Hey, nobody forced mastershake_phd to put that in his signature. If someone's going to self-label, anyone else is free to call them on it
So, in order to be allowed to be intelligent and pragramatic without anyone complaining you have to hide your political affections?
.. that does actually makes sense. I'm very convinced 'eek, he said something intelligent and pragmatic, kick him out!" (translated to political speech) has happended lots of times in lots of different political parties all over the world. Nobody likes intelligence and pragmatic notions messing with their agendas.
If you're truly Libertarian, Hubble is exactly the sort of thing you'd be against having the government fund.
Being against spending money on a project doesn't mean you're not allowed to acknowledge its positive sides.
Seriously, I hate this sort of thing. Any proposal has good and bad sides. When you're making a decision you count them and weigh them against eachother. Then you make a decision. Obviously, he values 'really free market' really highly, but that doesn't mean he's not allowed to acknowledge the cases when there are more cons to his approach than usual.
Acknowledging arguments and still making a decision is a sign of intelligence. Trying to force somebody else to make false choices, or attributing false opinions to them is stupid.. and way too bloody common.
What the vast majority of non-US slashdotters don't understand is that "Republican" and "Democrat" encompass a much wider range of views than parties in most other countries.
We/I do know. Atleast, from what I can tell west, south and east each has their own flavour of Rep/Dems, making the power-struggles within the party just as interesting as the struggles between the parties. That doesn't make the arrangement less stupid or silly.
One problem with the 'first past the post' system, as in the UK. is that if there are 3 parties and one party comes 2nd in every constituency
That argument is, in my opinion, exactly what's wrong with most people arguing about voting. Yes, in the uttermost hypotethical situation that could happen. What's really interesting is how prone to this behaviour the different systems are though. With 'winner-takes-all' at state level, it's so profound that nobody even bothers seriously starting new parties. With winner takes all at city/village/constituency-level it's still possible. You are correct in that in the end, smaller parties end up with fewer seats yeah, but that's the norm in proportional voting too, and as far as I know, most people agree it's a good thing.
Seriously, just taking one simple look at reality and counting the number of parties in India, the UK and the US really should end that line of argumentation. India has tons, the UK three major and several smaller, the US has two. I mean, you can register as a voter as Democrat, Republican or Other.
I think article-heading meant US-type voting, not western. Proportional and the different variants of plurality all have weaknesses, but none are as glaring as the US-type one. I would like to say one thing though, in most countries in Europe you vote for a party, not for a presidental candidate.. and a lot of the 'weirdness', like when Brown took over from Blaire stems from this fact. It's not a bug though, it's working as intended.
Either way. Both India and the UK has winner-takes-all variants which are more or less working. In India several different parties can vote for the same candidate. For the most part, you still end up with two large blocks, but atleast you'll get *some* group-dynamics and bartering. In the UK they only use winner-takes-all on constituity-level, meaning you still can take local-phenomena into account. The Lib-Dems do get seats.
My point is, there's probably a million really small fixes that could majorly change the whole incredibly silly voting/campaigning-dynamics you have over there. There's no need to scrap everything.. and frankly, I really believe trying to introduce a whole new, reasonably complex voting system is silly to the extreme, given how really ******* easy it would be patch up the one you have.
If you want to protect against a boat filled up with explosives, you need an army. Not security guards.
Either way, I'm about as scared of terrorists as I am of the roving angry bands of pedophiles that roam the countryside. There's no global conspiracy; every single terrorists attack has had very real and very local causes. In my humble opinion the 'too much generalization is as dangerous as too little' proverb is as apt for understanding society as it is for programming.
This is the North Sea we're talking about. *North* sea. It's cold, stormy and miles away from civilization (if you can call my dear home Norway civilized).
I mean, piratebay jokes not withstanding, it's not exactly teeming with criminals.
Corporations have two goals: increase the price of their stock and produce dividends for investors.
Sorry for being partly off-topic, but that idea is so widely perputated it's ridicilous.
A corporations goal is to do what its owners want. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it's highly likely, but not a given, that what the owners want is to get richer.
Of course they don't! The wast majority of people who buy music want to listen it. If formats get in the way, that's bad. If they don't, it's good.
People want music in varying quality, and are willing to scale the pay of a song to the quality.
They do? Most people have no concept whatsoever of file-size, and file-size to quality ratios.. and nor should they have. They want music, they want to listen to it and as long as they don't notice the quality it's good enough. I mean, there's a reason mp3 is so popular. Either way, most mp3-players have shitloads of space, there's little reason to go for anything other than lossless these days (besides mp3 being universally supported).
People are not willing to pay more than a song is worth. (This is the biggest issue for the labels)
A good is worth what a purchaser is willing to pay for it.
