on the left, you have to vote for the -- as a whole, conservative -- Democrats, or risk the -- as a whole, totalitarian -- Republicans.
So you go in the same direction, just a little slower. That, of course, makes no sense.
What this country really needs is a multi-party parliamentary system... it aches me to see all these letter writing campaigns and people talking on Slashdot about bearing arms when it would be more effective to simply get all these Libertarians, all these Greens, all these guys tired of the dynamic between the left and the right, they should all rally behind one individual party (because while the Libertarians and Greens agree on nothing else, they agree that they don't have a chance in a two-party system) designed towards changing state governments towards proportional representation systems. From there, see how it goes, and work on changing that.
I don't know much about Finland's political system, but you're telling me that, when faced with a scandal, your chief executive actually admitted it and resigned? Hell yeah, I'd vote for that kind of honesty and accountability!
I think what you have in this case is the classic case of a real lack of oppertunity compared to a perception of a lack of oppertunity.
Look, it is very true that in some places, one of the only jobs available is to join the military. It is also very true that in some places, it only -seems- like one of the only jobs available is to join the military.
The military offers you, in my opinion, an "easy out." Not that it's easy, but it can give you a quick way out of your current situation. Hell, who wouldn't want money for college and a bit of pocket change?
Here's the problem: When you join the military, you are being trained to kill people. Sometimes they send you to kill people that need to be killed - bad guys like the Nazis. Sometimes they send you to kill people that don't need to be killed - they just happen to 'be in the way' at the moment. When you join the army you can't distinguish between a good war and a bad war.
When we elect a president, we place trust in the commander in chief to send troops in harms way only when necessary. And many people enlist hoping and praying that's the case. And it's not the case now.
At any rate, you don't have freedom and democracy in the Army. Fine. But you can't tell me that blocking all the left-leaning sites while all the right-leaning sites are up doesn't send a POWERFUL message to the troops that the government that sent them into harms way doesn't want them to know the truth.
That's gotta be more harmful to morale than Franken talking about how the troops are getting fucked over.
I'd rather face the judgement of an panel of learned justices than a jury trial anyday. Juries don't know the law, can't question authority, and assume going into the courtroom that the defendant is guilty.
Turn the chalice from up to down only once, but always turn the chalice from down to up. When you have been called into the room and you see the chalice up, count it. We know that the chalice can only be turned from down to up a maximum of n+k times, and a minimum of n times.
After you are brought into the cell and see an up chalice n+k times, I -think- it's safe to say yes.
The University of Texas "Undergraduate Library" has an interesting history - basically, the library was developed to allow undergraduates to browse stacks - before then, only graduates could do so - undergraduates had to use the card catalog to find exactly the book they wanted and give it to the librarian.
This was in the 1950s-1960s.
But since then, almost every library is open to every student - making an "undergraduate library" a bit of a redundancy. Already, the "Undergraduate Library" was not the main library on campus - that honor went to the Perry-Castaneda Library a blocks south. (It's a Biiiig campus)
That's where all 90,000 books will go.
It's actually a better deal - instead of looking in the directory at the PCL and finding out that the book you want is at the OTHER library (something that's happened quite a bit to me!) the books will be in one place. Already the "Undergraduate Library" - or as it's now known, the Flawn Academic Center, was used primarily as study-group area (because it had a big lobby) the housing of the campus computer store, and one of the largest computer labs on campus.
So, to recap: No books will be thrown out, they'll be put where they ought to be - with the other books, in the other, main library on campus. This is a win-win.
expands to just about every aspect of governance. Sure, a few missteps but not the rampant stupidity and corruption that we have here.
I like it so much, I'm moving there. But it's difficult. In order to move there, I need to save up money, in order to save up money, I need a job. Jobs are scarse here (and I have an M.A.!) and there's no guarantee I can make -rent- let alone save for NZ. However, once I *get* to NZ, the job market is much, much better.
So I'm in catch-22 mode. Anyone got $4200NZ they could let me have?
As one of those Americans, I would like to point out that the BBC has programming on both the radio and the television worth watching/listening. Your 220USD is less than you'd pay for a cable service and you still wouldn't get any good stuff.
So cram it. The minute the BBC starts charging overseas customers for a H.264 video stream over the Internet, I'm converting to pounds and paying them what they ask.
There's so much government waste and stupidity in the world and you want to complain about government efficiency and service?
I see little use in a calculator that takes 5 seconds to load when I have an identical calculator that loads within half a second.
I see little use in a weather widget when I can have a weather docklet that I don't have to bury all my work for. I can't even get my dashboard stickies to work with my stickies.app?
Look, Konfabulator is great for people who like this sort of stuff. But I want to uninstall Dashboard completely - I don't want tiny little programs running everywhere, hogging memory. There isn't any program that's not on a widget that I can't simply find an app for and keep it in my dock. That's what the dock is for - the most recently used apps!
Slashdot Mirror
But no Trump.
I punch those numbers into my calculator and it makes a happy face.
What was interesting is that the U.S. Military posts in West Berlin were not necessarily there to actually stop any real Soviet advance into the city, but to be used as effective human shields. That is, if the Soviets invaded West Berlin, the death of American troops (a certainty) would give America the justification it would need to go to war with the Soviets. Therefore, since the Soviets didn't want a full-scale war with America, they would not start a small-scale war against West Germany. It was the geopolitical equivalent of letting your opponent know that you'll go all-in if he tries to steal the pot.
If I say something that's considered to be insensitive in certain contexts, or a word that has been associated with hate and bigotry, that's political incorrect. It is "politically incorrect" to call black people "colored," even though the octogenerian users of that term may not have even seen anything wrong with it's use, it wasn't always seen as an offensive word, and in fact, is part of the name of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). That's political incorrectness. And you treat political incorrectness with stern correction that the behavior is "not appropriate," and you try to educate, if possible. Hate speech is when you *know* how hurtful your words are **and that's the entire point of why you say them.** The stuff Reddit banned during Pao's tenure absolutely, positively qualified as "hate speech."
I'm the amateur programmer who first programmed the code for Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC. I don't know if you remember this, but the site went down on May 2, for about 8 hours, when we were raising roughly $10,000/hr. I had built everything on a LAMP stack and sent everything through a single MySQL database, which just didn't scale. (I was - and still am - an amateur). Luckily, pro developers stepped up and staunched the bleeding, and eventually we moved onto a Ruby-on-Rails system for the front-end and a NodeJS/Google App Engine solution for the backend.
As it turns out, this account was my personal account made back in the 1990s. But in 2006, I took a job with NetQoS, and created a new account, boyko.at.netqos - to submit stories to slashdot (Basically, I wanted to make sure that Slashdot's editors knew my affiliations). When NetQoS was bought out by CA, I left the company, and left the account. So that's why you don't see a lot of activity on this account.
on the Princess Bride? INCONCEIVABLE!
Awesome! I know I have a weird voice, but there's worse things to compare it to.
I just finished the rough draft of my book. This is going to be a godsend. Let me explain. All the thoughts are original; the problem is that I'm referencing one or two books quite often; the worst of it is that I'm not sure if I've cited material correctly. Alot of the book was written in the hours between 3am and 6am, on weekends, when I couldn't sleep. I wouldn't be suprized if something bleary eyed came by without a footnote citing it. I just paid for the service, and I'm using it to make sure my book has all the proper citations before sending out proposals.
Reading it, I can see why. Thomas believes that video games, by their "interactive" nature, are not protected speech, and doesn't agree with the idea that free speech automatically applies to new technologies. Thomas is an jerk, but we knew that. Breyer, on the other hand, makes the argument that games are protected by free speech, but that California's law doesn't prohibit the consumption of material to minors, only the sale of the material to minors. Viewed from that perspective, it places violent video games in the same category as Playboy magazine. Breyer doesn't make the argument that California has proven that games are harmful, he just makes the argument that it's not unconstitutional to restrict the commerce of goods from minors, and that the rules were not ambiguous or vague. Nor did it restrict consumption of speech - only the *sale* of it to a specific group. While I happen to agree with the court majority opinion, I can see Breyer's point.