If you want fines to work, you have to do what they do in Scandinavian countries - charge a percentage of your income
This is only being tried for traffic violations, and only in Sweden. For that purpose it makes sense atleast, too many wealthy people budget with fines.. how much time do they save vs fines paid.. they never, ever stop to think about the fact that the real cost of high speed is more fatal accidents.. and that risk is shared by everybody, not only the person speeding.
Sorry, I'm foreign. What does that sentence really mean? Did you buy the equivalent of 5 CD's? Did you buy around 5 CD's? Seriously, what does it mean?
Oh, and why isn't British thaught as a foreign language in the US? It'd do you good!
Faulting an AV-less Vista for not stopping viruses is a bit like faulting a door without a lock for opening when the handle is twisted.'
Or rather.. it's a bit like faulting the construction company when the wall in your house fell over because somebody knocked on the door.
Anywho, anti-virus and personal firewalls are ridicilous concepts. You shouldn't have userland applications necessary for keeping other userland applications out of the actual operating system.
Something like 70% of English born "soccer" aka football players in the English Premier League where born between September and December.
Well, I'm just plainly not going to believe that untill I see a source.. and even if it is correct, I'd still be vary of drawing conclusions from it, English football is rather savage compared to just about everybody else.
Either way, schools don't have football teams.
If you look at the hand size of goal keepers in the Premiership it is substantially above average. Please explain that one if it is all about skill?
I said playing football was mostly about skill. Goalies don't play football.
Wow. You've heard very, very wrong then. That statement is very wrong on many levels.
Either way, soccer has very little to do with physical size, and alot to do with technique, balance and how well you read/understand the play. As far as depth goes, it's the most complicated sport I've ever played (complicated as in doing it, not complicated as in the manager does decisions, or you have to remember xxx formations).
High expectations from their parents cause headaches and other health problems, especially when a kid fails at some task. Give a kid free time.
I'm Norwegian, and I've travelled a fair bit, and my experience is that 'utterly insane parents with ridicilous expactations' are a largely American phenomena (and interestingly enough, the Swizz too). Here in Norway we do have some failed soccer-players wanting their sons to be the best, but what comes off here as utterly insane seems mainstream over at your side of the pond.
This is just from what I'm told though, from an extremely random, but way too small sample set of people.
What, exactly HAS congress done to lower gas prices?
Wow, your rant has so many implied assumptions that sound utterly inane to me it's crazy. On the top of my head:
High gas prices is a problem why? What happended to supply and demand? What happended to letting society shape itself around its problem?
Even given the silly premise that high gas prices are evil, why on earth should congress to anything about it? I'm reasonably sure low gas prices was left out of the consitution for a reason.
And, what on earth led you to believe that single-car commuting was a good idea in the first place? Now, a lot of you are pretty screwed anyways, due to utterly insane zoning laws but that still can be changed. If mohammed can't come to the mountain...
Sounds like the Scandinavian countries are too out-of-line.
Well, as a Norwegian, I can honestly say that this is scaring the shit out-of-me. The US has a long history of getting "back" at countries by confusing different issues. Between us recognizing the rightfully elected Palestine government, our lack of enthusiasm for invading Iraq and this, we're fast getting on the shit-list.
.
Now, we have an on-going border dispute with Russia over the Barentsea and Svalbard, and without US support we're pretty much screwed.
After the report is released, Microsoft money will step in and suppress it. The guys who wrote the report will be fired, and a new report will be written recommending OOXML as an "industry standard" with "longstanding vendor support".
That's called corruption. You know, it doesn't have to be built into the system.
Although It obviously can be, as the US is bloody rich.
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Either way, I'm kinda curious how the money gets to be part of this. The elected represantatives are, well, elected, and obviously aren't allowed to take bribes. If any party accepted money with strings attached they would pretty much instantly lose their integrety and a large part of their voter-base. It really is amazing how much harder it to screw you over when there's alternatives.
Huh? The EU started out as, and effectively remains, an economic organization. How did they "keep the peace".
By making the countries of Europe dependant on each other. Wars have a strange tendency to only happen when the political elite stands to profit from it.
If anything, I would credit the relative peacefulness of Europe in the last 50 years to cohesiveness against the external soviet threat, combined with the massive US subsidy of European defense budgets.
That's certainly another factor. I would however say that while this was very important for allowing Europe to kickstart, it was next to inconsequental in the 70's and later, because we were rich "enough" anyways to do both.
Don't worry - it won't last. Sooner or later, European countries will have to start footing their defense bill.
I'd rather say the US spends a ridicilously large amount on offence, rather than the European countries too little. We learnt the hard way the consequences of projecting hard power onto other countries, you're learning it now. Hopefully, it's a lesson we're not forgetting anytime soon.
and I predict we'll see open warfare between (soon-to-be) former EU nations within 20 years.
Not a snowball chance's in hell! We'll see open warfare between Republicans and Democrats before we see any western european countries at wars with eachother. Open hostilities within countries between demographics; maybe. Nationstates vs Nationstate; never!
America doesn't even extradite americans who commit crimes on actual foreign soil, there's no chance in hell they'd extradite on who hadn't even set foot in that country.
As far as I know, the US has one way extradition-treates with most of Europe atleast (I know they have one with us, Norway, atleast). This is 'yet another reason' for why alot of/most people view the US as just another country, rather than the bastion of freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I hate this sort of thing. Any proposal has good and bad sides. When you're making a decision you count them and weigh them against eachother. Then you make a decision. Obviously, he values 'really free market' really highly, but that doesn't mean he's not allowed to acknowledge the cases when there are more cons to his approach than usual.
Acknowledging arguments and still making a decision is a sign of intelligence. Trying to force somebody else to make false choices, or attributing false opinions to them is stupid.. and way too bloody common.
My father has that in his My Documents-folder. It contains secret passwords.
Seriously, just taking one simple look at reality and counting the number of parties in India, the UK and the US really should end that line of argumentation. India has tons, the UK three major and several smaller, the US has two. I mean, you can register as a voter as Democrat, Republican or Other.
Either way. Both India and the UK has winner-takes-all variants which are more or less working. In India several different parties can vote for the same candidate. For the most part, you still end up with two large blocks, but atleast you'll get *some* group-dynamics and bartering. In the UK they only use winner-takes-all on constituity-level, meaning you still can take local-phenomena into account. The Lib-Dems do get seats.
My point is, there's probably a million really small fixes that could majorly change the whole incredibly silly voting/campaigning-dynamics you have over there. There's no need to scrap everything.. and frankly, I really believe trying to introduce a whole new, reasonably complex voting system is silly to the extreme, given how really ******* easy it would be patch up the one you have.
Either way, I'm about as scared of terrorists as I am of the roving angry bands of pedophiles that roam the countryside. There's no global conspiracy; every single terrorists attack has had very real and very local causes. In my humble opinion the 'too much generalization is as dangerous as too little' proverb is as apt for understanding society as it is for programming.
I mean, piratebay jokes not withstanding, it's not exactly teeming with criminals.
A corporations goal is to do what its owners want. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it's highly likely, but not a given, that what the owners want is to get richer.
This is only being tried for traffic violations, and only in Sweden. For that purpose it makes sense atleast, too many wealthy people budget with fines.. how much time do they save vs fines paid.. they never, ever stop to think about the fact that the real cost of high speed is more fatal accidents.. and that risk is shared by everybody, not only the person speeding.
Oh, and why isn't British thaught as a foreign language in the US? It'd do you good!
regards
A Random Norwegian
Or rather.. it's a bit like faulting the construction company when the wall in your house fell over because somebody knocked on the door.
Anywho, anti-virus and personal firewalls are ridicilous concepts. You shouldn't have userland applications necessary for keeping other userland applications out of the actual operating system.
Either way, schools don't have football teams.
I said playing football was mostly about skill. Goalies don't play football.Either way, soccer has very little to do with physical size, and alot to do with technique, balance and how well you read/understand the play. As far as depth goes, it's the most complicated sport I've ever played (complicated as in doing it, not complicated as in the manager does decisions, or you have to remember xxx formations).
This is just from what I'm told though, from an extremely random, but way too small sample set of people.
High gas prices is a problem why? What happended to supply and demand? What happended to letting society shape itself around its problem?
Even given the silly premise that high gas prices are evil, why on earth should congress to anything about it? I'm reasonably sure low gas prices was left out of the consitution for a reason.
And, what on earth led you to believe that single-car commuting was a good idea in the first place? Now, a lot of you are pretty screwed anyways, due to utterly insane zoning laws but that still can be changed. If mohammed can't come to the mountain...
.
Now, we have an on-going border dispute with Russia over the Barentsea and Svalbard, and without US support we're pretty much screwed.
.
Either way, I'm kinda curious how the money gets to be part of this. The elected represantatives are, well, elected, and obviously aren't allowed to take bribes. If any party accepted money with strings attached they would pretty much instantly lose their integrety and a large part of their voter-base. It really is amazing how much harder it to screw you over when there's alternatives.
As far as I know, the US has one way extradition-treates with most of Europe atleast (I know they have one with us, Norway, atleast). This is 'yet another reason' for why alot of/most people view the US as just another country, rather than the bastion of freedom.