I didn't just get dicked over on the chats. That happens. That's life. I got -insulted- by Conrad personally, many of my friends did too.
The fact that you didn't have problems sounds to me like either "A" you were one of the in-crowd, or "B" you're Conrad Hubbard.
This has disaster written all over it.
I'm not worried about a P&P game based on EVE Online, as WW has already done P&P based on Everquest, and though no one plays it, I think they made money on it.
And looking at the new WoD lineup, it does look like they designed the games to be more MMORPG-friendly, with emphasis on every supernatural creature being based on five "races" and five "groups" each one having a "power" stat, each one having a limited choice of roughly the same number of powers (Mage, in particular, was severely "nerfed" in the name of play balance.)
But what I'm worried about is that White Wolf has had an absolutely horrible experience in massively-multiplayer gaming. They operated an online chat called "New Bremen" and it was resoundly hated - so much so that people compared other White Wolf mushes (and WW gamers were generally seen as having really bad games to begin with) unfavorably. This was mostly due to the horrible, horrible nature of the administration which functioned on a suck-up/catch-22 model. Those who sucked-up in the "in-crowd" were promoted, everyone else could have their characters deleted for any number of un-written, illogical and arbitrary "catch-22s."
This was including particularly hellish and outright abusive treatment from the moderators there which was encouraged by their administration, a White Wolf employee.
Keep in mind that White Wolf is also DRM-heavy and treats their fanbase like crap by asserting phony IP rights.
Why not give up?
The problem is not America - it's the American people. We're no longer a force for good - and the American people no longer want us to be a force for good.
Here's my story.
In 2004, I swore I was going to leave the United States. At the time I was in graduate school, and utterly convinced that I was planning to leave the country upon completion of my degree.
It's 2006, and I'm still here.
The problem, it will come as no surprise to many of you, is money. After getting out of graduate school, I had no savings and tried to find full-time work. Unfortunately, there just wasn't any full-time work - the best I could get was contract work and freelance work, without benifits, and in my best months, I could make rent. In my worst months, I couldn't.
My problem was mostly caused by the fact that I'm smack-dab in the middle of a nasty job area; jobs that require Master's degrees are typically very hard to find, are very rare, and are very specialized if you've got a M.A. in any liberal art. I did try to apply for temp jobs and full-time "joe jobs" but they weren't hiring either, I kept getting rejected, as I was overqualified - and flat out told this, in many cases.
Eventually, I had to start traveling across America - I was based in Williamburg, VA, and interviewed for jobs in Richmond, VA, Washington DC, Philadelphia, PA, and Bennington, VT; phone interviews included several in San Francisco (including Wired Magazine, actually - I applied for the Gadgets internship and got up to the interview stage.)
I lined up an interview with a company in Austin, TX and agreed to fly in (on my parent's dime) - then hurriedly applied for other jobs, informing them I'd be in Austin during a short time period. The job I applied for kept me waiting but another position I applied for finally paid off. I am now fully employed, making a salary of $45k/yr, working in my field. But if you count the times I was contracting and freelancing and couldn't make ends meet, I've been unemployed for about a year and a half...
I've got some "golden handcuffs" on me right now - my sign-on bonus goes bye-bye if I leave before two years are up. That's fine, I figure it'll take about 2 years for me to save up enough money to leave. I still intend to do it, and hopefully I'll have enough money to visit places before deciding on a country. But I think it's a bit depressing - and sad - that Bush will (presumably) be out of office by the time I plan to leave.
I still plan to leave, though. This country got broken during the 2004 election, and once something gets broken like that, you can't put it back together.
My top choices are:
New Zealand (best government, but I'm worried about there being not much to do - I'm an urban guy),
Germany (Perfect if it wasn't for the language barrier - I can learn the language but I'm better off learning through immersion,)
The U.K. (Yes, they're U.S. lite, but even though their government is screwed up as ours is, the -people- there aren't as screwed up as ours is. The U.S. has the government it's people want, generally, while the U.K.'s government is mostly based the flukes of the 3-party FPTP system,)
Canada (Really an obvious choice, but if you could live anywhere in the world...)
Australia (John Howard's government sucks, but the people have bicameral proportional electoral system that makes sense... sort of the flip-side of the U.K., really.)
I'd like to get your feedback on this.
I see your point, but Reporters Without Borders is technically complaining about it in France.
Here's my main concern with Macs. They're better machines with better OSes, but here's what I can't do with a Mac. I can upgrade a component in the Macintosh but only after doing extensive research on what is and what is not Macintosh compatable. This was a major problem for me when I moved to a house that did not have Wired ethernet, only unwired ethernet, and my computer could only take Airport instead of Airport Express -- eventually I looked around for a compatable card, and found a Motorola - but I was very lucky in that regard. If the power supply goes bad in my Macintosh, I have to order a special part. There are no "off the shelf" MacCPUs or MacMotherboards that I can quickly replace. The Macintosh is tied to the Macintosh chassis - I got a little burned by the fact that my 800mhz PowerMac did not allow for two optical disc drives - when I already had a DVD-Rom drive that I could have used. I'm not -unsatisfied- with my Mac experience - I used a Macintosh for three years... but the problem was that in the intervening time, I couldn't make the tiny little upgrades - esp. to the CPU/motherboard - that would have enabled me to keep it. Instead it just ran slower and slower to the point that I was frustrated with response times. After three years, I just built my own, and for the cost of a Mac Mini, I have a PC that can be upgraded; I plan to drop in a dual core Athlon 939 chipset chip when I save up the money for it - I'm thinking of adding a TV tuner for $60 (instead of $200 for the Mac) etc, etc, etc. The thing is, I'm not happy with either proprietary vendor - Apple's DRM forbids you from running MacOSX on your own hardware, Microsoft's DRM forbids you from upgrading your computer (with Vista, which is why I'm not upgrading.) But if I'm going to get screwed, I'd rather be screwed to the order of $500 for an upgradable box than $500 for a tiny, non-upgradable box.
When I signed up for an MMORPG, I went with Guild Wars precisely because I can only manage about 2-3 hours a month. (Busy life. Not too busy to read some morning slashdot, but too busy to grind and power-level) WoW at $15 would not be a good deal - especially after considering that you pay $40-50 for the box... But that's getting to a point. I used to play roleplaying games - the pen and paper type. And they have no fee. You just buy the books and play. They're expensive books, but I kept hitting the argument that "You pay $8.25 for a movie, and that's only 2 hours of fun, compared to a $40 game book that you can have an unlimited amount of fun with." Here's what I've learned. 1) $8.25 for a movie is overpriced, but if I go buy a ticket, I'm pretty damn sure that I'm going to have fun for those two hours. 2) I don't need to wrangle 4 other people together to watch a movie. 3) If a movie has boring parts, I'm honestly surprised. 4) Gaming may provide you with 20 minutes of fun-- crammed into 4 hours. What you buy for your WoW subscription is not "as much fun as you can handle" for $15/mo. What you buy is the -potential- to have fun. Which is why I'm more likely to go to two movies a month at $8.25 (or, actually, 5 movies a month at $3.00 at the rental store... who GOES to theatres anymore?) than I am these days to either buy a roleplaying book or grind on an MMORPG that has a monthly fee.
One of the big problems is that it is true - we have only two choices, and if you're anywhere on the left, you have to vote for the -- as a whole, conservative -- Democrats, or risk the -- as a whole, totalitarian -- Republicans. So you go in the same direction, just a little slower. That, of course, makes no sense. What this country really needs is a multi-party parliamentary system... it aches me to see all these letter writing campaigns and people talking on Slashdot about bearing arms when it would be more effective to simply get all these Libertarians, all these Greens, all these guys tired of the dynamic between the left and the right, they should all rally behind one individual party (because while the Libertarians and Greens agree on nothing else, they agree that they don't have a chance in a two-party system) designed towards changing state governments towards proportional representation systems. From there, see how it goes, and work on changing that. I don't know much about Finland's political system, but you're telling me that, when faced with a scandal, your chief executive actually admitted it and resigned? Hell yeah, I'd vote for that kind of honesty and accountability!
I think what you have in this case is the classic case of a real lack of oppertunity compared to a perception of a lack of oppertunity.
Look, it is very true that in some places, one of the only jobs available is to join the military. It is also very true that in some places, it only -seems- like one of the only jobs available is to join the military.
The military offers you, in my opinion, an "easy out." Not that it's easy, but it can give you a quick way out of your current situation. Hell, who wouldn't want money for college and a bit of pocket change?
Here's the problem: When you join the military, you are being trained to kill people. Sometimes they send you to kill people that need to be killed - bad guys like the Nazis. Sometimes they send you to kill people that don't need to be killed - they just happen to 'be in the way' at the moment. When you join the army you can't distinguish between a good war and a bad war.
When we elect a president, we place trust in the commander in chief to send troops in harms way only when necessary. And many people enlist hoping and praying that's the case. And it's not the case now.
At any rate, you don't have freedom and democracy in the Army. Fine. But you can't tell me that blocking all the left-leaning sites while all the right-leaning sites are up doesn't send a POWERFUL message to the troops that the government that sent them into harms way doesn't want them to know the truth.
That's gotta be more harmful to morale than Franken talking about how the troops are getting fucked over.
I'd rather face the judgement of an panel of learned justices than a jury trial anyday. Juries don't know the law, can't question authority, and assume going into the courtroom that the defendant is guilty.
Turn the chalice from up to down only once, but always turn the chalice from down to up. When you have been called into the room and you see the chalice up, count it. We know that the chalice can only be turned from down to up a maximum of n+k times, and a minimum of n times.
After you are brought into the cell and see an up chalice n+k times, I -think- it's safe to say yes.
I"m trying to save up and move. Of course, being underemployed with an M.A. makes that hard, but I am making progress.
Only thing I can think of is -- didn't they try this with the Power Glove?
They aren't throwing out a single book.
The University of Texas "Undergraduate Library" has an interesting history - basically, the library was developed to allow undergraduates to browse stacks - before then, only graduates could do so - undergraduates had to use the card catalog to find exactly the book they wanted and give it to the librarian.
This was in the 1950s-1960s.
But since then, almost every library is open to every student - making an "undergraduate library" a bit of a redundancy. Already, the "Undergraduate Library" was not the main library on campus - that honor went to the Perry-Castaneda Library a blocks south. (It's a Biiiig campus)
That's where all 90,000 books will go.
It's actually a better deal - instead of looking in the directory at the PCL and finding out that the book you want is at the OTHER library (something that's happened quite a bit to me!) the books will be in one place. Already the "Undergraduate Library" - or as it's now known, the Flawn Academic Center, was used primarily as study-group area (because it had a big lobby) the housing of the campus computer store, and one of the largest computer labs on campus.
So, to recap: No books will be thrown out, they'll be put where they ought to be - with the other books, in the other, main library on campus. This is a win-win.
expands to just about every aspect of governance. Sure, a few missteps but not the rampant stupidity and corruption that we have here. I like it so much, I'm moving there. But it's difficult. In order to move there, I need to save up money, in order to save up money, I need a job. Jobs are scarse here (and I have an M.A.!) and there's no guarantee I can make -rent- let alone save for NZ. However, once I *get* to NZ, the job market is much, much better. So I'm in catch-22 mode. Anyone got $4200NZ they could let me have?
As one of those Americans, I would like to point out that the BBC has programming on both the radio and the television worth watching/listening. Your 220USD is less than you'd pay for a cable service and you still wouldn't get any good stuff. So cram it. The minute the BBC starts charging overseas customers for a H.264 video stream over the Internet, I'm converting to pounds and paying them what they ask. There's so much government waste and stupidity in the world and you want to complain about government efficiency and service?
I see little use in a calculator that takes 5 seconds to load when I have an identical calculator that loads within half a second. I see little use in a weather widget when I can have a weather docklet that I don't have to bury all my work for. I can't even get my dashboard stickies to work with my stickies.app? Look, Konfabulator is great for people who like this sort of stuff. But I want to uninstall Dashboard completely - I don't want tiny little programs running everywhere, hogging memory. There isn't any program that's not on a widget that I can't simply find an app for and keep it in my dock. That's what the dock is for - the most recently used apps!